skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That wouldn't really make sense. The hypothetical engineer of questionable skill is just as susceptible to outsourcing pressures as you are.

If said engineer is able to compensate for that outsourcing pressure and you cannot, it is better explained by the points made in the article - negotiation savvy, domain knowledge, externalities like goodwill, etc.
> nestduftwarmebingdung

I like this one. Probably meant Nestduftwärmebindung (Nest=nest Duft=scent Wärme=warmth Bindung=binding).
There was a study on how real estate agents sell clients' houses vs their own. On average, agents will keep their own properties on the market ~10 days longer.[0]

If a client's house sells for $310k vs $300k, that's an extra ~$10k for the client. On the other hand, spending the additional time negotiating only nets the agent $300.[1]

Typically agents will sell additional houses rather than negotiate prices on sure sales. However their behavior changes when selling their own houses.

---

[0]: From Freakonomics as mentioned by vitalique and roel_v below.

[1]: Real estate agent fees are typically 6%, equally split between buyer / seller agents.
For me the hardest one to give up was car maintenance. I grew up working on cars, and if I wasn't in IT I'd probably be a mechanic. Unfortunately keeping all the tools and supplies necessary was too much of a hassle for a single late model vehicle that requires practically no maintenance. It doesn't bother me to have someone mow my lawn or fix the way my doors hang, but handing the car keys over for an oil change is painful.

And FYI, women have it significantly worse in this regard. The division between feminism and traditional roles has created a trap. You'll be judged both for having and not-having traditionally female skills.
An issue we've talked about here before that I've experienced myself is that recruiters often don't understand that titles in this industry are often meaningless and don't know enough about the lingo and the languages to competently place someone somewhere where they should be making the money they deserve based on their skillset.

I met with a local recruiter that claimed to be the best at what it did -- working with technical people -- and they couldn't parse my résumé except to say that they didn't see anything that said "senior" and therefore they couldn't help me. Given the fact that the types of jobs they were bragging about placing for was icanhascheezburger and other equally worthless entities, I'm fine with the fact that they don't get it, but experiences like that could be damaging to someone that doesn't understand their worth to begin with and would be willing to settle for less because people paid to help them don't actually understand what they can do.
I particularly enjoyed this line:

"For a bit of perspective, that's how much Facebook spent on its acquisition of Instagram last April."

Some might argue that the comparison employed distinctly encourages a lack of perspective.
The MP3 patents have at this point largely expired, so there's comparatively little real cost in implementing them for commercial products. And actually, to the extent that the difference can be measured, Vorbis is generally considered to be a better codec.

But content rules. I have 8G of mostly-mp3 music in my Google Music account simply because that's how I got it. Players out there play mp3 because that's what is out there. Of the successful consumer platforms out there, only Android includes ogg support out of the box, and that mostly due to the whims of its developers than any real market pressure.

It's exactly that point that Stallman was talking about in 2001 -- despite having very good software available, we're now into our second decade of "free software products cannot play music by default". Maybe we should have listened to him more carefully...
Neonicotinoids were banned in Germany in 2008, so we already have a (rather large) control group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_imp...
I was thinking of writing something like this to help my girls code. Modding minecraft with Java is fun, but the language gets in the way of beginners. This python version is great for that.
Here a study of the evoulution of Linux File Systems (post from 5 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431413

While it does NOT contain ZFS it is a great read.
Yeah, it's really awesome. Check werkkzeug3, a demotool for procedural asset generation by the .kkrieger team (Farbrausch).

It's in Farbrausch's GitHub with many more demos/demotools https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public
It's a fantastic demonstration of the need for the new feature of "What tab is making noise" appearing on browsers.

High pitched beeps at long, semi random, intervals can be a great weapon for people engaged in psychological warfare in an office environment. A couple of dollars (or a few lines of script) can get a device that will cause many hours of lost work.
HackerNews n00bs are users who are initially green. Likewise, you can see all stories and comments which have been posted by n00bs at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
> "Their commission is percentage based, so a good agent will try to get you the most possible for your home."

That discounts the value of time. If it takes, say, 40 hours of work to sell your home for $300K, and another 40 hours of negotiations to bump that to $400K, it is not in the realtor's interest to pursue the $100K - he/she can simply pursue another $300K sale in the same time.

A commission based structure tends to have weird cliffs like this subject to the details of the field.
Assume for a moment that organizations are information technologies. If that's the case, then processing units are the firm's humans, plus whatever mechanized information systems they have.

Now, unlike mechanical systems, human components of this larger IT network are far less modular. Certain positions require decades of experience and knowledge in order to perform optimally. You can't merely buy a person off the rack to slot into your organization if you have particular needs for their position.

From the perspective of an organization, then, in order to ensure continuity of capacity of a system, niche capacities need to be actively cultivated. If your position as X manager is part of their VP of X pipeline, then the organization's ability to selectively pick people who would be best suited for grooming into the VP of X position could be vital to their staffing strategy.

That said, this assumes a certain approach to developing capacity within firms (one, however, that is excessively common), which itself is a strategy choice mediated by a number of factors, including the firm's attractiveness to hires from the outside. If you're Google, for instance, you likely have the ability to pull the capacity you need from the market if its a generalized asset.
Great article. Stepping back, I love the approach Dave is taking as a recruiter where he is sharing real career advice that technologists can benefit from without any hard pitches.

Great recruiters are few and far between, but the best ones out there can add a huge amount of expertise and value to your job hunt.
"less believable"?? Clearly, you are not familiar with India. In fact, if there is a huge arms deal for defense forces (or huge deal for anything), you can bet there is involvement of at least one politician to take his cut.
Very cool! This makes working with HTML such a breeze: http://emacsrocks.com/e12.html

"do I file an issue with the emacs developers hoping it is voted on enough to make into the next version?
Hell no!
This is emacs.
I fix it myself!"
Suppose there is some bug in ZFS or the OS. Checksums will fail (problem is detected), but conceivably, there could be a type of bug that an fsck tool could fix, without having to roll back to a previous version. Another potential advantage is that a fix by fsck could be much quicker than restoring a complete backup.
Unfortunately, spending time with the poorest people I know makes it glaringly obvious why they are poor.

One possible reason for the disparity is that being poor sucks and is really hard in many parts of the world (like NYC I would imagine), however where I live, rents and other expenses are low and it's relatively easy to get government handouts.
Show HN: IsThisLost helps you recover lost items like keys and phones
Taxing the Wealthy Is Not So Easy: EU implements tax on trades
Really old dragonfly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeura

Meganeura is a genus of extinct insects from the Carboniferous period approximately 300 million years ago, which resembled and are related to the present-day dragonflies. With wingspans of up to 65 cm (25.6 in), M. monyi is one of the largest known flying insect species; the Permian Meganeuropsis permiana is another. Meganeura were predatory, and fed on other insects, and even small amphibians.
$100M maybe, but $1B??? No way.
Yes, that's true. I skipped the opening paragraph and interpreted it as "why don't programmers as a whole get paid more".
> Why is MP3 still more popular than Ogg if Ogg is much more leniently licensed?

"Network effects": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
There are all kinds of charts under http://blockchain.info/. I guess it would be possible deduce a trade that occurred at a price that put the value over $1B but that depends on your exact definition.

Also the valuation might go over and under $1B multiple times in the future.
Ask HN: what do you use for a home NAS?
I'd write a poll, but I don't know enough of the brands. Joe Armstrong apparently uses a Synology. FreeNAS obviously supports iXsystems. Personally, I use hand-me-down Dell towers with SuSE because the upfront cost is $0 and YaST over SSH is good enough for NFS.

I recently got bit by my set-up though when I finally figured out that a disk that chronically drops out had a bad cable, not a bad disk.

So, between that and Armstrong's usesthis post, I wanted to ask HNers: what do you use? And why?
and another one worth checking, emacsmovies -http://emacsmovies.org/
Connectors and physical controllers remain expensive and difficult to make. "Computers" just fall to the base price of etching a circuit board.

This is the new normal. The connector is the valuable part.
There has recently been a huge uptake on 'make code beautiful' all over the place. The main thing the beauty seems to emphasize is variable naming and other inane surface level driftwood.

This stuff is not what makes code beautiful and any code can be converted to look like this with simple formatting tools. Judging code on being 'good' or 'bad' based off whether someone hastily dumped it through a neatness format tool is a terrible precedent.

Code is beautiful if

1) Accomplishes the goal it has to perform in an
easily understandable format.
2) Is designed in a way that modifying one part of
the code will have minimal/no impact on other parts
3) Is named well enough ('self documenting') so that
the amount of comments can be kept to a minimum
4) Hides as much boiler plate code inside helper
functions/libraries as possible so that the real
logic is not lost in a sea of boiler plate.
5) Is specific enough that 'tricks' are not required
to use it for the intended purpose.
6) Uses generalized code in common areas - and has
this generalized code moved to external libraries
for maintenance and re-use across projects.

And very importantly (but often missed in this case):

Uses system knowledge to optimize code to run as well
as (within an order of magnitude) the most performant
possible code for that problem can run.

Systems can be as beautiful as they want, but if your OS takes 15 minutes to boot or your FPS game runs at 2 fps (and as people are beginning to notice: your web app server can only handle 50 users), all of your beautiful code is wasted and should be thrown out.
Pretty much seems to have hit the speculation threshold. Perhaps the Eurozone crisis will do for Bitcoin what the first Gulf War did for CNN.
One reason is that the slow growth period would have likely created a series of down-rounds when the company was raising money in its initial years, massively diluting the initial founders. So even after the company gets cashflow positive or figures out some other way to stay alive (loans, etc.) without raising VC money, the entrepreneurs can never make out like bandits with the stock they've got left, in most realistic exit scenarios.
Right now there seems to be about 15M transactions total.

Number of Transactions

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total

Transactions / Day:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

Trade:Transaction Ratio:

https://blockchain.info/charts/tx-trade-ratio?showDataPoints...
Wow, it's nice to see that these guys are still going. They posted here a while ago, about not getting into Y Combinator, but that clearly didn't stop them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2507662

I think it's an interesting read, and it puts things in perspective.
I, at least, meant conspiracy in the more literal sense: people coordinating in secret.
An academic analysis of LOLcats
100% agreed, many are just looking for buzzwords. The best way to avoid being underpaid is to know what you are worth. Some recruiters will be better than others at understanding the market and where an individual's experience/skill/etc place them.

After talking to a new candidate for about 20-30 minutes, if we haven't discussed compensation yet I'll usually throw a guess at them. I've been off by 50% on either side, but usually I'm within 10%. Part of that accuracy is based on my having a specific niche, to the point where I'm quite aware of which employers pay more than others in my market. I'll adjust my guess based on their employer, which is something more generalist recruiters probably couldn't do.
Does anyone know what servos they run in these?
WebRTC cannot connect to arbitrary IP addresses, only to other browsers that have opened the same page and whose user has authorized a WebRTC connection.
You can still see the fun that was had yesterday here:

http://bitcoinity.org/markets?currency=USD&exchange=mtgo...
I said BTC 1B and not $1B because not all BTC transactions occur between participants dealing in USD.
Move around (horizontally) and you should get a notice that you've changed servers, at which point other players may be found (if not, keep going.)
On exchanges, or on the Bitcoin network as a whole? For example, 41 million BTC were traded on MtGox in USD since the beginning.
Hmm, you know, my comment defending the Atlantic posters actually does have a weird amount of upvotes. (Not a joke -- it's at +37 right now, which seems high given its placement and late timing in the thread.)
And i started using btrfs in 12.04 and reverted back to ext4 in 12.10 because it was awfully slow. Atleast noticable slower then ext3 (or 4, not sure what i had earlier).
May have changed today, but yes.. It's not all great and nice for everyone ;)
Being less radical would diffuse his message and make it more difficult to explain to the masses.
I dont agree to with him to extent he make his points and historically he has always acted "radical", so the thing im trying to say is very arguable.
But his uncompromising stance could very well be a pragmatic approach, because there is next to no one doing it instead of him.
This post by Ole Lensmar perfectly aligns with your idea of "beautiful" software: http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/275689/What-M...
So, you're saying that potentially releasing a poor quality product to early adopters who bothered to help fund development of the console and will help shape early public opinion about the unit before the full launch, is ok.
I've corrected it. Thanks.
Hm, how would you differentiate qualitatively between control and influence? I think we're likely just disagreeing about words here, but I'm curious as to how you're using them.
Dad? :) Thanks for the kind words. It can be depressing to be in an industry that is so hated, and I'm generally trying to give candidates actionable advice and insight into conversations that many are simply not privy to. I use the word transparency a ton when discussing recruiting - secrecy seems to be one way recruiters try to make money, but transparency and sharing ideas is another way to really differentiate yourself in the recruiting business. Thanks!
> Coding habits are often a reflection of the person

What nonsense. This whole paragraph was elitism personified and anecdotal nonsense. Coding habits are arbitrary. They are taught (even if it takes a tool to do it) and learned.
According to the phrasing on the bottom of the page I linked to, the blocks are "tentatively allocated." I'm not sure how this is substantially different from the phrasing I used, which was "tentatively included."
I've got a NetGear ReadyNas Pro with 6 drive bays each containing a 2Tb seagate low power drive for 12Tb of usable space. It allows me to rip dvds in pretty much raw form to the nas and then transcode them (using http://handbrake.fr) to whatever format I want. My wife wants to watch some RomCom on her phone/android tablet during a long plane ride? No problem! Get it at RedBox for $1.20, rip it, and transcode it to the proper size and format. The resulting file is only 300-450Mb, so her phone and tablet can hold gobs of them. Also, netgear has some pretty decent forums.

As a Linux guy, massive bonus points that the ReadyNas boxes are just modified Debian and they will let you get root on them. http://www.readynas.com/forum

I'm a HUGE fan. You can get a diskless 6 drive bay one for:
http://www.amazon.com/Readynas-Pro-6-Unified-Nas/dp/B004S9JX...

It is also a great time machine backup for my wife's crackbook pro lappy.
And yet another aggressive article with a title trying to diminish other people.

Can we please stop voting up all these: "Why you're doing it wrong", "Why nobody cares about your skills", "Why your product won't succeed", "Why plumbers are earning more than you" (not that there would be anything wrong with being a plumber), "Why you are a slave working for the 1%", "Why you'll never get hired at Google", "Why you failed your interview", etc.

Please? This is really, really, really getting tiring.

All this aggressive psychology bullshit and mental masturbation is getting on the nerves of quite some HN readers.

Can we please focus on technical stuff and startup news?
Highbrow: A Textual Annotation Browser
Ask HN: Did you have Lasik eye surgery?
I'm getting Lasik eye surgery later in April, and was wondering if anyone out there would be willing to share their experiences with the surgery? Also if anyone has their own tips before the event, that will be greatly appreciated.
I'm in the exact same position. I'm an Engineer who received many job offers before moving to the valley on an H1B. My wife is on an H4 visa. This in effect says "you are welcome to spend money, but you can't make any!". Of course, there is the patronizing concession that she can study (she is already very qualified...).

Unfortuantely she is not a developer, so the chances of her getting granted an H1B are extremely low. Particularly because the quota is reached so early in the year. She is qualified and talented, with international experience. Language is not a deterent as we come from an English speaking Western nation.

This situation is not common around the world. This is the third country we have lived in, and the first where we have encountered problems as great as this.

We are currently considering leaving. The valley will lose another resource, and many more will follow.
He doesn't know that node is single-threaded. Take an embarrassingly-parallel task (serving multiple unrelated requests, for example) and pit a single thread against multiple threads. Guess who's going to win?

Depending on the size of the .NET's thread pool, this probably more than accounts for the difference. The drastic inefficencies from not knowing what the async library does are just icing.
> I don't know where this is coming from.

Polygon's hands-on review mentions this latency, along with a few other criticisms, including the feel of the controller:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157602/ouya-feature
Experimental: Media queries extended for elements
I'm not sure many people would use Vim/Emacs in real life. I don't know... maybe some people... certainly not pros.
This captures it. The cost to add the transistors to put an ARM CPU in silicon is < the cost of the metals in the USB and HDMI connector you use to talk to it.

I gave a talk on the Internet of Things where I tried to communicate this point clearly, for more and more applications the marginal cost to add a computer is nearly 0, the marginal cost to add a network is about $0.35, so a lot of things that wouldn't have had networks or computers in them before suddenly do.

Back when Sun Micro was trying to get everyone in the Java group to write up patents on anything they could think of, James Gosling in what was a great comment on the process wrote up one for Java inside a light switch. He reasoned it was the most ridiculous patent ever since a light switch from Home Depot was $1.50 and there was no amount of "coolness" you could add with Java that would merit building a light switch with its own processor. What he didn't count on was that the cost of the computer that could run Java would drop below the cost to make a mechanical switch.
Hands on with the Ouya
That's true, but I think it's just as dangerous of an assumption to assume that poorer people would waste money given to them. It portrays poorer people as seperate from society and it makes it easier to mistreat them. When Florida proposed drug testing welfare recipients, it was noted that welfare recipients actually had a lower rate of drug use than the general public. Part of the rhetoric used to deny social services to people feeds into the easy assumption that poor people are not like us and that they are poor because they deserve it.
And where engaged or retained search is most valuable is to get rid of this. Real estate agents selling their own home know that they will sell that house - they aren't competing with other agents to sell their own home, so they aren't pressured to sell quickly. When recruiters are compensated partially up front and have semi-exclusive deals with companies, it takes away the need to sell quick (force a hire). If I know I'm going to fill the slot, and I know that another recruiter isn't going slip in and take my fee, I'm not of the same cut-throat incentives to just make a deal happen. Again, good analogy with contingency recruiting.
https://blockchain.info/stats

156,779.62 BTC in the past 24 hours
I want to be able to get behind Bitcoin I really do. I just don't understand the purpose it serves.

As an asset class it's far too volatile even for someone who plays naked options. Imagine putting $10,000 into an asset class that swings 20-30% daily on a regular basis. Trading curbs eat your heart out.

As a currency it's too impractical and there are serious hurdles involved with turning central bank currency into Bitcoin and vice versa.

We think Wall Street plays a rigged game. Manipulating the Bitcoin market would not only be possible for someone with a small amount of capital, but the regulatory boards(SEC/FSA) don't seem to be interested in coming within 50 parsecs of the stuff.

Bitcoin is an interesting idea with the potential to change the world, sadly the world just isn't ready. More importantly the people running the world aren't ready.

The moment Bitcoin starts to worry a Government or a big bank they'll simply manipulate the market. Oh, and you wouldn't even know.
As a user of SoapUI, I find it amusing that SmartBear is writing posts on sucky code. SoapUI for the Mac may very well have the worst user interface that was ever created. It somehow manages to make the GIMP UI seem fluid and well designed.
Link bait headline? Worked for me. Who knows if its true though.
You own land near Davis? How is that as an investment/hobby? I really want to buy land in Davis too -- someday.