skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said. Just because you have a company does not mean you own me ass hole. And I have a life outside work. Shove it deep in there.

By the way, what was it that makes you or your company so entitled to think you can judge me? Did you guys ship a awesome product or made a pretty penny or invent something fundamental in Computer Science?
The only caveat I'd add is "don't quit your job if it turns out you enjoy it just fine". The post makes the same assumption that a lot of Hacker News articles do- that a startup is the most preferable option available to anyone, at any time.

It isn't. Depending on your interests you may be fine working in a larger organisation- if you stick at it for a while (the same amount of time it would take to establish a startup) you may be able to call a lot of shots yourself and really start owning your job. Or maybe you'd enjoy the kind of research-like position that only a larger company can provide. Maybe you'd be best suited to a non-profit. It's all down to you.
Two posts previous: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/an-experiment-concer...
Maybe think for yourself next time.
Or you can start the company on the side and jump when you are ready (or not start one at all, that's okay, too). I bootstrapped my current company with my friend just working nights and weekends. We are now profitable and growing and the schedule helped us focus on what was important.

In hindsight the risk was actually staying at my job, where I would have stagnated and not had the amazing experiences I've had over the last year and a half.
His father is a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to mexico at a young age. He has no Latino blood. Both of his parents were ivy league academics: so he had a big genetic advantage, but that's just life.
The most viable alternative is "apt-get" which provides simple downloads from a central package repository with signature checking. I believe pip and cpan are comparable. In this case I'm picking on homebrew, and the quoted curl command is the command to install that very package tool. The brew package manager does some lightweight checksum verification on subsequent downloads.
Thanks a ton for these data- helpful stuff!

I've shown her some raw data from Indeed and DICE, but the reason why I've turned to the community is this:

She's not impressed with the raw number of open positions. If that were a conclusive indicator, then getting a marketing job would be a snap in the Bay Area, but I assure you that it is not.
I tried explaining to her that price (or salary) is a good indicator of the saturation rate of the market, but she's not convinced by that argument. (I'm not sure that I am either. It could be that the salary averages are being driven up by more senior ruby positions that I wouldn't be able to qualify for in less than a few years.)

That's why I'm hoping to get some data points from employers who know whether or not there is actually a dev shortage like many people claim.
This illustrates the core argument for conservatism (in the burkean sense.. as commented below). You have to move slow to make sure you don't break things that were working (as in.. if it ain't broke). There is no such thing as tight deadlines in conservatism.
As with all things, I disagree with applying a rule to unforeseen situations. Sometimes you need to adjust your rule and sometimes you just have to break stuff.
You should listen to Shane Becker's (@veganstraightedge) talk at LA Ruby Conf 2012, 'Quit You Job, srsly' http://youtu.be/0CMjiIqhvdQ
Good Rails devs are hard to find and in large demand. As a beginning Rails developer, though, you'll need to convince your new employer that you are a net gain. A junior dev can need so much hand-holding that they can steal away precious time from a senior dev.

Put some good Ruby code on github. If you can, you'll improve your chances of getting hired quite a bit. If you can't then you're not ready to be hired yet.
"strlen gets marked as pure by the compiler if there is no non-pure definition that overrides it"

That's what I meant when I wrote that "the compiler recognizes strlen, and optimizes it specially." It was not my intent to say that only builtins or all builtins may be hoisted in this way, although now I see how someone could interpret that. That was bad wording on my part.

The point I was trying to communicate is that gcc can do special optimizations on functions that it recognizes as builtins - for example, replacing printf() with fputs(). One illustration is how strlen is treated as pure, even if it is not marked as pure. As someone with far more gcc expertise than me, would you agree with that point?

"Basically, the compiler defines a function named "strlen" that is pure and nothrow behind your back, but you can override it by providing your own definition. This is unrelated to whether it is a builtin"

Well, the optimization is defeated by -fno-builtin, so I assumed that the underlying mechanism is that a call to strlen is replaced by a call to the builtin. Was this wrong?
It is a sad world we live in where some people don't have sl installed.
URLs are for humans - a browser concept
29, then 28, then 27...

Until they're left with The Most Interesting Developer In The World.
Rent out the house and move into cheap accommodation somewhere. This isn't really a good excuse. You may even be able to rent it furnished.
I've had the new XPS for about 2 weeks now. It's nice and light, good screen. Worked with Ubuntu out of the box except hibernate -- which ran into some problems with encrypted swap before it could work (could be my fault for saying Yes to encrypted home dir when setting up the preloaded Ubuntu). I gave up on the trackpad though (maybe it can be tweaked to be usable), and am using a mouse. I never liked the trackpad on my previous laptop (some kind of netbook) nor the trackpad or the red thingy on the solid Thinkpad T42.

With an i7, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD it's nice and fast. Suspend, hibernate are quick. Sound is decent.

I tried an Asus zenbook and the Samsung series 9 in a store, and was not happy about the keyboard. I think the Dell XPS keyboard is nice. Not as nice as on my 2005 Thinkpad, but the XPS is far lighter and thinner.

Here in Denmark it was hard to find a good selection of laptops to try in store. My other alternative was the X1 carbon... but I really wanted something that worked with Ubuntu out of the box with 100% guarantee.

Overall, it feels solid and sleek yet light (1.4 kg or so). It fits into the same tiny Victorinox laptop bag that my 2009 10" netbook fit into, yet it is much more powerful (of course, also 3x the price).

I found one wifi hotspot that the Ubuntu or wifi hardware mysteriously refused to connect to, where I had to connect via my Galaxy S3 phone and share the connection via the USB port (which worked pretty well).

While the screen is nice, I've increased the font size to "Large" in Ubuntu's universal access settings, and have zoomed in on several web pages with Chrome. So I'm not yet sure about the benefit of the high resolution screen (Linus Torvalds however swears to his Pixel and its 2560x1440 or so screen).
I have to use vertx for work. It's not my favorite.

It's not Maven friendly. It's not Spring friendly. Callback spaghetti is hard to read and maintain.

It uses it's own half baked messaging framework instead of something more powerful like AMQP.

The documentation is confusing and often times self contradictory. ("Worker verticles use threadpools" vs "All verticles are strictly single threaded")

It encourages message passing and queuing even when it doesn't make sense. That leads to code that is very hard to understand and even harder to debug.

It uses Hazelcast for in memory datagrid but doesn't explain it at all in the docs. It also doesn't expose any of the useful Hazelcast APIs. So unless you are already familiar with Hazelcast you will miss most of its benefits.

I think Spring Integration is a much better solution to the problems vertx tries to solve.

That fact that vertx tries to be polyglot friendly doesn't really seem like a benefit to me either. Just makes feature development much slower.
Thanks for the links. Unfortunately the tests that tech sites do for memory consumption are quite rudimentary -- usually they don't do much more than start the browser, open a few sites, and measure.

This kind of testing produces results that favour Firefox, because Firefox does very well when you measure memory consumption in a browser session that hasn't been alive for long, but less well in longer-running sessions. This is partly due to its mostly-single-process architecture, which makes for smaller per-tab/site overhead, but fragmentation and leaks hurt more over time.

As a result, at this point in time I find reports from actual users more convincing than measurements done by tech sites. Firefox's memory consumption has improved a lot in the last 18 months, and I've heard lots of users say it uses less memory for them than it used to. I was hoping that antonios might have something similar to say.
My first thought, along with "this is a cool idea", was that their design is antiquated. Better sails, lighter materials, and yes solar powered.

I suppose they'd like to appeal to people who think that because it's made of wood, and not, say, carbon fibre, then it's more "natural".
There are so many jobs and freelance projects available for Rails developers. The thing I find amazing is that anyone I talk to looking for Rails developers is that they can't find enough talented people.

Also, Rails is so easy that you can slide by being junior.
Really, if you tally the wealth extracted from the economy by taxes and monetary expansion, follow its path through defense spending and astronomical bank subsidies, and see whose pockets much of it ultimately ends up in, you can't claim Washington isn't corrupt. It's just a professionalized corruption, baked carefully and discreetly into the system. The sums involved dwarf anything that's happening in Dhaka or Moscow.
Thanks for the feedback!

I'm actually making a part of my transition plan to attend an intensive course like those offered by General Assembly and CodeFellows.org

Those programs are designed to give me plenty of opportunity to put up live projects and public code. I have some stuff now, but it's so messy and noob-tastic that I'm not showing it to anybody for fear of being put in the stocks. It's that bad. :/
The Power And Weakness That Come With Being The Default
posted Mar 16, 2010
I'm jealous. Granted, I learned the API before I re-learned C, so I admittedly shot myself in the foot. Now that I'm back up to speed in C (I was in a Java shop for 5 years) and doing more work in Go for my own start-up, I shy away from using Python for anything other than one-off numerical analyses.
Step 1 is to be really fucking good at your job, whatever that job is. Ideally that job would be in a unit that is directly responsible for driving revenue growth. That will probably lead to you becoming an executive at some point, but that would be a symptom of your success, a necessary evil, not the starting point.

Especially in a company like Google, which has a cultural disdain for empty suits, if your goal is to "become an executive" you'd never find yourself in his position.
Why are you looking for "active" VC's? Why is that a metric? It seems to me that if I were looking for a VC I'd be on the lookout for those who make fewer, more conscious investments, instead of the standard fund that just shotguns their money and plays the numbers.

Side Note: A little game theory... it's probably not a good idea to use a data source (crunchbase) that is heavily influenced by those who you are currently negotiating with. Sounds a little like back in 2007 when Goldman and Co were the ones rating the same junk securities they were trying to offload.
Not to mention that it's sysadminny-types that you turn to when your OS is hosed and you want to recover data from your drive - having little or no sysadmin skills means recovery and reinstall is very much not trivial.
Yes.

"Lots of Irritating Spurious Parentheses", far too many awkward SHIFT-0, SHIFT-9 for )(, and also that I'm left-handed and lazy at the keyboard, I remapped keybindings: `]' and `[' in emacs for `)' and `('.

I've a suspicion that I'm not the first to do so.
A related and somewhat more entertaining article along the same lines: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...
Android started before the iPhone was announced. Google's stated goal with Android was to build a rich, common phone platform to enable the smartphone revolution. Remember that before Android, most phone's came with shitty little browsers and little-to-no room for third-party software.

When Google bought Android, very few people had done any amount of mobile web browsing. Now, mobile makes up a notable fraction of total web usage.

Google's accomplished its goal so far with Android, but it certainly didn't start out to prevent an iOS monoculture - it did to prevent a carrier-dominated oligarchy of shitty web-less feature phones. (More strategically, it's made sure that when the mobile web became important, Google services were still front-and-center.)
>that they can't find enough talented people.

Interesting nuance here. Maybe there are a lot of hacks out there who can Google their way through a Rails Tutorial, but cause more trouble than help when brought on to a production app?
Microsoft, Google, and Apple: Which one faces doom in 2017?
Have you never seen a third-party How To?
Most people who buy Android devices don't know what a skin is, and certainly don't buy a particular phone because its easier to remove the skin. It happens, but not enough to matter at this scale.
I would also say that if you think you want to try a startup, do it before you get married or have kids. Spouses will say they will be supportive, but like anything else involving a startup they don't really know what they're in for. Many simply cannot handle it. Divorce and/or child custody issues will not help your startup be successful.
AWSY's graphs suggest that Firefox's memory consumption was best around Firefox 12, in January 2012. So if that's your evidence, it's not particularly convincing.

Fortunately, although AWSY is useful, it's also a single benchmark with a number of flaws and limitations, and should be viewed accordingly. In particular, it can miss big improvements such as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695480 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689623.
You might be interested to note that the world's largest R&D firm [1] has a charter where they can't research offensive weaponry, but can research "dual-use" technology. e.g. if you can develop techniques to turn a cancer drug into an aerosol for oral delivery, you can use the same technique to turn a mildly infectious contagion into a bio-weapon.

1 - http://www.battelle.org/
I'm sure you'll get some good data here.

But you give no indication that you enjoy programming. As someone who has made significant career changes myself, I caution you that choosing a profession solely to follow demand, and not based on your true interests, can turn out badly.
Facebook has deals with carriers in countries where mobile data is hard for the average customer to afford that enables free access to Facebook Zero even without a mobile subscription.
The Skills Most Entrepreneurs Lack (HBR)
It would be awesome if you made us billionaires by the end of the month...
I have a house and a mortgage (Europe, Scotland) and I pay at least half of what I would by renting. I can't speak for the US but here once you own 40% of the property outright, mortgages aren't a terrible idea.

Of course this is based on living alone, living with my parents or something like that would likely work out cheaper.
Chances are if you bought 5 years ago you are underwater and can't sell it.
FWIW, this really does not align with my personal experience in the ed-tech sector. Either we're cut from a different cloth (unlikely?) or I lack the analytical skills and empathy to evaluate! :)
DevOps Engineer at Scribd: Help run one of the largest Rails sites, SF or Remote
Scribd is building the world’s online library of books and documents. We’re one of the top 100 sites on the web by traffic, but our ops team is still just three people. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve already built a lot of specialized infrastructure to make our business possible, but we have a lot more to do.

Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.

To allow us to keep scaling, we’re looking to add an experienced DevOps engineer to our small team. As a member of Scribd operations, you’ll have tremendous ownership and responsibility for the site and its infrastructure.

This role is open to remote employees working from anywhere in the world. Let us know when you apply if you want to work remotely or would be interested in relocating to San Francisco. We are happy to support either.

What you’ll do

- Expand/improve/fix a 150+ growing server farm and infrastructure which is running on top of it
- Build new back-end infrastructure using ruby and chef
- Support the engineering team by building awesome internal tools for developers
- Keep Scribd.com up and fast
- Be a part of 24x7 on-call schedule with other members of the DevOps team

Some things we’ve built

There is a lot of technology operating behind the scenes at Scribd. We’ve built the first HTML5 document reader, a multi-terabyte data warehouse, a resizing image CDN, and a remote-controlled go-kart (really!)

For more, see our jobs page (scribd.com/jobs) and tech blog (coding.scribd.com)

You should have

- Strong general programming skills
- Related experience with website operations; this includes experience with high volume/high traffic web sites
- Strong oral and written communication skills
- Strong knowledge of most widely-used networking protocols and unix/linux command line tools
- Solid scripting skills

Even better would be ...

- 3+ Years of solid Linux/UNIX systems engineer/administrator experience
- Hands-on experience with building and maintaining reliable large-scale distributed systems environments
- Experience with ruby, rails, and chef
- Excellent database knowledge, particularly with MySQL
- HBase/Hadoop deployment/scaling/maintaining experience
- Experience with any of the following technologies/tools: Nginx, HAProxy, Memcached, Squid, git, Solr, Sphinx, Hive, ActiveMQ, Postfix, Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, Redis

To apply
We're easy to reach. Just send your resume and cover letter with the subject “[Your name] – DevOps Engineer [SF or remote] – via Hacker News” to jobs@scribd.com.

Your application will be reviewed by a senior member of our engineering team within 24 hours.
Zapier has become one of my favorites web services. I've always lamented that IFTTT doesn't cater to the productivity/project management crowd by offering a very limited set of channels to work with. Then Zapier came along and blew me away.
I agree with don't copy paste. because i hate with copy paste
Guest: Turn STEM into STEAM with arts education
I believe Facebook has OEM support from both Samsung and HTC. That's why they're launch partners.
There is also the option of part-time consulting to pay the bills while building the startup. As a Django consultant, this person could probably make $50k annual income by consulting a few days per week. The rest of his time could be dedicated to the startup business.

Even if you have low living costs, you should still consider opportunity costs of not working. A consultant making $100k per year who takes two years off to do a failed startup has effectively lost $200k in income.
Elapsed Time: “Well, that’s the future”
The majority of developers in London, and indeed in the rest of the UK, make far far far far less. On the plus side, 3 weeks of vacation? 5 is more common and 6 isn't unheard of.
Python relative imports - the hard way
I think, google is number one.
yay lets nerf those undeserving white men. that will make the world a better place
I agree with the sentiment but I think it's more the "fulfill this arbitrary metric in a month or you're fired" implied here:

If we are hiring you because you are awesome, then you have 30 days to do something awesome. And awesome is simply defined as me (or your supervisor) thinking to him/herself, “man, that's awesome!” just once.

that's putting people off.
>Dhaka is corrupt. Moscow is corrupt. Washington is dysfunctional, but not corrupt.

I have bridge I can sell you. Don't worry it's in the US and not corrupt at all.
> Because just observing the polarity changes it, so you can never be sure what position it was in originally.

That does put a crimp in my universal router plans, but that's really interesting by itself that just looking at the atom affects its polarity.
How to build a constraint propagator in a weekend
> For the record, this is also true for every quantum computer in existence.

Yes, I'm well aware. The difference from D-wave is that the labs at IBM, UCSB, and Yale haven't claimed they've built a quantum computer (mostly).

> What is clear though, is that quantum computers have already solved problems in fewer steps than classical computers.

This is statement is false and probably not even interpretable in a sensible way. See, for instance, my esteemed colleagues on why some labs' claims to have factored small numbers like 15 are bogus:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.7007

> And to be fair, it's going to take a while to beat current computers. We've had decades to get them faster and faster, and we will need some time because we can perform low level operations nearly as fast and get enough qubits to get to sizes of problems that classical computers have issues with

Although it will take a while, it will probably not be because classical computers are so great. I could be wrong (I'm no expert and there could always be scaling surprises), but I'm willing to bet it takes us longer until we perform the first quantum computation that can't be done by hand than between that time and the time when we perform a computation that can't be done with a classical computer.

The short version is that you're mistaken about how research in quantum computers has been progressing. There have been fantastic successes and advances, but they cannot be measured by "number of qubits" or "difficulty of computations done". There simply haven't been any real computation performed. You should think of researchers at the stage of still trying to get the first transistor to work, not the Moore's-law stage of trying to cram the 2^Nth transistor into the silicon.
Going into debt to consume things (cars, homes, vacations, clothes, etc.) is Bad (capital B).

Going into debt to purchase capital that has the potential to pay for itself and make a profit in the long run is [not as] bad.

Saving to buy things debt free regardless of its purpose is the best way to go. Those that [can] delay instant self gratification tend to be the ones best off. Short term pains for long term gains.
This is great advice that I was pretty certain I'd see here.

I do enjoy programming! I've been working with HTML/CSS/jQuery for a couple of years and PHP/mySQL for about a year on and off and I absolutely enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when everything clicks and you get that one little line of output in the console that you've been driving at for 3 days.

I enjoy it enough to build things at hackathons just to see if I can. And sometimes I win and get interviewed on TechCrunch. Okay, so maybe that just happened one time.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/12/meet-the-vetsintech-hackath...
I once had an evening/weekend project to write C++ code on Windows without linking to the C and C++ runtime libraries. It was a lot of fun and it gave me some preparation for a next job that involved even more system-level stuff.