skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did you break into the programming industry?
Tell us how you broke into the programming industry by leaving a comment on the blog post and also see what other programmers had to say!
Dont be shy! Tell us your story!
Maybe (really hoping) Drizzle will be better for the web. For enterprise, Postgres
'the end of RDBS' is a gross overstatement. ACID and RDBMSs are a combination that is ideal for the vast majority of applications. You get flexible query and excellent data security, and the scaling issues associated with ACID only become significant when you're working on truly huge amounts of information.

BASE is more appropriate for eBay or Amazon, but your average startup is better off with a mature, easy to code for ACID solution.
It seems like it would be more useful if it were on the same private network, since you can mix and match dedicated and "elastic" servers on the same private network.
That seems odd. Surely there's an API?
True story: I walked into the front door of a startup and said, Hi, I'm X and I can do Y, are you hiring? And they were. This was April or May, technically I hadn't actually finished college but exams were over. Only stayed there 7 months, they changed direction and didn't do what I wanted to do anymore, but that experience was enough to land me my next job.
BlackBerry Strom 2 Smart Mobile Phone Will Launch in September
Eucalyptus is an open source implementation of the EC2 API that runs on Xen. It could become a de facto standard.
Are you using the daily Sales/Trend reports on iTunes connect to generate these graphs? or are you gathering the data some other way?
Gold is not an investment vechicle. It is only good for as a hedge against inflation.
I have a unique password for each and every site I'm registered at. Outsourcing the safekeeping of your password to everyone but yourself is a bad mistake.
Maybe he meant "You should not trust anyone with your password."
I'd prefer Off-The-Record encryption over GPG. I want plausible deniability.
It's an uncommonly warm and fine spring day around here, I think I'll take a walk outside in the sun. I find it soothing.

I also apologize for dragging in this topic. Mind if I take it out now and hang it to dry ?
A Dutchman replies:

http://www.newmajority.com/ShowScroll.aspx?ID=8a80f624-92a7-...

The NYT article doesn't make any mention of the fact that emigration from the Netherlands in 2004 was the highest since 1954. This makes me wonder if things are really as wonderful there as the article claims, although it does a pretty good job of pointing out the pros and cons.
This is what's nice about using languages with libraries. If I want to do an unsalted SHA-1, like news.yc, I would write:

use Authen::Passphrase;
my $pw = Authen::Passphrase::SaltedDigest->new(
algorithm => "SHA-1",
passphrase => "passphrase",
);

If I instead wanted to be secure, and use bcrypt (which I always do, even for the most trivial sites), I would just write:

my $pw = Authen::Passphrase::BlowfishCrypt->new(
cost => 8,
salt_random => 1,
passphrase => "passphrase",
);

Notice how I get better security without any extra effort? That is the joy of not being the only user of your programming language, and that's how you ensure that people do the Right Thing with your data -- make it easy for them.

(I'll also mention that it gets better; with Moose type coercions, I can basically treat the password as cleartext -- the type coercion converts a Str into a Passphrase. To set it, I supply the cleartext password as an initarg when instantiating a user; when changing it, the writer accessor handles the coerciion; when checking it, I delegate to the passphrase's check_passphrase method. A great API with great security, involving almost no effort on my part. <3.)
Facebook defeats Recession
In recent tough economic conditions, Facebook refused to decelerate. In times when even the biggest of the enterprises saw a decline in their growth curve and almost all economies of the world witnessed a downfall, Facebook’s growing social phenomenon managed to make profits even in the age of recession. According to a survey conducted by Inside Facebook, leading payment providers experienced 35% growth in both transactional volume and dollar volume in the first quarter while some grew as high as 300% for the quarter.
Software jobs, PhDs and over-qualification
Another option for generating passwords - http://simplepassword.com/?&domain=news.ycombinator.com
[Edit: I'm an idiot. This is a "batteries included" Haskell. If only Lisp, indeed]

CLISP + Emacs and slime is pretty much universal, almost to a fault.
10 minutes, wow. I've only experienced that with Windows instances (especially in eu-west) which I rarely use. Solaris instances are slower too but those are still considered beta.

I've been working on a development tool for EC2 for the past few months so I'm starting and shutting down instances almost every day. All of the Linux instances I've started have come up in less than a minute and usually around 30 seconds.

Keep in mind, if you're using a custom image or one that's been modified it could take longer depending on how large the image is (lots of preinstalled software) and what scripts are running on startup.
Wait, who uses CLISP? Most Lisp applications included with my OS use GCL, and I personally use SBCL. It also seems like most libraries support SBCL, sometimes exclusively.
Can you create, attach, and take snapshots of multiple disks with Slicehost?
.. on win32?

I use sbcl on win32 and it does most things almost right. Just not all. At least CLISP doesn't half-run them.
Reddit alien went back home for april fools day : reddit.com
SAMSUNG A436 at cellhut.com
SAMSUNG A436 is simplified production of the band with many more multi skin texture and can have the deal of the phone at cellhut.com at pocket price. The phone has included features like VGA camera with high resolution of 640×480 pixels.
Your LOL ruined an otherwise intelligent post. Can I have my upvote back?
It's not the president's job to know the difference between chip design and software design anyway. He just meant "tech stuff".
Staging is one aspect of hosting. I will go even further and say that because a staging environment needs to mimic the production environment as close as possible it should be hosted by the same vendor too.

You're right that if you compare numbers directly, some aspects of EC2 are more expensive than other vendors. My point is that AWS offers greater value by allowing you to do things you can't do anywhere else.

Allocating static IP addresses on the fly for example.
But which one do you use for email? where you can send resets for everything except the bank (I assume).
Built a couple of DirectX/OpenGL c++ demos and showed them to Ubisoft. First thing I know, I was working on the Myst IV production, and then Assassin's creed at Ubisoft Montreal. The game industry is a lot of fun when you are 21. Of course things change afterward if you are slightly entrepreneurial, independent or self-starter...
I guess you've found the next installment of the series.
"We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design", said Obama."

Am I the only person who finds this statement a little, um, concerning? A person might easily spend 5 days a week for a half-century working at a career, not to mention schooling. You'd better like what you're doing, especially in engineering. Is it too much to ask that we be allowed to make this decision for ourselves without our betters in Washington telling us what to do?
If you don't have salt, the more passwords you have, the easier it is for someone to find one password by a dictionary attack. If you have a lot of passwords you should use salt, if you don't have a lot you still expect your app to grow don't you?
> If Isaac Asimov's a genius, what was Isaac Newton?

A genius of a different type. Can you compare Nelson Mandela with Leonhard Euler? Can you compare Benjamin Franklin with William Shakespeare? Genius, like intelligence, comes in different flavors.

In short, it's silly and ultimately pointless trying to quantify terms such as "genius". One person's "genius" is abother person's "skilled". Let's agree that it's not worth worrying about.
I'm thinking that a salt could be retro fitted by changing the check from:
sha1($password);
to
sha1(sha1($password) . $salt);

and you could update the database for that easily.
Texas woman suspected to have died from swine flu ID'd
No DB interface included, not even ODBC. Team Haskell doesn't seem to understand (or care) what a barrier this is to mainstream adoption.

(Yes I know about HSQL but it's not exactly "batteries included" is it - compare Haskell to Python in this case)
+1 for the SL private network. Minus (minimal) outages, it's been excellent for us over the past 2 years.
This is no doubt one of the best speech i ever heard. It gives me a lot of new perspectives when i heard it for the first time back in 2006. Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
By programming. Do enough of that, and other people will become aware of your existence.

IRC and mailing lists are good places to hang out if you do the open source thing -- every job I've ever gotten has been via IRC. (This probably works only if you are an active participant in a smallish community. I wouldn't join #java on Freenode and ask for a job, or expect someone to offer one.)

Actually, I'm wrong -- presenting at local user groups (and conferences) is also a good idea. That is how I got started teaching training classes (and writing).
Ok, now go visit all open source web apps and post here,
you can even write a script for that.
I agree - in the UK Twitter seemed to stay under the radar for a long time compared to the US then one week the BBC seemed to brief staff on it and the large scale public adoption was overnight and very much celebrity or central-media driven.
I know where you're coming from, your basic nincompoop is breaking into cars and steals a laptop out of the trunk. Perhaps he has absolutely no idea what a password file is, let alone how to crack it with a rainbow table. HOWEVER, he does know how to sell the laptop to a local ask-no-questions pawn shop that specializes in (a) buying stolen goods, and (b) computers.

I suggest that the pawn shop I've just described employs someone with considerably more advanced cracking skills: they receive several stolen phones and computers a day and have a tidy business on the side selling data and stolen passwords to identity thieves.

I made this scenario up to illustrate that if there is valuable data that can be cracked open, the "market" will organize itself in such a way to get ahold of it.
Debian is switching to EGLIBC
Welcome to Girl Gaming Month
Is it just me or is everything female-tech-related the new trend?
How to know what Oracle will do with Java
Debt consolidation and management | Debt management group
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Influence is Earned by Inches, Yet Instantly We Recognize a Star
Innovation means respect for creators and consumers
Great pov article, what the NRE did sounds terrible (and self injuring).

Loved the link to Idea Bounty, looking forward to how it progresses. Also interesting to hear about Stanza getting picked up by Amazon, we'll see how that turns out.

Just posted about Innovation a few days ago myself (how it's measured). http://messel.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/how-do-you-measu...
Webwindows| Web Windows Design
Web Windows Design was set up in 2006 by two Directors of Web Windows Marketing Limited. Since then company has built a reputation for quality, reliability, on-time delivery and cost effectiveness.
The business world can be a shark pond. You can't really rely on other companies, unless you know exactly where their self-interest lies and that it aligns with yours (for now).

A friend of mine compared it with the Diplomacy board game. Whatever diplomatic agreements you make or do not make, you have to first and foremost understand what is in the other person's interest, and work on the basis that at some point their interests may change and become hostile to you - at which point, you cannot and should not expect them to live up to any previous agreements.

I'd be very careful about making any application that relies entirely on a service that belongs to another company with its own self-interests.
Are there any iphone development tools for Linux?
Started programming when I was about 10, went to college and got a CS degree, got a job.

This question is worded strangely. The "programming industry" is not like the "movie industry" or the "music industry." Just start coding. It'll be easier to get a job with a CS degree, but plenty of developers can get jobs without it if they are good enough.
Five Key Questions Developers Need to Ask before Troubleshooting
The Lost Art of Hitching
The parent poster has a much better grasp on the big picture than the author of the Salon article.

While he was bashing western banks, he failed to point out that domestic Chinese banks have long been giving out loans to unprofitable companies as a way of creating employment, and that the central government regularly bails them out.

China's economy is a really interesting and complicated subject, especially given the unreliability of local economic data.

But Salon is just giving us useless linkbait by publishing an article with a few cut and pasted quotes and a catchy headline.
The most important thing is getting out and doing things. Start small with 1 or 2 activities a couple of times a week, then as you start meeting people, see what other things they do.

Another tip is to meet your neighbors. As soon as you move in, walk around and knock on a couple of doors. It's always nice to know the people you live near and the best time to meet them is right after you move in.
Debt consolidation and management | Debt management group
IPhone app crash reports now available to developers
How to make a Beach (in o3d)
niche market I guess. I was at I36 the other month (big UK Lan Party) and there was quite a lot of stuff aimed at the girl gamers. A LOT more girls were there from previous years too: so I guess it is a growing market.
I purchased this chair from www.coolchairz.com for only $219.99 w/Free Shipping. Very strong and sturdy chair and I give it about an 8 on the comfort scale

http://www.coolchairz.com/solid-metal-mesh-chair--metallic-t...
Watchmaker from Kazakhstan Invented Islamic Watch
The article does not mention this fact because it's not true: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=nl&v=27. The net migration rate merely stopped growing.
The new release has a camcorder application, which is awesome.
Start with an idea you love and then learn how to write it. Repeat this enough times and you'll either develop a marketable skill (a particular programming language, platform, etc.) or you'll write something that others can use and you'll just have to put a pricetag on it.

Things like iPhone apps, Facebook apps, etc. have made it allot easier, in my opinion, for a developer to bootstrap their own business, but I would focus on writing something you're passionate about because you won't require the financial motivation (which is unpredictable) to keep at it.

If you truly desire the results of your own work, nothing (including any classical definition failure) should be able to stop you from completing it.
I built a college class scheduler app in Rails & Javascript on the side while working at a tech support job. I taught myself everything from sites online. I finally applied for a web developer job and showed my app as my "experience". I got the job and doubled my salary.
Used AppViz to pull reports. Then used the sqlite database from AppViz to write some custom queries. Used that data to fill in a graph in iWorks Pages app. Tweaked the graphs by adding custom shapes to it. All relatively easy in Pages once you understand how it works.

http://pastie.org/469387
http://pastie.org/468282
It's been a trend for a while, it's just once you start noticing it more, it becomes more obvious.
To be honest, I think the story of how I broke out of the "programming industry" is far more interesting. Then, the story of how I broke out of the consulting industry.

How I "broke in": started programming age 9. After university (physics degree), in a dead market (2002), the best option that I found was to start working as a Java programmer for a large consultancy's software engineering arm.

How I broke out of that, into consulting: quickly realised that being just a programmer wasn't enough to satisfy me, so tried to transfer to the consulting arm of that corporation. Was told it was impossible. Did it anyway, through a combination of doing awesome work and convincing the right senior people to be on my side.

How I broke out of consulting: worked my bollocks off to start my first business - 9 months of waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning, working till 7, napping for an hour, then off to work for a long (and challenging) day of consulting work.

What happened next: First business slowly tanked for a number of reasons (main one detailed at http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend...), but I managed to hop onto the second one (http://www.woobius.com), which is going great for the moment.

Don't try to break into the programming industry. You might find it's not so easy to break back out of it...
Using a crowbar, I shattered a window at Redmond, Washington and then threw a pie at Bill Gates's face.
Hah! Will you be at i37? Might drag myself to that or the next one. Haven't been since i26...
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Thanks for the catch. I've corrected it as per below. My source was (my memory of) a statement in a book that I read a while back. From a 2005 article:

http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/local_news/why-are-they-all-...

"In 2004 almost 50,000 people born in the Netherlands decided to leave and live in a foreign country. Since 1954, the number of emigrants has never been so high. The Dutch economy, with the exception of the early 1980s, has never been so poor since 1954.

The Netherlands is undergoing the longest period of stagnation in two generations, according to the latest statistics from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis."
It's nice to see that in this world of open source, patents are getting some attention and IP is still valued.
I think I might be at i38. Off on Holiday the day after i37 so it's pushing it :)
I have always had a thirst for knowledge, especially electronics and computers. I started programming quite young on Atari Basic, got into HTML/Javascript when I was 12 or so, took 2 C++ courses in high school. Graduated but did not go to college.

At 19, I found a posting on a local college bulletin board for a full-time web developer position. The pay was low for a web developer, but good enough for a 19-year old. I have been absorbing knowledge from peers and internet sources ever since. I learned Coldfusion, ASP, SQL, PHP, regular expressions, server administration, AS2, C# .NET and AS3 through the 8 years I've been there. I have since advanced to Senior Web Developer and my salary has too. I am now focused on learning Python/Django and Cocoa/Objective C for iPhone development.

I just skimmed your article and your portfolio. I was, in fact, very much like you. I am not saying you should not go to college, if you have the ability. But college is not necessarily a requirement to get into a programming job. I learned a ton once I was in a professional atmosphere.

Two recommendations, take them or leave them: (I am not a professional resume writer) Remove your age from your portfolio, I think some companies may shy away from hiring someone so young (just from reactions I've gotten when I've told people my age). And remove "one day" in the line about where you want to become a programmer. You want it, right? If your are a senior, you must be graduating within a month or so. Start looking.

Go check your local college's bulletin board (the real one in the commons). You might get the opportunity to get your foot in the door. Never stop learning.
Such sensationalist headlines should not be encouraged on HN.
China has been in mental recession ever since its conception.
Does anyone have a non-scribd link ?
Slightly off-topic, but can "advice" be considered plural?
Dell offers WiMax option
Google Introducing Stand-alone Contact Manager
Chrome already runs on multiple processors and it doesn't lock my system in any way. Mind you I'm the type of user that can have over 20 tabs open at any given moment and sometimes have irefox with multiple tabs, chrome, ie, word and other processes running at the same time on my Athlon X2.

I don't think you need to worry all that much, it seems operating systems (or just cpus) have become better at dealing with responsiveness under pressure since the single core era.

Eitherway you can already run web workers in Firefox so in a way it can already touch several of your cores.
The summary is pretty good, but the actual article is available and isn't much longer: http://www.archaeology.org/0905/etc/insider.html
I thought the idea of the Android phone platform was that it was supposed to be open and hackable?

If you need to root/jailbreak it anyhow, what makes it better than an iPhone?
Even if it was true, would that in the case of NL indicate anything in regards to its taxes-welfare state?

I thought it was a widely held "fact" that the NL is overcrowded and that dutchmen should try to find their lebensraum elsewhere.
This is the sort of thing that people can argue endlessly, and ultimately, unproductively about.
Some of the symbolism is a bit extreme but overall it's a pretty good overview of life in the Netherlands. There is a level of comfort here that I haven't experienced anywhere else however that comfort has both positive and negative consequences. This is the only article I've read that touches on that aspect of life here. And I'm glad he mentioned the lack of anything open 24h a day and rarely past 6 (some grocery stores are open until 10). It's madness!

By the way, if you're interested in the history of the Netherlands, there's a dutch movie coming out later this year about the flood of 1953:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230194/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953
Have used ec2 and s3 for a while now in a production context. While there may be cheaper services out there, we've appreciated the ability to scale up and down rapidly, build test environments, etc. It really depends on where you are at in the cycle of a project. If you are running MySQL, and want high availability, you likely want replication, which means multiple instances no matter what provider you choose. With replication, the fact that your disk is transient isn't as big of a deal. The way I look at AWS is that it nudges you in the right direction as far as building reliable, scalable systems.

As far as EBS, another thing to think about is instance types. Since EBS is essentially network attached storage (I believe), network IO greatly affects performance. Small instances don't have particularly great io. Thus, I prefer to run off the transient disk right now over EBS. If we went to larger instance types, which have better network io, that might swing the pendulum.
I'm wondering how many HN users have phds. Poll time anyone? (or has it already been done).
Stickam’s StreamAPI Makes Doing Video Live Cheap And Easy
MonoDevelop on Mac OSX