skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is extremely accurate based on my 11+ years of experience in the industry (across two studios). After some large AAA projects threatened people's relationships and overall happiness, many steps were taken to improve things, such as near-elimination of crunch and a high overall amount of respect for people's personal lives.

Note that I actually fit into the article's title as a 35 year old guy who doesn't plan on having kids. I will often spend a few extra hours polishing something up because I relish the end result and because it energizes me to come in to work every day. Sure, I could make "double the money for half the work" in some other industry, but I love making games and can't imagine sacrificing my passion to make some equation look better on paper. But I never pressure others to stay late, and from what I'm seeing these days, more and more studios are converting to a reasonable outlook on developer productivity and happiness.
I guess this is why they wanted everyone to reset their password 2 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915
Trust sparsity ("bozo bit") is an irrational behavior that doesn't make anyone rich. In general, it makes everyone poor.
Dear capitalist America,

Even the notion of hardware that is disposable is appalling and out of tune in the state of the world today. Please, don't focus on cheap production of items that are intended to have a short lifespan.

We need modular hardware. New camera came out and you really want a new camera? Sure, go ahead, upgrade the one you have on your iModularPhone.

Need crash-proof stuff? Sure, here is some of our flexible screen phones.

You see, durability, for the end user, could as well mean cheapness. Upgradeability, for the end user, could as well mean cheapness.

So, instead of dreaming the perfect product, or as a hacker have the need to improve and upgrade, please don't even for one second accept cheap, fragile items.

Limited features is ok (but possibility to upgrade is non-optional). Limited lifespan is never ok.
This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof.

Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who have a Harvard degree have a much easier time than those that don't.

How long you've been out of work is more social proof. Were I in this situation I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious employment and get a friend to back up any reference check and I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. I know employers are filtering on superficial things and those that have had difficulty finding work is a pretty quick and easy filter.

There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership.

10+ years ago I remember reading a study in Europe that showed the rate of unemployment was directly proportional to the rate of home ownership across the entire EU with a very high correlation. Spain had the highest rate of home ownership and unemployment. Britain (then) had the lowest for both.

We push home ownership as a political agenda. While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are.
Definitely agree on the "do something in the gap" aspect. In a lot of technical fields, 6 non-practicing months can be very close to "no experience".

My job responsibilities tend to come in waves of 3 different functions, where I'll focus almost exclusively on one aspect for 4 months, then move to another for 8 months, then hop again. Each time I switch it can take a lot of time to "shake off the cobwebs" - either the software changes, there is new functionality, or just rediscovering some best practices.

I can completely understand reluctance to hire someone in that situation.
You're right, I don't think citizenship is a requirement. I guess this was my vague way of saying that these prisoners are in a legal gray area as to what court they would be tried in, what their legal rights are, and what would constitute a 'fair trial'.

This seems to be actively debated in the upper echelons of US law and politics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#L...
That tweet would suggest to me that someone's credit card was stolen via another method and used to purchase Linode services, rather than the other way around. Ie, I don't think that was related to Linode breach.
From a purported abridged chatlog with the alleged hacker:

> 05:42 < ryan||> credit cards were encrypted, sadly both the private and public keys were stored on the webserver so that provides 0 additional security

> 06:00 < ryann> They did try to encrypt them, but using public key encryption doesn't work if you have the public and private key in the same directory

http://turtle.dereferenced.org/~nenolod/linode/linode-abridg...
Thanks.

I didn't realize there were more pages. I just thought it was a very short and fluffy article.
Publishers see devs as "replaceable meat puppets"
This isn't a trend because it's not sustainable. The only reason these are cheap is because China artificially lowers their currency related to dollar, but with increasing pollution and social pressure, it's clear this can't go on forever.
What are the main challenges that explain why it hasn't been completed yet? Seems like a clear win over centralization, kind of like git/mercurial vs svn.
I think the problem here is that we don't have the original prokaryote genome. Today's prokaryotes have gone through billions of years of evolution and might well have longer genomes than their distant ancestors. So the leftmost points on the graph might have shifted up over time (albeit more slowly than the rightmost).
Nice, never heard of otool or vmmap. I'll definitely try 'em out. thanks.
>I don't see Python as being cleaner than CoffeeScript. CS is very similar but with less punctuation. How do you figure that one?

Python's syntax is less confusing and less likely to introduce subtle bugs. I've been hurt enough times by CoffeeScript's ambiguous syntax.

>You don't always have to do continuation passing, and I feel like Node.js's way is a lot more straightforward than anything like Twisted.

I like Twisted's way because it is object-oriented and well-structured. It doesn't lend itself to spaghetti code, unlike node.js.
I'd be interested to see the results of this study if the participants were exposed to ambient drone music, such as sounds of a didgeridoo or a Steve Roach piece, that music often consists of long drawn out tones that don't fluctuate frequently and often lack a "melody". For me, it puts me a deep trance like state of mind that is very calm and peaceful. Humming along to the long tones also feels good, it's like your body resonates with the music.
I get super frustrated by infinite scrolling when the site designer adds to the footer of the site menu options that aren't in the header menu. So you can NEVER click on the footer links that you so desperately need. Also wish you could kill infinite scroll w/a click or keyboard command.
Correct. So far as I know, the way jQuery detach works is to remove it from the DOM and then return the individual element. The element could act as a fragment, because it can contain children, and then be reappended to the DOM.
I set comment threads to close on my blog because after maybe a week the only submissions I get are attempts at spam.
From my talks with Carter previously he's working on a haskell based platform for analytic tooling in Haskell.
Basically the core primitives for making large scale data analysis apps in Haskell.

Or that's what he was up to in august. Hopefully he can chime in here and update everyone on his progress. I honestly hope he succeeds in his plans.
These guys are Airbnb-like in another way too: as with Airbnb, I initially thought this was a bad idea. What changed my mind was when I emailed all the YC alumni to recruit users for the closed beta, and large numbers of them immediately and enthusiastically signed up.

There is clearly something to the "sharing economy" that everyone is talking about. There will be glitches along the way, but I'm pretty sure this idea is here to stay. Considering the value of the assets involved, it could be the big economic story of this decade.
I have a few things I do to stay focused, some you can control and some you can't:

1. Eat well, sleep well, work out and relax\mediate\etc. <-- this is really important for me

2. Keep simple, simple lists. (Someone on HN actually made one of my favorites recently: http://1-3-5.com/)

3. Make sure your list is kept simple. Remove things from it, do not add to it without removing from it.

4. Work on things that inspire you. Rethink what you're working on if you're not inspired by it. ( This is sometimes out of your control )

5. Wear headphones and do not listen to lyrics. Classical is actually my favorite for getting stuff done.

6. Use a white board to keep track of your ideas and thought process. Notebooks can work, too.
Found it interesting that Linode uses Coldfusion. Wonder if Adobe has anything to say about the apparent 0-day.

If the hacker's claims are true (Would appear so, the directory listing checks out) then Linode really need to address this ASAP. Passwords are one thing but to have CC details leaked is even worse. I'm not familiar with CC processing but it seems like bad practice to store the encryption keys on the web server.
This seems unreasonable to me. I think we can safely hold people responsible for reading to the end of a seven-word sentence.
FWIW, I'm seeing next page fine in Firefox.
That's certainly true, it took my mother ~5 years to get back into her industry after having kids and even then it was lower in the org chart than she left at.

I would still posit that reasonable people would be more sympathetic to a mother spending 2 years looking after children than a single guy playing a 2 year xbox marathon though.
To celebrate http://jsfiddle.net/q3RbH/show/
My Visa card that I used with Linode was stolen and used on an Amazon order I didn't authorise last week, my bank successfully blocked the charge. Someone else reported their Visa had also been compromised in the thread 2 days ago, looks like that confirms the suspicions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542015

Poor show Linode. (edit: worth noting I use the card with other things too, I have no confirmation it was leaked through Linode other than the compromise happening at the same time these supposed leaks happened).
Gold on Track for Biggest One-Day Fall Since 1983
It wouldn't take a zero-day flaw in the Coldfusion stack for a CF application to have an undocumented vulnerability; in fact, it's much more likely that the vulnerability is in the application code than in the stack itself.
90% of pirated games are infected with Malware - Hacking News
You mean open and standardized system that is serviceable and mainable ... like PC? Sadly only the end users and developers benefit from the unwalled gardens.
Fantasy strategy game + fantasy football = Iron Rivals
Personally I would much rather have 1 person that I have fostered a very strong relationship then 10 people who I have weak connections with. I think that quality out beats quantity just about every time.

Possibly, but maybe not...

http://acawiki.org/The_strength_of_weak_ties

http://sociology.stanford.edu/people/mgranovetter/documents/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties#Weak_tie_hyp...
"While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are."

Over the last few years it's more like they can't move to where the jobs are, at least not without taking a huge loss on a house or declaring bankruptcy.

But yeah, you're right - we've got a rather immobile labor market, for a variety of reasons, and there don't seem to be any quick fixes. telecommuting you'd think would help, but it's not applicable to every single job, and even places that do allow for it don't necessarily orient their culture to take full advantage of it.
OK, how do you build a decentralized currency exchange? No one knows.
This reminds me very much of the TCP Evil Bit [1]. That is, it seems like the issue of whether anybody would actually set this is essential to the question of whether or not it would work.

One could even imagine that governments would want people to live in ignorance of the existence of restrictions. It's 100% the Ethan Zuckerman Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship [2]. The government would rather that you have all of YouTube except the subversive content, because then you might not notice the restriction and so will learn not to care.

Indeed, from the document:

"The use of the 451 status code implies neither the
existence nor non-existence of the resource named in the
request. That is to say, it is possible that if the legal
demands were removed, a request for the resource still
might not succeed."

That suggests to me that the author is also aware of this problem.

It should be noted that Google has done an amazing job in trying to fix this problem by trying to force whole services to be blocked when that's feasible and by transparently explaining (in the UI itself!) when content is unavailable for legal reasons. Kudos to them.

For that reason, I would say such an effort is worthwhile even if it won't have much impact: it's quite likely that it will help further the norm that when censorship exists it should exist transparently. That's a cause worth fighting for, even if every step is going to be a huge challenge.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

[2] http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-t...
Yes, it is industry-specific. Not only do software engineers have the necessary skills to do contract programming or start something up by default, they also make enough money such that building up a nice amount of savings is a trivial issue.

Outside software however, things are quite bleak. Many people are stuck in that awful income range where they make too much to qualify for government aid, but too little actually save any meaningful amount of money[1]. And, unlike with a lot of software companies, their jobs don't really allow them to work remotely. So when they become long-term unemployed, they get hit hard.

[1]You know, software is kind of a unique field, in the sense that you have both ends of the income spectrum. On the one hand, you have homeless wanna-be founders who eat nothing but ramen all day. On the other hand, you have people who get paid six figure salaries in comfortable office environments. What you don't have however is people who are in the 20k-40k range. As a result, most software engineers cannot sympathize with those people.
Classical landing page had me hooked anyways :-)
Sounds like there is a market opportunity for job coaches. Reasonable-reason-for-extended-absence-from-the-job-market as a service, anyone?
Ah yes, and here we have the "tptacek shitting on a comment using big words and smart-sounding phrases" comment. ;)
Yes, re-read my original comment: do you really think I am drawing a conclusion about an entire field from three anecdotes on HN, or that maybe the "dangerous" comment was me being light hearted? I just thought it was odd that in such a short space the same thing was cited multiple times, nothing more.
I'm a big fan of Zipcar, but getting to/from the airport from/to your Zipcar has always been a big frustration. I've tried FlightCar and have been surprised how easy and seamless the experience is, given how young the company is. I hope they expand quickly.
Why we hate the sound of our own voice
Where on the resume would you recommend putting that information?
Do you have a blog or link to your work? I'd be very interested in reading about the experiences of someone who has a successful "career" making games while providing for a family.
Critic Accuses HBS of Teaching A "Fisher-Price Version of Entrepreneurship"
The idea is great, I'm sure the'll get the pricing sorted out after the launch. From my point of view $10/Day + free parking ($18) seems low. Maybe if you're leaving a smart car or something, but what if you have a nicer car like a Lexus or Mercedes?
Show HN: Automatically add "Follow discussion on HN" links
You don't really want to get into the alternatives. It's pretty common to shard everything but the core user data (email, PBKDF2, username) and scale that with slaves and vertical upgrades. SSDs can take you a long way if you're fastidious about offloading everything else off the machine responsible for keeping user accounts consistent.

The alternatives aren't nice.
Here's a solution that doesn't require the government to hire long-term unemployed: lying on a resume or in an interview to conceal unemployment is now legal. (Well, technically, it was never illegal; just considered unethical.) You may:

* Expand dates of any job by up to two months or 10% on each side, whichever is larger.

* Bump an educational degree forward by up to 5 years if under 40, and 10 years if older.

* Move any employment engagement translationally by up to three years.

* Inflate title as long as it does not involve falsification of a professional credential (e.g. "Senior VP" is OK, "Physician" for a non-doctor is not).

Anyone who is fired for such now-legal falsification must be given six months' severance or there is a wrongful termination claim.

How does that sound to you?

(I don't think it's a good idea, but it is an improvement over the system that exists now.)
I came a bit later than this guy, in the mid-80s (I'm 40 this year) and heavily support the idea of teaching at least basic level programming to just about everyone.

I never had a particularly good role-model in school or at home for this, my programming came out of some innate curiosity about computers and robots originally sparked by my love of Sci-Fi.

When I was about 10 I was lucky enough to get my hands on a C64 which was a very big purchase for my single-mom (of 3) to make.

My progression was roughly:

C64: MS BASIC 2.0, 6510 assembly, mostly to implement my own games

Amiga 500: 68k, AREXX, AMOS Basic, C/C++ (pirated copy of SAS/C at first -- sorry, SAS, my allowance wasn't nearly large enough, followed later by Matt Dillon's DICE)

Was an avid BBSer (starting on a 300 baud modem) on the C64 and around the time I got the Amiga I started spending more time on packet-switched networks, some random X.25s and the pre-commercial Internet. Made myself an account on some of the ai.mit.edu machines controlled by gnu (they had open guest accounts and intentionally lax security, rms had a setuid root shell in his home dir, IIRC). From there various UNIX systems (Solaris/BSD/HPUX/NeXT/AIX), more C, C++, emacs lisp, various shell scripting dialects, Perl.

We did have a Pascal course in high school but by then I was pretty far beyond the teacher (who wasn't particularly hacker-ish) on the programming scale.

Later moved to x86 PCs dual booting Windows and Linux which is pretty much still my preferred setup, though now the Linux installs are a multitude of VMs instead of dual-boot partitions. Spent quite a few years doing Win32 application programming in C/C++, lots of backend web development in many different languages and then ARM-based linux embedded devices (@chumby industries). Day job now is Java programming for Android devices, at night I prefer to code in Go (my current primary side-project which is almost all Go [since I'm the only developer and can unilaterally make such decisions] is volunteer work at a Nano Engineering Lab at UCSD writing controller code and scientist-friendly GUIs for TI DMDs, NI motion control devices, Lumenera cameras, various UV lamps and such).

For me the important spark was that my mother was forward-thinking enough to see the C64 as a useful educational purchase for a son with an innate desire to learn about computers. These days it seems like the vast majority of US families have access to computers which is awesome, but there is a tendency (across the entire socio-economic spread) to view them primarily as facebook/twitter-consumption devices, which is pretty sad (no offense to Facebook or Twitter, but early-me had visions of easy access to computers being a bit more meaningful).

I'd love to see more focus on using computers as tools as opposed to consumption devices in both elementary and high school levels.
"why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off"

That's just bizarre. I've been around a couple decades and I've always taken a personal or vacation day for interviews. I guess there are people who call in sick although thats not my style. I've never even heard of an employer so controlling that they get to decide if my day off activities are "worthy enough". Salaried jobs I just took off for an odd lunch hour.
Well, the little black 'phone' in the article is actually a spy device. If you put a SIM in it to give it a number, you can then call it at any point, and it will silently answer and you can listen in to what's happening.
>They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants him, why should I?"

Having been in charge of hiring, this is way, way more true than it is false. It is not irrational at all.
Long term unemployment is intrinsically destructive, both to the individuals losing careers and money and to the economy as a whole. While understanding why it's happening is important, it's also important to compensate for it, for the good of society (and the economy) as a whole. Government is one of the few agencies that at least theoretically has the care of society as one of its goals; private corporations aren't going to give a sh*t, they're not going to "take one for the team" and hire less experienced people, even if the long term effect is increased consumer spending.

It is after all why things like welfare exist. So peoples' lives aren't ruined, and the secondary effects of that happening on a wide scale.
Joel Spolsky said it best here:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html

To quote:

"When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions. "

The article's author is assuming that the people in the under 6 months and over 6 months are identical candidates just based on resumes. They are ignoring all of the "soft skills" that can get picked up in actual interviews.
Also - it depends on what you define life as, which as far as I know is an ongoing argument. What about RNA+protein life before DNA?
An argument could be made that Obama was young, inexperienced and naive when he made those promises. But that's leaps and bounds different than accusing him of making promises and then breaking them. Because that implies malice. It implies that he lied. And I don't think we have any proof of that. Personally, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He's not a perfect president, but he's not awful either (like the parent implies).
It's not a decentralized exchange. It's an open sourced exchange. It will be up to entrepreneurs to take the buttercoin code and set it up as the engine for their exchanges. The majority of the work will not be in the systems, but in setting up the exchange as a proper legal entity. There is significant cost in operating in the US, because you have to register as an MSB at the fed level, plus once with each state. Fees run in the thousands per state, per year.

So I think the OP's question was why there aren't decentralized exchanges. I took that to mean why there aren't P2P style exchanges. I'm not sure what the answer is. I think people have been tossing that idea around for a while but I'm not sure if they have started code for it. There are many exchanges now, but for some reason people choose to use MtGox, which is AWFUL.