skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the complaint may be more about the location than the campus itself. Redmond, WA, is for all intents and purposes a Company Town.

It's pretty remote, and the entirety of the city revolves around a single employer. Everyone who works there either works directly for Microsoft or is closely affiliated with Microsoft business. Ditto everyone who lives there.

It's far from the nearest major city (Seattle), and to make matters a bit worse, there is a large natural barrier between the Company Town and the city (a huge lake in the way, with highly congestion-prone bridge crossings).

The negative side effects of this are too many to fully enumerate. Beyond the general boredom of living in a place where everyone works for the same company, there's also the issue of not having ready access to cultural events (which tend to be urban), the lack of proximity to competitors or indeed actual users of your products, etc.

Being outside of a major urban area is also limiting for employees in that there is substantially less choice in where you can live. Companies based in Seattle offer employees the full gamut of commuting options and accomodate both urban and suburban lifestyles thanks to the hub and spoke model of transportation. Being outside of a hub reduces the number of places that are within reasonable commuting distance.
App Store Market Size, Top100 download numbers
Show HN: BakManager.io, keep an eye on your backups
That's a good point, though protocol buffers aren't used for everything. There's more tightly-bound systems stuff going on, plus libraries and so forth. Which is to say, I have no idea.
I bought 3 of these [0] for £10 each from phones4u the other day, they are a whole lot more functional than the phone in the video at the bottom.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-E2121B-Black-unlocked-mobile...
When these people want to work on games, they want to work on games, not "at a programming job." You see phrases like "childhood dream" going around, and to people who spent their childhoods playing games, making games is much cooler than making any other kind of software.
I know bashing Microsoft is oh-so-tempting, but can you at least try discussing the actual article here?
Direct link to the Android app in the Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sendhub
made it very clear that work-life balance is important to them, and that normal workweeks and generous vacation time was to be expected

What they tell you in the interview is very rarely what happens in real life. Every company says they have a dynamic environment where you work on interesting problems for 40 hours a week at above-market salary. The reality is often different.
Joining Rackspace
Given that they paid the printing costs, I guess it's up to them if they want to control it like that.

Students paid the printing costs (or, on students' behalf: their parents, taxpayers, or private donors).
Here you go:
http://gbk.eads.usaidallnet.gov/data/fast-facts.html

"The United States remained the world's largest bilateral donor, obligating approximately $49.6 billion—$31.7 billion in economic assistance and $17.9 billion in military assistance. By comparison, the United States obligated $37.4 billion and $14.5 billion, respectively, in FY2010."
Why do games require so many developers to work 20 hour days? Aren't most of games built on commercial engines that do most of the heavy lifting?

I've been following the Doublefine guys and a lot of their development was put into making developer tools. I suppose I understand that, but when I hear of these 400 person teams building a game that takes 4 years to make, I'm honestly a little bewildered.
Thanks Kasey,

I'm probably thinking of algos more generally and generically. For example, whatever the class of trades, I think that what you are doing is making a stochastic forecast of future price movements. So maybe there's a good separation possible between your algorithms that create a distribution and algos that determine how to trade once you have that distribution. But saying this probably reveals a bias I have to think statistically.
And I totally agree the majority of the system build thats important is the boring stuff. An algorithm should be able to tell if the market feed has died or the market shuts down unexpectedly, right? And know what to do next.
And good to hear that someone thinks the costs are much less than popular opinion suggests.
You don't hear a difference when listening to music that is produced and edited with an assumption of crappy audio equipment. Many people have entire playlists of songs that they'll stream at 96kbps over shitty free headphones. 96kbps over 600$ of equipment wont change much.
This is true as far as it goes, but what do you propose to replace the acrimonious and partisan rhetoric? We really haven't reached agreement on how to proceed (there's even still some argument about whether we should, though that is mostly in the background nowadays). Without agreement, we've no choice but to talk, and that brings us back to where we are now.
Another good development path is to write Wikipedia articles. You get to see someone "kill your darlings" and perhaps learn from it. Plenty of readers too. But there is no opportunity for blog-like self promotion. You only get better writing and analyzing skills.
Editing popular articles vs. starting a new one are completely different experiences.
I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months.

If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you can take advantage of. But it gives you something you can put in that hole on your resume, and hopefully gives you relevant skills.

The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it.

The question is whether or not you should put your "forced sabbatical" projects on your resume or not. They'll plug the hole, but I imagine that it will also cause you to be filtered out by HR departments in big corporations if the work isn't "relevant".
The industry is doing the vast majority of its HFT development in C++ or Java. Data analysis is mostly done using Python although I still see a lot of R.

If you are doing this to break into the industry, I suspect the languages you used should have been the above. Also the above languages would probably have been better to attract open source developers who are also hoping to use their code and experience from this project to break into the industry.
Two tangential points I want to hit quickly.

First, most software developers are taught "computer science" (or an imitation of it) in their formal education, not engineering.

Second, software is mostly not engineering. Engineering is very measurable. But software includes a lot of design and craftsmanship. If software dev. were restricted only to the portion that could reasonably be called pure engineering it would be a very, very small subset of mostly systems code. Indeed, a good hunk of software dev. could properly be called merely arts and crafts, under such a strict interpretation.

I think this explains some of the religious wars, because the debates are more aesthetic such as "do you prefer charcoal or pencil" than engineering "which is better steel or aluminum", because purely engineering questions tend to have very much more straightforward answers.
Nayefc, thanks. Your comment was enlightening and makes total sense. Will fix.
JetBrains Earth Day Sale
High German Romanticism or not, your classmates may be proven right in the long run.
I missed the latter part of the title. Can we have NSFW stuff labeled at the beginning of the title since they're so uncommon and unexpected?
Wow, "next page" is broken/nonexistent in firefox. I could only read the first page with it... Had to switch to Chrome to get past the first page.
Hopefully they will be easy to re purpose.
This of course means that they will have to general enough to support more than one use case and also unlocked in such a way that reflashing the firmware is trivial.

Maybe like some service you link devices to and it gives you a list of all the various gadgets that it can turn a piece of hardware into.
I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen.

Nor mine, not in the short term.

Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight.

Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed.

The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe.

Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many).

Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades.

In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint.

So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.
Lots of gamers custom-build their own PCs, so as long as people keep playing games on Windows and demand ever faster graphics cards and CPUs etc. the desktop PC should be fairly safe.
First of all, the US is not the entire world. Especially not when it comes to video game production. From my experiences, game development studios in Canada, the US, and Japan have all had employees with ethnic backgrounds that seem roughly similar to the overall ethnic backgrounds of their region. The US is ~70% white, the fact that game studios in the US are ~70% white should not be used as evidence of a problem.
Demystifying Harvard's Tenure System
Which is how I did it back in 74 though we had to learn a assembly language CECIL which we wrote out on coding sheets and sent off to a batch system to be processed.

And this was the CSE stream class for those of us not considered good enough for O levels - ironically as I was in the CSE class I wasn't allowed to take the Computing A level in the 6th form.
Here is a nice 1986 MIT lecture on Lisp given by... Harrison Ford? :) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY
I worked in game development for 5 years and left when I was about 28 years old. This article is pretty much spot on.

I like to work a lot. I like to work 60 to 80 hours a week. The things is that reward has to be somewhat commensurate with effort. And as a developer you are expected to take a discount compared to adjacent markets. That just doesn't make sense when you have a car, a mortgage, and like to take two vacations a year.
Doesn't work for me. Just "NOW LOADING CROWD-SOURCED MUSIC VIDEO".

EDIT: Chromium 25, Ubuntu.
Whats happening then?
But some people can't even read the "actual article" because the navigation is so broken.
MRI's Method Caches
Safari already does this in desktop and mobile browsers - what's the big deal?
A scripting language is a language to extend applications. These applications tend to be written in languages like C, Pascal (think Delphi), C++, and others. Like a CAD system is written C or C++ with an extension language added on top. The interpretation is only an implementation detail. For example PTC's modeller is written in C++ with several million lines of Common Lisp on top.

Lisp compilers exist from day 2 in its history. The first self compiling Lisp compiler was written in 1962, IIRC. Maclisp was mostly compiled, Lisp Machine Lisp was compiled, Common Lisp was designed for compilation from day one.
Red Hat emulates Fedora Linux project with RDO OpenStack community
"is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches"

Along the same lines I had an office a few years ago in an office park about 1 mile from a Walmart.

In all the years I was there nobody ever knocked on our door looking for work or dropping off a resume. At the Walmart though I'm almost certain that they had a steady stream of job seekers showing up and filling out employment forms.

I've helped two doctors get better jobs just with the simple suggestion that they proactively contact all the relevant departments within a radius of where they could work and not wait until called by a recruiter or by responding to an ad. They got multiple offers and essentially had no competition (jobs hadn't been posted yet).

One time I got a job that I was unqualified for by simply flying out to a tradeshow after doing some research and cold calling various sales managers in person (had setup some interviews in advance as well). Got hired two times (short 3 year period when I didn't work at my own thing). Worked great. No doubt in my mind that if I had responded to an ad with a resume, that since I wasn't really qualified, I wouldn't have been picked or even come close to getting an interview.
What's amazing to me is that a bicycle is considered an asset. I can't imagine being so poor as to not be able to own a bicycle... not owning a radio is almost worse, but at least a bicycle doesn't require electricity.... and I don't know how predominant radio is in India, but I would guess bicycle travel is pretty damn common.
Our skill is intense concentration. Imagine a soloist violinist mentally rehearsing his performance for later that evening. On the outside he looks sullen, near sleep. Inside, however, there's a 120 piece orchestra with the crazy Russian conductor, and the German harpist is plucking strings, and the soloist is counting in his head, watching the conductor, trying to perfectly time the moment when he begins moving the bow's horse hairs across the fourth string, vibrating his wrist, ring finger on the high e, indicating the moment of the hero's death and ascension to heaven, in the emotional denouement of the 45 minute piece.

Just as there are many people who neither appreciate classical music nor the skill, talent, and concentration required to play it well, so there are many people who neither appreciate computer programming nor the skill, talent, and concentration required to do it well.

As an aside, if you want to hear some fantastically good classical music, head over to youtube and search for the Vienna Philharmonic's rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Salsburg Festival in 2005.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristie-arslan/five-big-myths-...

"large businesses only employ about 38 percent of the private sector workforce while small businesses employ 53 percent of the workforce. In fact, over 99 percent of employing organizations are small businesses and more than 95 percent of these businesses have fewer than 10 employees"

Affordable health care is pretty much the last major benefit that puts a large corporate employer at an advantage to a small business or self-employed status. With health exchanges and affordable (?) health care kicking in next year the parent assertion might be correct.
The Corporate System is actually collapsing.

No, corporations are actually getting more powerful.

they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work.

They're as efficient as they've ever been.

The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do)

No, we don't have human-level AI yet.

Convexity will end the Corporate System for good.

There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.
Does anyone have any advice on Django development with PyCharms vs SublimeText? (Previously I've just used Emacs, but I"m looking for a change)
> I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.

I assume you are looking to ask the 50% of the population with lower unemployment, shorter median unemployment duration, and lower % long-term unemployed: http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/femalelaborforce/
I recently read a piece that I feel explains the phenomenon quite well [1]. In short: we evolved rhythmic music as a defense mechanism, to unify the tribe into acting a large meta-organism for the purpose of aggression displays against predators and other tribes. As with a lot of other social behavior, it feels good to be part of something larger than yourself, and music connects us emotionally, physically and rhythmically to one another.

This may not tell the whole story, but I believe it's a strong component, particularly given the historical relationship between religion and music.

[1]: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
Yes wasting resources is an incredibly sound idea. Lets just increase taxes to 95% and spend it all digging ditches!
They're really good for delivering pizza in an urban area.
What is the rhetoric achieving? We're hackers, we know how to get things done: figure out what you want to change, measure it as well as you can, then iterate. I find it hard to imagine a measure articles like this would score well on.
I don't understand either of your points. Care to spell them out?
It's a terrible trend and its absolutely true.

With the unemployment rate so high, employers are now getting absolutely flooded with resumes for every and any job posting. There is a high volume of completely unqualified people applying to positions they have no relevant experience for. There is also a much higher volume of qualified people, and HR departments need some way of prioritizing these applicants. Fair or not, filtering out people by whether or not they have been recently employed is a relatively effective way to find the most promising candidates.

If you are out of work and looking for a job, your best chance is to try to bypass HR altogether by either reaching out to hiring managers directly or by networking your way in. Most jobs are filled long before they are ever even posted online. It's never too soon to reach out to companies you want to work for - they may not be hiring immediately, but you want to be top of mind when a new position does open up.
“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

Edit: I don't mean this to be rude. I am just trying to point out that discussion of news items usually IME is nothing more than idle gossip. While possibly beneficial in social bonding, it can also have potential negative effects on the mind.
Me too, but in the later 80s. Basic on C64 -> Amiga. Then a few years without much programming until late 90s. Then I discovered Perl. Sweetness.
I think the point is that all spending is good spending. Imagine if we spent all of our resources building defenses against aliens. Wed all starve
It may not be new, but it clearly still needs to be said. The way to move forward is exactly as the article says: just stop discriminating. Don't treat female programmers as female programmers and male programmers as male programmers. Treat all of them as programmers. So many well meaning people try to be "inclusive" by singling out women and making a big stink about what they think women want/need/desire/dislike/etc, and then women become the target of people's unhappiness with bad polices that were put in to "help" them, which they never wanted or asked for.
> you can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen studies that have proven this decade after decade

Please, throw that rock. We had this discussion[1] and the conclusion was that there is no (known to the participants) solid study relevant at least to "knowledge" work, if not for software development directly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4623289
I can't access the website (WP DB error), but reading some of these comments seems to give the gist that he's complaining about being a prior-review publication that the school administration decided was a PR vehicle of the school.

It was the same thing for me as a student, I was pursuing a journalism degree at my school, and gave 5 years of blood, sweat and tears to my paper as Photo Editor, News Editor, and Editor in Chief. We had a very high degree of oversight where we could not do stories that could reflect poorly on the school in any possible way.

Legally this is actually questionable as the money we received from the school was actually from student funds, similar to our ASB, so we technically worked for the students, not the school. Further, being a prior-review and PR paper, means the school approves of everything we write, which opens them up to libel issues if anything slips through.

This made it very, very hard for me to get a decent journalism education. A lot of journalism is about the (attempted) presentation of two sides--often in college it's students vs administration, city vs school. And when they decide we're not covering an issue because it's too hot, or we only present a rewritten PR release, I'm only learning how to write content-farm content. And don't even think about starting an underground paper, you'd get thrown out of school. My school really handicapt my possible journalism career which I really learned out on my internship. Luckily I built my own tech career and fell back on that and now run tech for a news company.
Lisp is too powerful only for unexperienced developers because the way of programming in Lisp is totally different from all other languages.

Actually many modern languages (Python, Ruby, Java, even C++11) copy more and more features from Lisp since the language designers suddenly realized how useful these features are.

Lisp was never "too powerful" but simply far ahead.
People have different interests. I know someone who spends thousands of dollars on coffee and coffee equipment. I think that's ridiculous. I think it's a cool hobby though.

It sucks that your friends make you feel bad for things you enjoy!

The new Apple Earpods are acceptable though (compared to the Sennheiser 429 I own which are too big to wear in public).
How to Work with Software Engineers