skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not surprising at all.

Same thing happens with real estate (well known) as only one example or even dating as another. (Price with real estate and market conditions are also a factor but a house on the market to long gets stale).

Generally the fact that others have passed on something is taken as a marker to less attractiveness all else held equal.

The question could be raised "if this person or house is so good why hasn't someone else taken advantage of it to date?" With respect to both employment or dating the reasonableness of the person in question could also be a factor.

Lastly, there is the theory of getting a "find" before someone else has discovered something that works in favor of less time on the market.
Well, as long as it's all in good fun :-)
EDN is natively extensible to more types, for example, the dozens of types postgres supports[1] which actually makes EDN significantly more suitable for this use case. JSON can't encode the difference between a string, a date, a timestamp, and a uuid -- they're all encoded as strings and consuming code needs to go out of band to understand the type.

the stuff about EDN being natively supported by clojure is a red herring and irrelevant.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/datatype.html
FWIW my friends who have worked in the games industry worked with a lot of chinese and indian co-workers.
This is how nearly all of Microsoft's products are, at least they are consistent in their user experience.
Log Into Your Computer Using Correct Sequence of Dance Moves? Ice Ice Baby.
SendHub (YC W12) launches Android app, reaches 100k users
Great question.

Those tools evidence your code duplication (saying the lines and code regions).
We, however, show you when those code regions were changed inconsistently.

We basically want to show you the effects of code duplication by introducing time whereas those tools don't have the concept of time.

If you ran those tools every single time you commit to see if you forgot to change a code region, you don't need us.
If you're interested in having that ran for you, that's where we come in.

Thank you for your question. I hope to have answer it?
... replacing one big troll on the bridge that used to extract more than the million tiny ones' total...
This article is true to a T.

An avid gamer all my life, I joined a game company to work on a gamer centric non-gaming project. Without saying much about my time there, it culminated upon completion with the entire team being laid off, with only the lowest paid hardest working "white childless males" being kept on because they fit the founder's expectations of ideal workers.
Great read Joe! I still can't wrap my head around $11 cell phones, but you are right hardware is getting cheaper.
Javascript was the only cross-browser scripting language, that's what made it a success. It took almost a decade before Crockford turned up to say 'here's how you write javascript so it's not a complete pita'. Would javasript shrivel and die if all the browsers released Python support tomorrow? Probably not any more, but 6 years ago, most definitely.

Same thing with Ruby, without Rails would it be anywhere now?

So half your examples actually show there's something very different going on when trying to explain why languages become popular.

What languages have truly emerged without a leg up? Python? PHP as the server-side language? C# emerging ahead of VB.Net? Scheme?
> Is it ever acceptable to have feelings of anger and hatred? Yes, surely. There are situations in life that demand that response. Are whites the only acceptable target? Surely not.

Not to accuse you of any impropriety, but that was the most artful dodge I've ever seen outside of a presidential debate.

Please answer the question as asked. As far as I'm concerned, anger and hatred on a racial basis is rarely, if ever justified.
Reid Hoffman: Shape Your Identity or It Will Shape You
The navigation was so poorly executed that I didn't even realize there was more than one page! I admire people experimenting, but this feels like taking the idea 80% of the way there, and just kind of leaving things unrefined/unusable.
Why not? Just curious
This is what happens when the maintenance crew finds the keys to R&D.
If I were you, I'd get a piece of paper and a pen and write a pro/con columned list. It will help you get your thoughts together. I think the basis of a decision for freelancing vs. the job offer should be about your happiness and which one you prefer overall (all factors: salary + work environment etc...).

Good luck with your decision.
Agreed. As you can see from the image at the top, the "city" they built is a sprawling mess of buildings quite far from the city (Seattle, in the background). Depending on your team, you may need to frequently take Shuttle Connect to get to meetings, or walk a mile or more. If you live within walking distance from campus, you'll be dependent on a car for everything else. There's just endless cookie cutter suburbia around there.
Shameless self-promotion https://github.com/redacted/XKCD-password-generator
Exciting times ahead for lovers of e-waste.
Your finger is fat and imprecise. Also, ever heard of gorilla arm?
Do you understand what 'selection bias' means?
The reason other engineering cultures don't have religious wars is because they have been around for longer than computer and software engineering have. As a result, they are dominated by old, experienced industry veterans who have learned long ago the value of using the right tool for the job.

In contrast, software especially has a lot of new, young blood (average age in software is significantly lower), and one thing young people love doing is claiming superiority over each other. And the best way of doing this is via religious wars about operating systems, programming languages, etc.

Whenever I hear someone claim "such and such programming language is the best!!!" they are either 25, or they are older but they hang out with 25 year olds and their maturity has regressed to that level.
> The Corporate System is actually collapsing.

[Citation needed]

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.

Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed.

Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
Stop Building Things Your Customers Don’t Really Want or Need
They said they were fine last week, and I'm not sure it gets much more volatile than that: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ccbet/ama_request_...
So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?
playing to, and trying to please your audience is the kiss of death, if you write for yourself and forget how you might be seen by those reading you, your writing will improve.
Somewhat tangential, somewhat related: people listen to music a lot, and yet the great majority of people do so with their stock iPod earbuds - or cheap alternatives.

I don't like to consider myself an Audiophile (and I really don't think I would classify as one anyways) but I don't understand why people are okay with paying hundreds of dollars (sometimes over $1,000) on HD TVs and yet stick with free headphones or cheap speakers. I personally think I listen to music more than I watch TV shows or movies - and I reckon this is true for many others as well. Why don't other people spend money on good sound equipment to have a better listening experience?

For example, I have a pair of Sennheiser HD600s which MSRP at about $400 I think. My friends find this ridiculous. I also have a $100 amp and a $70 DAC. So I've spend almost $600 on this audio equipment. I bought these 2.5 years ago and don't plan on replacing them any time soon (definitely content with what I have).

I don't really expect my friends to immediately plunge into what I have ($600) but they could try out a more 'beginner' pair like Sennheiser HD 555s which cost like $120.

$120 is, I think, more than reasonable for the sound difference you'd get using those headphones. Those are what I had prior to my HD 600s for close to five years and then decided I wanted to try something even better.

I suppose some of my friends HAVE spent ~$100 on Beats headphones, though this just makes me sad as they're complete crap compared to other headphones you could get for $100.

I dunno. I'm not trying to sound like I'm ranting but I do find it interesting that so many people find it wasteful to spend money on audio equipment when they spend so much time listening to music.
That was the same thought I had. The worst part is that they split it up into "chapters" which are really just one page of text and a pic each. The whole point of these designs is to be able to scroll down through the whole story like you were casually flipping a magazine. Instead, the MS article makes you click a "next chapter" link at the bottom right.
Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer?

"Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.
EA to Shutter 'SimCity Social,' 'The Sims Social,' 'Pet Society'
Scaling Pinterest - From 0 to 10s of Billions of Page Views a Month in Two Years
From my observations, nothing from Microsoft is considered cool.
Good point about the waste. That's a problem worth solving if it can be done. I'm excited to see what innovations come next.
Uh, as a developer of 13 years who has never been in the gaming industry... I question your generalization. I have never seen or heard of anyone saying game programmers are inferior or clueless in my professional career. Granted, I work in Boston, so things may be different here, but it's really not a characterization I at all recognize.
A 25% recidivism rate is miniscule considering we have been told for forever that these prisoners, all of them, were the "worst of the worst".

But your general point is a good one: Is someone who joins a not-very-nice local militia really a terrorist just because US troops or lackeys happen to be nearby? The US gov't is playing too many words games IMO.
So, here's my honest-to-god question.

When I was last interviewing for programming jobs in New York, only one of the places I interviewed at (and I looked at a lot of companies) wanted people working more than 40 hours a week, on a regular basis (they were a startup with a fixed runway). All the other places (a mix of established companies and startups) made it very clear that work-life balance is important to them, and that normal workweeks and generous vacation time was to be expected.

So I read these stories about people being asked to work 80+ hours a week, and I can't for the life of me figure out why anybody does this, when there are so many companies which don't ask for it. And it's not like the 80+ hour jobs pay any better, as far as I can tell.

What's going on here? Is it geographical? Industry-based? Do some programmers just not know any better?
#Bloomberg News stories that Citing Twitter as a Source Have Doubled in 8Months
Kenny Kellogg: Sunday Reading Catchup - April 14, 2013
Flickr co-founder once again bounces from games to business
For additional context for people not watching the video / clicking through: this is a kid who had a bone marrow transplant and was in isolation for two months, and was temporarily donated a telepresence robot.

Seems like a great idea for such enforced-isolation cases. You aren't reliant on other people coming to you to interact (though yeah, someone has to cart the thing around), so you spend a lot more time around (a much larger number of) people.
The Future is Driven by Interface Changes
What is the definition of a "powerful" language?

It sounds to me like arbitrarily taking a word with good connotations to mean something that is convenient for promoting what you're interested in; regardless of the literal meaning.
I use PhpStorm, pyCharm and WebStorm on a personal Computer and a Laptop. Laptop Goes to work with me every day, but I use both interchangeably at home all the time. A big part of my workflow is to use the laptop to run tests or manage another project while I'm coding on the desktop or the reverse.

Granted I did call them two years ago when I first wanted to do this and asked, so maybe they added something to my account, but I was simply told at the time that I could.
Stop Hustling, Start Listening
That's just normal in Super Mario Brothers 1, kills by shell start at 500 points and escalate for more targets. All the later games start at 100 instead, SMB3 and SMW and the New SMB series.
ucee054 made the same claim re Breivik a year ago when I posted the same argument -- he didn't answer that same point then either.

ucee054 earlier also argued for jewish conpiracy theories, etc.

Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4059752

Edit: Brevity, spelling error, link.
Freelancing is not easy - you have to put in the time and effort to network. Work won't just come to you for some time unless you are constantly telling people that you're available and what you've done.

Posting on HN is good, but don't bet on most of the work landing. (Remember there are many freelancers on HN also responding to those posts). Partnering with other freelancers is also a good option to fill in gaps.

I would suggest contemplating why you left? The hours, the pay, the career progression, the responsibilities.
Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer?

This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self-employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time look incredibly productive.
Two things.

First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a resume and screen based on that, and there's high unemployment and so increased demand for every position, it stands to reason that unemployed people are structurally disadvantaged when competing for jobs via resume blasts.

Second: Six months, you say? Can any of us think of a cohort of job seekers that routinely needs to contend with 6+ month employment gaps? I wonder, maybe, just maybe, do you think that has a powerful "objective" stigma attached to it disproportionately often might find it difficult to compete equitably in the job market? I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.
We desperately need more women in tech and that's how we have been pursuing them, desperately. Women don't want to be treated differently and they don't want more focus put on them.

The problem is that I've seen a lot of articles about women in x (and x is often tech) end by saying that women need special programs and mentorship and opportunities and so on; am too lazy to dig them up now but chances are good you've seen them too.

The other issue is that if a specific company gets accused of a gender ratio imbalance, they can point at the special program and mentorship and opportunities as specific things, but it's very hard to show that the company is being "be more inclusive instead of polarizing."
It is disappointing to me that as companies, as engineers, and as people, we don't consider the end of life for hardware components.

There must be a better solution than building things that are expected to simply be thrown away.
Thanks for your insightful comment and help on the problem! I'll make sure to remember that about Microsoft software.
Available datasets:

{
"api_version": "0.1.1",
"datasets": [
"dialysis_facility_directory",
"fda_product_recalls",
"home_health_directory",
"hospital_directory",
"medical_codes_icd10",
"medical_codes_icd9",
"medical_codes_loinc",
"medical_codes_ndc",
"nursing_home_directory",
"test_dataset"
]
}
Google Doodle Honors Math Brainiac Euler
Yep, I remember that. I don't think that action, or even what Bush the elder did, was anywhere near the colossal fuckup and misinformation of the 2000s decade, though.
Can't decide if that went over your head or you're trolling back...

But seriously, this seems to be checking for the antithesis to good code and I imagine a lot of programmers here are thinking 'you shouldn't need it!'. So sell it a bit more as your website doesn't.

On the code bases you've beta tested this on, do you really identify this kind of percentage of replication? Isn't that a sign the code is bad and should be abstracted or does this help in another way?

I'd want to see some real life examples on your site somewhere on some public repos, where are they!
"Gentlemen start your bitchin!1!!1!!"
Startuplandia myopia is myopic. Even for software developers, if you apply for a bunch of BigCo jobs, you're going to find that a long stretch without formal employment is an obstacle.

The "I've been freelancing for the past year" trick probably does not work as well for med techs or paralegals.
I was a game programmer at EA for eight years.

> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,

This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me.

I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.

> Many companies want to own your work even when you’re off the clock. “Here at Nine Dots, we aren't using any non-concurrence agreements, so these personal projects can actually benefit them financially if they make something that is commercially viable,” Boucher-Vidal said.

This was also another major reason I left EA. I couldn't work on games in my free time. Meanwhile, the stuff I did at work didn't actually scratch that itch: it was either huge franchise games I couldn't care less about or technology stack stuff that wasn't an actual game. I spent more time feeling like I was "making games" when I didn't work at EA.

> Until there is evidence that other models will work, and that's going to take a hit game or two, very little with change, and the revolving door of young, white, childless men will continue to make our games.

I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry. In both, you have:

1. A product that people don't need to consume.

2. A product where consumers increasingly expect prices to be tiny or zero.

3. Hordes of young people who want to do it.

4. Work that is intrinsically satisfying for its own sake.

Push aside all of the bullshit and making games is crazy fun. Lots of people want to make them. Lots of people want to play them too, but they don't really want to shell out much cash to do so. I think the end result of this is that it's just a domain where it will be a young person's game and it's very hard to make a lot of money.

Yes, some companies will be able to make real money at it, but for every Rolling Stones, there's a thousand local independent bands playing dive bars that you've never heard of.

And that's OK. I was in one of those bands you've never heard of once. It was awesome. When I had kids, I gave it up, but I certainly don't regret it. Maybe we should think of making games the same way: a fun thing to spend a few years doing when you're young and have the time.
The current rhetoric is acrimonious, partisan and has lost feminism a lot of formerly diehard support.
North Korean EMP Attack ‘Unstoppable’
Chicken Scheme's community is great too, though smaller.
More like it will get upvoted because it starts out with a bombastic statement.

The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
Even a 1% success rate is considered phenomenal in the advertising world, and as annoying as the ads became, it is true that tracking and targeting increased the value of ad impressions significantly when they were first introduced. The same is true of annoyances: popups, audio, and such: they simply worked.

But the people are speaking out. They don't want to be tracked by marketers, and they have been putting considerable effort into blocking the tracking efforts. Some estimates claim that as many as half the browsers on the Web now have some form of ad-blocking installed, and while the actual numbers probably aren't THAT high, it's not unreasonable to think that maybe one-quarter, or even one-third, of people may be blocking ads because of the annoying and tracking behaviors that advertisers have come to rely on.

When one takes this into consideration, surely it must be the case that annoying and tracking are now hurting advertising revenue far more than they help. It is, perhaps, time for advertisers to buck that trend: a return to the mass-marketing model that built media empires as recently as fifteen years ago. Or perhaps it is time to turn to a new kind of targeting: rather than going after individual users, target the sites themselves, directing advertisements to users based on the common interests that drive them to the places they go.

Imagine an advertiser that used such a model or something like it, and in return, pledged not to track or annoy the people who see its ads: a sort of "DuckDuckGo of advertising." Would you whitelist that advertiser in your ad-blocker? I would, and I doubt that I'm alone. I don't block ads just to stick it to the advertising agencies; I block them to make the Web usable and safe. Many people do. I wonder if a business model could be built on those people. Maybe even one that, on account of its wider viewer base, could eclipse the current tracking/annoyance models.
I have both. I really like the fact that the IDE's are so segregated. I find IDEA or Netbeans or Eclipse to have to much stuff.

I use webStorm for javascript only projects and phpStorm when I'm doing php development.

I configure each IDE to work how I like with the language of choice and all is good in the world.
Amen. We're planning a follow-up post about that issue. It's a real one for sure. If you can get a $40 Android tablet today, they'll be handed out for free within 5 years. Nobody is talking about the waste issue.
Fast and beautiful API testing
What are some of your favorite blogs?