skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them"

Rentacoder is readily available, its just that word on the street was most jobs paid about $5/hr.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk has some extremely fuzzy stats and not much more than anecdotes but earning around $7/hr has been reported. Higher pay, more fun, less effort?

Waiter/bartender at a tourist restaurant is probably the most fun and could pay even more.

Why is the market so fuzzy and illiquid? Why aren't there ten places I can go to find "write perl to import this old fashioned CSV file into that database" and see exactly what thats worth? Fix that and then wonder where the people are.(edited to rephrase there's no market, so no one plays the market)
Got Linux skillz? Want to become an #EC2 expert? Check out OpDemand's open Linux Intern positions. Boulder, Colorado.

http://opdemand.theresumator.com/apply/job_20111212190356_DY...
Sure but that method just trades time for space. Later work did reduce the overall complexity by substituting different "hard problems" as the cryptographic primitive, but it's still in the realm of unusable scaling characteristics.

On the other hand, so far as I know, no one has published any papers that suggest a fundamental barrier to improvement. Here's hoping!
...after he made wheelbarrows full of money from the Sun purchase.
Semi-correct. Falsely identifying real users as spammers when computing metrics isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal if you are suspending accounts. Twitter does remove spammy accounts, but it's a slippery slope and I'm glad they remain cautious when it comes to suspending users.
Dear Warner Brothers:

This is not going to work. As a consumer, I am not going to subscribe to a dozen different streaming video services, one per distributor who thinks they're too good to be aggregated. I don't care how good you think you are or how good you're going to be, and frankly I don't even care if you were each trying to charge me a dollar a month, because it's just plain too much hassle to be subscribed to one service per distributor.

Even free, it would be a bad deal. It's not hard to imagine a world where Warner Brothers works on my phone and my XBox, but not my PS3, Fox works on my PS3 and my Linux computer, but not my XBox, Discovery doesn't work anywhere because they don't have the technical chops to properly set up their network, and on and on it goes. There's a lot of distributors, even accounting for which of you have merged and operate under a dozen names. None of them as good as Netflix, working in as many places as Netflix, and as reliable as Netflix. (Oh, you think it's easy to serve video at this scale... yeah... heh heh heh. Your little websites with bits and snippets of video was barely getting your feet wet in that world.)

And of course it won't be free. Perhaps $9.99 a month for "everything" is unsustainable at any level (even though Netflix is generally not exactly the freshest content in general), but I'm just not going to chase you all down to give you money individually, and I know at least some of you are going to get really big heads and think you can charge $19.99 or something for a vanishing fraction of Netflix's content.

This is bullshit, and nobody's going to put up with it. I don't necessarily want there to be just One Uber Aggregator either, so you're going to have to deal with Amazon and Netflix and iTunes, but you can't go it alone. I'm not going to follow you. You're lucky I've even heard of you.

Even HBO is either going to become an aggregator with a viedo side business (see Netflix) or eventually join one.
So publishing content is anonymous, but ultimately SFT is responsible for hosting? Will they, for example, stop hosting your content if the MPAA/RIAA make copyright claims?
One thing I wish more people would do is to indent joins appropriately; e.g.

...
Inner join a on a.... = main..
Inner join b on b... = a...
Inner join c on c... = b...
Inner join x on x... = a...

The syntax of SQL is a real basket case, readers need all the help you can give them.
These are great tools, but I feel like they're lacking a big piece.

Lynda.com is the industry accepted place to learn code and tech. Reaching from Git to Javascript to practically EVERY Adobe product, they organize excellent courses and present them in a flawless fashion.

If you're starting at the beginning, that's an ideal place.
I'm honestly too lazy to email you so I'll just buy it, but the fact that you don't have samples ready to go or on the sales page concerns me.
It's a reference to Macross[1], though I wonder if the SDF abbreviation (in Macross) has any relation to the Japanese Self-Defense Force[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_Dimension_Fortress_M...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Self-Defense_Forces
The reason I don't like this way is it can be harder to refactor. You don't want "return 1" happening if cond. For example, if you refactor to something like this:

func hello() int {
var result int
if cond {
result = 0
}
result = 1

// New code with result

return result
}

Now, in this case, you don't want result to be 1 if cond, so you have to add the else condition. If you start with if-else, this is less likely to bit you in the future.

This particular bug just bit me in a bad way in production because I had what you have and and to make an quick production fix and did a refactor just like this and missed adding the else.
If I open a paid Wordpress.com account using my real e-mail address and a credit card registered to my home, and post a $10 reward for revealing my identity, the fact that I strongly doubt anyone will claim the reward is not proof of Wordpress.com's perfect safeguarding of my identity, just that their systems are secure enough to not be trivially hackable and that nobody cared enough to find a way to obtain a court order to compel WP.com to hand over my info.
Ah, so the ground gets pulled up and the power driven down.

Thanks. This makes a lot more sense. I never thought Intel was doing something for no reason, but the reasoning wasn't obvious.
Even the best hard drives will fail eventually, so you need a redundant failure-recovery system anyway. And once you have that, using commodity hard drives shouldn't be a problem.
I almost agree with you, but I put all reserved words (including ON) on a new line.
Why doesn't the pay reflect the supply and demand? I consider myself a decent developer with 9 years of industry experience in several domains and my salary is only $88k. It sounds like based on the demand, I should be pulling in a lot more.
Yes, because the only solution to state regulation failing to meet every single one of its goals is to end all regulation of everything, everywhere.
It's probably more pleasent and easier to read for the next person.
I agree with the other commenters, but I'll say that I understand the original intent of the rule was to avoid confusing logic, such as:

if (x):
do(thing1)
y := do(thing2)
if (y):
do(thing3)
return 0
else:
return -1
else:
do(thing4)
return 0

___

As you can see, such logic could quickly become hard to test and reason about. Does a single return help all that much? Not in and of itself, but it does tend to make writing such code a bit more painful, leading to better designs. However, guard clauses are a superior design in general.

I still avoid multiple returns in my main logic when side effects are involved, at least when I can.
Every company seems to think it needs programmers who hit .408 in the major leagues. Maybe the problem is that they think making money is a zero-sum game like baseball, so that they have to have the "best team" and not just a team which can build what's necessary to make some money (not the most money, that would also be a game).
SEEKING FREELANCER, London, remote okay

We're a consulting collective, Wildfish, http://wildfish.com .

We're looking for:

- Django developers

- Front end developers comfortable enough with Django to get a project running.

We have an ongoing need for help on projects, so are hoping to build up relationships with developers who may like to dip in and out of things as needed. Would particularly suit someone also wanting to take time out to work on their own startup or projects between things.

We're based in London, but happy with remote, so long as your English is good.

Please mention any experience or interest in:

- Django

- Testing (django-webtest, factory-boy)

- Ubuntu server admin (Linode, AWS, Fabric, Salt, Nginx)

- Django CMSs (Django CMS 2, FeinCMS)

- HTML/CSS/Bootstrap

- Angular

- Ember

Please email contact@wildfish.com, and include the sort of rate you're after.

Thanks!
The sensibilities for everything you just said are entirely subjective, and change as you are exposed to them. If you spend all day every day writing SQL, it is different than if you do it a little here and there. The entire codebase of Oracle Apps looks like this, so I found I grew accustomed to it over time and saw the benefits. Editing commas actually can be significant in terms of time and drag (this is even more apparent when edit Erlang).

Being very dogmatic, and in a discussion of ideas saying "that's the worst thing in the world" is easily worse than comma placement. So surely commas as indentation isn't the worst thing in the world.
Linux popularity with IaaS and PaaS providers has a lot to do with it.

Support for the BSD crowd at AWS pretty much is non-existent (they are working on it and making progress, though, with FreeBSD). Rackspace has some support, but only for FreeBSD and with some limitations.

Most of the PaaS players use Linux under the hood because they rely on AWS under the hood.

I'd love to hear about IaaS or PaaS players who use BSD, though.
Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon?
Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.
Responsive design, yet his own portfolio isn't responsive. Nice.
I guess I still prefer a catchy title to preachy ones that extensively use RFC 2119 keywords. e.g. "Why you SHOULD profile Ruby code to catch expensive regex bottlenecks" :)

Personal preference though.
Hacker Monthly Issue #35 is out
Thinkful (thinkful.com) - NYC, full-time.

We are a team of educators and students. Whether you’re building the product, designing a curriculum, or working directly with students, you’ll be asked to learn quickly and help others do the same. We hire for the curiosity, enthusiasm, and grit that characterize our students. We believe in both teaching and learning while at work, and we provide the freedom and support you need to learn any skill.

We offer everything you should expect from a well-funded startup: competitive salaries, health insurance, significant equity, and a few perks that reflect our culture: gym membership, Kindle, and monthly book credit. We share an office with other great startups in the Flatiron district of Manhattan.

Python/Django engineers

We’re building the tools to deliver curricula, expertise and live help so anyone can advance their career. As an engineer at Thinkful you’ll be working directly with both Darrell and Dan to architect, build and grow our technology and our team. You’re excited about learning new skills and applying them to help others learn. You must have a portfolio of interesting software engineering projects you can show us. The ideal candidate has a keen interest in education and learning, reflecting the aspirations of our students. Talent and curiosity matter more than raw skill: Experience is valued, but not as much as potential. This position is with us in New York City.

Contact Darrell (darrell at thinkful dot com) to apply. Send along your GitHub profile, or any work that makes you awesome.

UX/UI designer

We need to build a visual voice that reflects the values of Thinkful: Aspirational, curious, and open to experimentation. In this role, you’ll define the look and feel of the Thinkful brand and create the UX and UI of our educational product. You’re excited to design experiences that help our students learn faster and retain what they learn. You want to contribute ideas, and take others’ ideas to the state of finished products. If you don’t already know how to code your designs, you’re excited to learn (we’re happy to teach you). Your experience must demonstrate that you’re versatile, and your curiosity must convince us that you intend to become more so. This position is with us in New York City.

Contact Darrell (darrell at thinkful dot com) to apply. Send along any work that makes you awesome.
Uncited statements from a magazine that a mission to promote free market ideology isn't a very good citation at all.

On the other hand, here's President Roosevelt's own speech about the matter:

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeche...

"Under existing law the National Government has no power to enforce inspection of the many forms of Prepared meat food products that are daily going from the packing houses into interstate commmerce. Owing to an inadequate apropriation the Department of Agriculture is not even able to place inspectors in all establishments desiring them. The present law prohibits the shipment of uninspected meat to foreign countries, but there is no provision for inspected meats in interstate commerce, and thus the avenues of interstate commerce are left open to traffic in diseased or spoiled meats."

This from the mouth of a President who thought Sinclair was a socialist jackass. So, which source to trust… a first-hand source, who hired the inspectors and commissioned the report, who ran the country and was presumably informed about legal jurisdiction, who thought the original author was a jackass… or a magazine that has its mission statement to promote free market ideology 50 years later?
I apologize for not having a sample chapter up on the site. I have one ready right now and it will be on the site soon.

If you'd like to see if before then email me at - foundersbook at gmail dot com and I'll send it your way!
By good, it is often meant to be in the 5% of the standard normal distribution. So "good" is an infinite shifting condition. When there are more developers, it becomes just harder to be good enough. This scares therefore often novice off. They implicitly think that they have to be "really" smart to retain a life long job.

I think that there are enough developers. But everybody is searching for the geniuses that can create a competitive advantage.
Security problems as far as I know. Many governmental workers have it installed, so it's used as a spear phishing vector.

"Re: UN Resolution #XYZ (Attached PDF)" is how these things play out. You open the PDF and your computer develops, ah, magical new capabilities, like sending copies of everything you do to Eastern Europe or China.
Agreed.

Caption below screenshot of homepage for new Warner Bros service sums up the lunacy of this:

The Netflix competition heats up, for the 55+ demographic.
That's one of my favorite uses of probability: if you know what you are doing, you can build extremely reliable systems out of unreliable components.
I don't like having comma first listings, but it makes it incredibly easy to comment out parts of a query. I find commenting out parts of a query essential when trying to debug really long, complex queries.
Are developers liable for software bugs?
I would have liked to seen the Judy array implementation in pure Ruby, so we could compare apples to apples. I'm not trying to troll... but basically they solved their problem by:

* Avoiding Ruby language features

* Rewriting it in a different language

This is why I lean towards static languages like Go, Scala, and Java.
Most AMD processors support it. At least the AM3/AM3+ ones. But only ASUS seems to have support for it enabled on the motherboards.
AFAIK Dropbox uses an rsync-like compare-by-hash protocol over HTTP.
Your description of Brooks's "pilot system" is better than my own, although longer.
By the way, here's a possible reason why you may have inactive accounts that you should be able to easily solve.

I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task.

I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet."

8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.
That's where it goes in English.
ShowHN: A Twitter Timeline Widget for ALL social media accounts
Buildrx (www.buildrx.com) is looking for freelance developers (possibly contract to hire)! Anywhere in the world, we are based out of Oakland, CA and Toronto.

---

We're looking for experienced PHP freelance developers to add to the team. Our clients include brands such as: Scion, Universal Music, True Religion Brand Jeans, Juicy Couture, the SF 49ers and many other big brands.

Please pass this along to anyone who might be interested and available!

LOOKING FOR:

Experience with HTML/CSS/Javascript:
-Experience making cross browser pixel
-perfect websites (including older browsers such as IE7 when required)
-Experience with jQuery
-Some HTML5/CSS3 understanding is good, not necessary

Experience with PHP/MySQL:
-Deep understanding of OOP, including at least one major framework (Cake, CI, etc)
-Experience working with Magento is a huge plus
-Experience with ORM (ideal but not required)
-Experience working with APIs (building them is a plus) -Experience working with Facebook (ideal but not required) -Deep understanding of MySQL

Experience with Rails:
-Also ideal, but not required

You will telecommute most of the time but would be great to find someone either in the SF bay area or around Toronto for occasional in-person meetings.

Email me!- ana@buildrx.com
Another tip for using WITH on MSSQL - prefix it with semicolon like this: ;WITH

MSSQL makes it so that people pick up bad habits over the years and often you'll find missing semicolons at the end of statements. While the parser will intelligently handle missing semicolons for the majority of of scripts, it will bomb 100% of the time (at least up to 2008R2) on WITH.
Without further ado.

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ado-versus-adieu.aspx
Forget "marketing". Take that out of the equation. I don't care if you ban all marketing to individuals. (Well, I do, but that's an entirely separate argument, and a distraction from this one). The question here is just what drugs can legally be sold or prescribed, regardless of how people learn about them. Currently, "off-label" use is COMPLETELY ACCEPTABLE to the FDA! Once a drug is legal to use, you can use it for any condition at all, not just the condition it was proved efficacious for.

So we already have current widespread use of drugs that haven't been proven efficacious. It doesn't seem to have been a disaster. In fact, widespread use of drugs is one of the few forms of medical intervention that demonstrably makes people more healthy on net. Right now the rule is that it's legal to use drugs if:

(a) they got accidentally grandfathered in due to historical use (eg, aspirin and penicillin would NOT have passed the FDA's current standards), or
(b) they were patentable and turned out to be useful enough for treating SOMETHING that it was worth spending on the order of a billion dollars getting SOME use approved, even if it's not the use it's being prescribed for now.

Meanwhile, a drug that is just as effective but isn't patentable or treats a rare enough condition that it's not worth spending a billion dollars to get it through trials in the US...is not legal to prescribe.

Can you honestly justify that contrast?

If a drug has been legal in, say, Denmark, for five or ten years, has seen widespread use, and hasn't caused mass deaths THERE, why can't we just automatically make it legal to use here WITHOUT spending hundreds of millions of dollars redoing the same studies here? Do we think the FDA is somehow smarter and better at its job than its equivalent in every other country in the world?

The FDA faces the wrong incentives. It has no reason to take into account the huge cost of the harm it does, which is a matter of life or death to people with rare or serious diseases. It needs to be fundamentally overhauled or gotten rid of entirely. Yes, there would be costs to letting more people take more drugs...but every serious attempt to estimate it says the benefits would outweigh the costs. If you don't want sick people dying needlessly, you should be opposed to the FDA in its current form. It is an idea whose time has gone.
Data Science: The Numbers of Our Lives
Pretty much everything about rsync.net is great; their "nsl canary" is an elegant solution to a problem, too.
by now most of the world’s programming would be happening in low-to-medium-wage countries and that customers wouldn’t have to pay a lot for high quality software. But it hasn’t happened (e.g., see my posting about California’s state government spending $327 million on a straightforward ecommerce site

Uh, the reasons government IT projects are typically huge wasteful boondoggles are not because programmer salaries are too high or programmer talent is mediocre.
Probably. But you'd be safe from litigation.

But the anonymity of the poster and the inviolability of the content are two separate concerns.
Rap Genius’ Co-Founder Apologizes To Zuck
How an iOS Game Helps Betaworks Improve Its News Products
LOL. Couldn't stop laughing after reading this.
I think the only thing this article is lacking is a competent editor!
Judy arrays are also faster in node.js: http://legitimatesounding.com/blog/Faster_sometimes_Associat...

the issue is with the patents - has anyone been contacted yet about the usage?
I think it's because (though it's always carefully framed to leave this implicit) the argument here really isn't whether there's a developer shortage. It's whether to do more stuff like H1B which increases supply and decreases wages.
Typically expulsion requires a review and vote by the county school board (at least that's how it works where I grew up). My dad was on the school board and had to review a few ridiculous cases like a kid who brought a pocket knife, or another who brought a flask of alcohol to prom.

Stupid, draconian laws enforced by ridiculous school administrators. Zero-tolerance laws are illogical because they make an attempt to pass-off guilt, logic, and responsibility by simply saying "perform any act bordering on this description and we have no choice but to come down on you with this one-size-fits all penalty."

They are willing to screw up a kid's life because they are unwilling to use logic. Bringing a gun into a classroom != having a pocket knife in the center console of your car, but they are treated as if they are the same act.