skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even the most calm and cool among us will become on edge when they have to go through 10-15 levels of voice menus, dropped transfers and being forced to listen to ridiculous and inane advertisements for the company website ("did you know you can find information about our products on xxx.com?".... thanks for that 20 second delay).

When I have to call a customer service rep, by the time I finally get to them, I'm usually in a worse mood than when I called.
Yeah, they clearly don't realize that, that's why the article says, "Statistical note: This graph is logarithmic. That means doubling your income from $1,000 to $2,000 raises satisfaction by the same amount as doubling your income from $10,000 to $20,000."
Pixate Engine: Well worth the price tag
You must be new here.

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
I can't speak for anyone else.. I'm an older developer, and a bit of a "rock star" so to speak. I know I'm at the pay ceiling, and peaked out into upper mgt a couple years ago, and never again. I'll accept where the pay is, and simply work where the best fit is. I've never been one to show up at a certain time every day (usually 9-ish).. but after lunch, I tend to get a lot more done than my contemporaries.

I try to at least be aware of what's going on around me. It's not always easy as there's a lot of new stuff every day, and when you finally get around to it, things change.

Most recently, I've been dabbling in NodeJS, as it's a good fit for one-off import scripts and backend systems. That allowed my to have a grunt script setup for the client parts of a new .Net project, where the backend is ASP.Net MVC ... I've seen the bundles out of the box in mvc, and feel that it's excessively painful.

By the same note, I can usually make a good judgement call as to when to plug my nose, and just make the patch work. Experience counts for a lot. And at the higher end the pay doesn't generally match your productivity... I'm a cog, but good enough at what I do that people tend to overlook my quirks regarding daily schedules.

For every prodigy I've seen (about 3 others in my career), I've seen a several dozen that were competent, not great, but get the job done, and several more dozen idiots who really should have a different career, and enough people that could be good, but can't break out of the same patterns they've used for over a decade to be more effective that I don't like thinking about it.

There are plenty of stereotypes, and plenty of exceptions. It's funny that SO is mentioned as the source in the article, as most of my best answers happen to come from me revisiting and updating older answers/questions with newer material. Beyond that it's pretty narrow as a focus, just tend to gear towards my interests.
Sounds like there's a simple (to explain, not necessarily to do) solution for you. What's keeping you at the sucky job?
What else ?! :)
Timex 2068! :)
Depends on a lot of things, really, like his company's structure and the relevant laws.
There is some really bad advice in here.

When declining an offer, there is almost never anything to be gained from explaining your rationale. Be gracious (i.e. thank the person who delivered the offer to you), indicate that you have decided to pursue another opportunity and move on.

If you feel the need to explain your decision, it can and likely will be misconstrued. "I have decided to accept a competing offer that I feel best fits my current professional and personal goals" may be read as "I don't believe your organization can support my professional and personal goals." If you write "I do not believe that I am a good cultural fit for the organization", somebody is likely to interpret that as "Your culture sucks."

Additionally, it rarely makes sense to notify everybody involved in the interviewing process of your decision not to accept an offer. After your initial interviews, assuming you are still considering the opportunity, you should send a thank you note to the people you met with, as appropriate. Unless you had a relationship with one of these individuals before your interviews, further communication regarding your decision to decline an offer is probably not going to be to your benefit, particularly if you have the hubris to invite the other party "to let you know if you can ever do anything to help them reach their goals." Really?

Finally, consider that your dealings with others in the context of a job search will probably be more enjoyable and well-received if you don't pretend that you have a "personal brand" instead of a reputation.
Yeah, I was jealous of the professional developers.

While I had to type everything by hand on the same computer, most companies (well game studios) were using those type of solutions.
Video game designer seeks more minority characters
> company, they broke the law, and were investigated and fined as a result. How is that "stunning"?

I believe the answer is somewhere in the question.
To take your idea even further, I was asked not to "reimplement" something by a new employer, but was flat out asked for the code I wrote in a previous job in the job interview. This is not a mom and pop but a huge corporation which shall remain nameless. As far as not using google, well Chrome and Search are ok with me, the rest of google's products are just data collection (about me) which I can do without.
These ideas all seem like bandaids to me if they aren't personal goals that you care about. I've seen studies that show that burnout is caused by sustained imbalance between your personal goals and how you're living your life. This can also happen retro actively. For example, if you were to find out that you weren't going to get paid for a job you'd been working the last 6 months on, you would almost instantly be burned out. That is, if you were doing it for the money of course. Your personal goal is to spend a certain percentage of your time on things that will increase your wealth, and if you weren't to get paid, the sudden overwhelming sense of losing six months would burn you out immediately.

Likewise in a startup, I think the studies would say that you find yourself burned out because at some point, something inside you says, "80 hours a week for the last year wasn't really completely in line with all my personal goals. I have a goal to have personal relationships, spend time with my family, and exercise, yet this startup is the only thing I've been doing." At some point a voice inside says, "It wasn't worth it."

People have very different goals, so results will vary as to what causes burnout, but as a boss, something I know will cause burnout is anything that will pull the rug out from under an employee regarding benefits that they expected to receive. For startups this is super tricky because some employees are expecting an IPO with big payouts, and when they get disillusioned about that, there's really no way to stop the burnout.
I'd like to think that the smarter hackers realize that good-willed work can make just as much money, if not more, than blackhat bullshit, and there aren't any victims either.

They both got what they deserved, and it's more than laughable that their tracks were so clear. If you're going to be committing fraud, at least learn some shellcode first. Gotta start with the basics before you go baaaad ;)
It would have a lot lot better feature if Android could manage battery usage for things like GPS in a low power mode[1] even if it was on all the time and would only activate in the background intermittently or AGPS fetches some region of interest. Though for this to work efficiently AGPS shall have to be more accurate than it is as of now - at least available on Android phones.

[1]Sth like Bluetooth Low Energy (it requires additional h/w though)
Signals intelligence is not just about reading enemy communications. Traffic analysis[0] would give the Chinese valuable insight into US military communication patterns. Changes in data patterns could alert them to changes on the ground.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
The routine..
I run a small ad free site[1] that links to several job boards. Most of the boards really are low traffic if you live outside of SF or NYC. Have you tried contacting recruiters?

[1] http://careers.sh
You can quite cheaply (for around $3 depending on the registrar) opt into Whois privacy protection.
The market for teaching Computer Science fundamentals is already rather crowded with thousands of Universities competing in that space. It's no surprise that Codeschool et al don't address that market. At their pricing level they are going for volume and volume is obviously at the lower end of the market.

Now there are to me two interesting points:

1. Is there a market for a more advanced CS education delivered outside the University system? Coursera/Udacity/EdX cover this to some extent, but even here their courses are simplified versions of the University offering.

2. Is there a way to do address the volume market in a significantly better way than Codeschool et all do? Their pedagogy is quite out-dated -- it's the old programming language as bag of syntax approach. The How to Design Programs (http://htdp.org/) approach, which I'm familiar with, is much better. I'm sure there are other initiatives.
Open source you want? Here you go https://github.com/operasoftware/dragonfly
Yes. A good number of streets are named after famous authors. I used to live on on Poe St. and remember seeing Byron, Seneca, Kipling, and Homer (and others I can't remember). A subsection of streets close to Stanford is also named after famous colleges. In general, I think its a good strategy for a University town to surround citizens with subtle reminders of famous/successful examples of education and the educated.
Obama makes the right call on the suits. Here's Dan Ariely on "ego depletion": http://danariely.com/2012/08/15/understanding-ego-depletion/
What Happens When Almost Anybody Can Build A Mobile Business App?
By saying it's "just" a tool you're implying that all tools are equal, and with your gun analogy you're implying that all tools have a balance of good and bad consequences. I'd dispute both of those points.

The vacuum cleaner is just a tool. And the printing press? That's just a tool as well. But the printing press massively changed society, and for the better.

It think it's arguable that the internet will have -- sufficiently far down the line (and remember that it took a long time for the consequences of the printing press to be really felt) -- bigger consequences than the printing press did.
The best learning curve there is. And additional irony, eventually someone on this curve eats all the white-boarding interviewing for lunch as well.
While reading, this was my conclusion too. If he wrote down the ideas somewhere, he could prove that the ideas and concept was original his. Even in Europe, disclosing ideas early can be useful, as it protects oneself from trade secret claims.
He already said he thought they were morally required to release the code on the net. Also, what are you talking about?
Yay for Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated book in the background of one of the photos!
The problem is without learning the fundamentals, you don't know what you don't know.

I'm 29, I taught myself to program with no formal education and I've been doing it since I made games for my calculator in 8th grade.

However, I'm going back to school for a CS degree (I already had 90 hours of a history degree), and I constantly run into new stuff in my theory classes that would've saved me a lot of time on past projects.

Learning just the practical stuff that you need right now is fine if you just want to hack something together. But know that if you do it that way you'll have gaps in your knowledge that you didn't even know were there until they bite you in the ass.
In this day and age, you use PCs to develop games for C64. You're able to do stuff you couldn't before because now you have the capacity to precompute an compress a bunch of tables and such. And you use modern developer tools (assemblers, etc -- all on the PC) and test the stuff on emulators. (It still works on the real HW.)

I know this because a colleague in the office is still active in the demo-scene (yes, it's still active) and participates each year in competitions.
Same can be said about getting enough sleep.
Well, sure. The one big advantage that public key crypto brings is that you don't need a separate channel for key exchanges.
Pro tip: avoid hardware, stick to software. Just kidding.
Opera were the pioneers of the tab, speed dial and many things. They are by no means "me too".
The following:

This goes back to what your Dad probably told you about fistfights as a kid. "Never start a fight, but end one." On your terms.

...

I am sick of watching our territory get taken by smiling assholes who have nothing to offer the world, and whom any properly masculine society would have done something about decades ago. I'm fucking disgusted and ready to fight. If that means I occasionally swear a blue streak, who fucking cares? The only thing that matters is defeating these assholes with such force that they never fuck with us again.

These are kind of statements-in-miniature of the Israeli national soul. Our unofficial motto is Al tihiyeh frayyer!, "Don't be a sucker!" (related is the word "chutzpah", colloquially translated as "balls" but really "rudeness"), and it's built into the entire culture on such a deep level that we often prefer to be rude or to fight rather than give up on what we believe or what we think we deserve.
> All he seems to doing on this project is providing money

How do you propose this would happen without Branson's investment? Space tourism seems like a pretty risky business proposition to me, and I think he deserves credit for backing it with actual money, rather than words.
Aside from the other reasons already mentioned here, I'd like to point out that it's also the only browser that seems to have a competent 64-bit implementation for Windows at the moment. This is literally the only reason I migrated to Opera not too long ago.

I have 16gb of ram on my pc, and regularly have >100 tabs open at any given time; I may be in a weird minority of some sort, but decent x64 support really makes my life a lot easier. I still load up Chrome and Firefox when I know I'm only going to be using them for a short/quick session, but as much as I like them, they just become awfully painful to use beyond that use case for me. Unfortunately, it seems Opera is following suit with the other vendors and is probably abandoning its x64 version, but at least they were the one vendor that pursued it enough to release something usable. Waterfox and the 'official' x64 builds of Firefox crash way too much for me to even consider. I understand the hell of trying to port to a 64-bit architecture when you're reliant on tons of old 32-bit libraries and such, but I really don't like this trend of staying overly complacent in the 32-bit realm when our hardware has been capable of more for a good while now...

When I'm on Linux however: Chromium all the way!
Thanks for these links. I ended up grabbing a routerboard 450G because they look like a really nice piece of kit. Probably overkill for playing around with routing, but I couldn't help myself.
Well played...

Missing to redact X.com's phone number allows "social engineering" of the company name, though.
I’ve spent the last 3 1/2 years working on a computer science degree from Stanford. In the past year, I cannot think of a time my understanding of the concepts mentioned in the article provided me a particular advantage in my programming work. That time includes a research position, an internship at VMware, an internship at Nicira (bought by VMWare), a self-initiated Unix course, a TAship in networking and a few quarters teaching introductory computer science in the CS 198 program.

I found this article intentionally contrarian for no useful purpose. Gayle, the founder of Career Cup cited at the end, runs a business grooming programmers to work at large companies (see her book 'The Google Resume'). Google and other large software companies are notorious for asking puzzle questions. Jeff Atwood, founder of Stack Overflow, has repeatedly expressed a hate for these questions. I've bought one of Gayle's books. It was well-written and helpful. However, I assume most programmers starting with Codeschool, Lynda and others are just dipping their feet into the world of software not shooting for working at Google tomorrow.

Mastery of computer science concepts is important in the long term. But as a 'long-term' programmer (~2 years of serious programming), I have yet to implement my own complex data structures in production use beyond simple JSON objects. Libraries simply abstract most of these problems efficiently enough for most work.

I read a comment recently stating 'the best programmers don't need frameworks'. Of course! The best produce frameworks themselves! And more importantly, the best produce frameworks, languages, and tools to educate the next generation of programmers in best practices. (See zachgalant's comment above.)

For those of us in software, let us not challenge ourselves to achieve personal mastery and also to enable mastery and education for others.
Show HN: Type in a search to find the average of the first 50 image results
When you search for something, it pulls the first 50 image results from Bing Image Search then blends them all together. The resulting image is produced by taking the mean color value of each pixel across all of the images.
The states won't let a Chinese phone carrier do business here because of the chance for espionage, but turn around and do this? What irony....
I must be misremembering the behaviour in Chrome/Safari. I guess the site-specific whitelisting must be a relatively new feature of the Firefox version that has not been ported yet.
Hello! I'm one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com). The answer is 100% yes. :)

Funny enough, we go over basic data structures (linked lists, stacks, queues, etc.) in the first week at DBC and we emphasize at every level of the curriculum that being a good programmer means being able to translate some idea you have in your head into code. We teach mainly Ruby and JavaScript, but the students know it's incidental.

I just helped four students today finish their first-week project, which is a Sudoky solver. When they see the solver I wrote solve 500 puzzles in 5 seconds they want to know how. That's the perfect time to teach them about algorithms and data structures.
What mistakes are you talking about? How will granting "jus solis" heal these mistakes?
I would hope that Wired, at least, would be above these terrible linkbait headlines.
They're both wrong. It's a false dichotomy. The best programmers run up and down the ladder of abstraction. The magic happens the marriage of the two.
Your "if" is contrafactual -- more precisely the "while" clause is -- for the reasons I illustrated with the story of the pronoun pattern. At least it should be.

Klein surely gets dozens of PR pitches per day, if not hundreds. Of course he's going to be influenced by a few of them. The people who assume otherwise ... well, they may well be too clueless to be his target audience.

And, returning to my point, it's not common to outline the genesis of any particular opinion column or blog post. I don't really do it, yet I'm closer to doing it than most.
>why did bother creating the HDI if GDP/capita works just as well on most cases?

Because using GDP maximization to decide policy in those other cases results in lower overall happiness.

I would have no problem if economic policy-makers were content to merely correlate their decisions with increasing the GDP. Using it as the only end-goal, though, is foolish, and using it in those exceptional cases is, by utility maximization standards, evil.
Microsoft's design uses a mobile first approach with media queries and other techniques to make it a ubiquitous experience regardless of device. The others don't. That's why it looks the worst in an ancient browser, although it arguably looks better than the other examples if you were to open the same page on an array of devices with differing dynamics.
Why would they bother to? Is there a shortage of opportunities for talented people to apply their effort instead of cramming an interview?
>The cost of quality customer support can easily be mitigated by factoring it into cost of your product.

Sure, but that only works for high end products. Apple might be able to get away with this (and, in fact, they do exactly this by virtue of offering free in-person support at their stores). But the high end is a miniscule part of any market. But Dell? Samsung? Do you really think you can sell ten million units and offer expert support for all of them?

The Rackspace and 37 Signals examples don't apply. In both cases, they can assume a certain level of competence on the part of their customer. My mom isn't going to set up Basecamp. My grandmother isn't going to be spinning 30 or 40 Linux VMs. Rackspace and 37 Signals offer excellent tier 2 support, with the assumption that you're competent enough to do your own tier 1 troubleshooting. That most emphatically does not apply to the vast majority of products.
This is a genuine question - do you really believe the (to me, seemingly obvious and much greater and potentially more dangerous) costs of switching away from astronomical time for measuring something inherently astronomical like the length of a year are smaller than the costs of removing the occasional time-handling bug in software?

Even in your example, Linux machines didn't actually crash - some processes spinlocked. And it wasn't even all Linux machines, if you were running a mildly old kernel (say, the one that came with debian etch and derivatives) nothing happened whatsoever.

Beyond that, there is no shortage of time standards that are both based on SI seconds and free of leap seconds - Terrestrial Time, International Atomic Time, GPS Time come to mind -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_time#Timekeeping

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

Google's solution is 'leap smear' and they, similarly, did not run into the problem

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-l...
Thanks for your feedback. I would perhaps agree that if handled incorrectly, the notes or calls to various people might not be taken well. On the other hand, they also represent a valuable opportunity to continue building relationships.

As for explaining your reasoning, that is perhaps the case. I would then be curious to know what you would recommend when the recruiter offers the inevitable question of: "Why did you decide to take another offer?" Planning an answer and being proactive about the reasoning in a judicious way can avoid even bigger snafus in response to an unexpected question.

I would be curious to know how you typically offer to help others. I have found in my personal experience, as well as that of others, that asking how I can help is one of the single greatest ways to build trust and respect in a relationship. Now, perhaps "reach your goals" takes it a step too far. If so, simply remove it from the phrasing.

As for the brand. Call it what you will. You have a reputation, or brand, in the eyes of other people. Maintaining a consistent reputation is the point, rather than the exact phrasing of the words.

Again, thanks for offering constructive criticism. I enjoy a healthy debate about career search tactics, and I am always open to continuing the conversation.
Big Data Beyond MapReduce: Google's Big Data Papers
It is fairly common for non-profits to own for profit subsidiaries which often become the main sources of revenue and sustainability for the non-profit.
Five Important Rules When DIY Upholstery Cleaning
I for one have started shedding the Google products. Im slowly switching to alternatives. I find Google creepy company and don't like being sold. I have 2 products left to drop.
Marketing, it seems, is all about spamming HN with ads for a book about marketing.
[video]Will this startup stop PowerPoint users from deserting to Prezi?