skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A mail address is not required to create a HN account, as far as I can tell. It's been a while though, and I don't want to create a random dummy account to find out for sure.
Somebody finally found a use for them!
Create a new (viral) software license, the Ethical Public License (EPL). The EPL is linked to the oath and forbids use of the source code in any project or system deemed to break the oath.

This might result in an economic incentive for companies like Path to curb bad behaviour, due to the cost of rewriting EPL code or using inferior code.

Note: The OSI will probably claim the EPL is not an open source license ("No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor") and the FSF will likely say the EPL isn't a free software license because it breaks Freedom 0 ("The freedom to run the program, for any purpose").
And like many brilliant and talented people, they're completely clueless that in the real world, many other people just don't have the natural abilities that they themselves have, thus they are repeatedly perplexed that others just can't do the "easy" things they do. Often I've seen instead that they will instead ascribe others' failures as moral failures, which bites doubly against those that are trying hard but can't measure up.
One Month App Challenge
Amicus (http://amicushq.com/) - We empower great nonprofits to do what they do, better.

At Amicus, you can do good and do well. You can improve lives and work on interesting problems. For instance:

We helped win marriage equality: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/the-soci...

We're well funded: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/amicus/

We work on interesting problems...

- A realtime collaborative community environment for supporters of non-profits to communicate, and provide each other encouragement. This will involve realtime javascript with node.js, socket.io, and backbone.js

- Machine learning and/or statistical analysis on demographics and how they relate to outreach/fundraising effectiveness

- Open source projects, including our own in house, soon to be open sourced, real time Model View Presenter javascript framework with bi-directional data binding

- Realtime data visualization with D3, including D3's map projection, to create data visualization's to help client's understand the impact Amicus is having on their organization

- And for lulz: A Minecraft mod/voxel.js project for devirtualizing virtualized servers. Basically a minecraft mod that allows you to control AWS instances by putting down/picking up blocks :-)

Sound interesting? Want to change the world for the better? Head over to http://jobs.amicushq.com/

We're hiring developers across the stack.
"if you are buying the servers from scratch and hire a first rate web dev, shouldn't cost more than 10-20k$"

this number is just as absurd as the $327 million.
It keeps the unqualified from swamping HR. That and they are good for minimal skill/experience jobs to dredge in the most number of applicants. It is for high risk hiring where the job is not cared about as much so if the employee is a bad apple, it isn't of high impact to the company.

I've never once found a decent job off of anything other than a personal referral or internal posting. This is for finding skilled individuals who already have industry experience and reputation. It isn't supporting the "Good ol' Boys" so much as a way to gauge potential employees based on those around them. Who you know is a reflection of your value because good people are valued by those around them.

Head hunting on the other hand... that's an entirely different animal. That one depends on the quality of the headhunter more than anything else.
Between the Moon and Earth, yes. I'm not so sure about between Earth and the Sun.
Your pension scenario closely resembles the public school system financial situation.
> Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

Because a career in computer programming (still) sucks: http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html

> Programming is easier to learn than a foreign language

Maybe 'coding' but not programming and definitely not software engineering.
Unfortunately, the diagram you linked to is misleading; we don't have all of those plugins built yet. We've got a (quite rich) Python client (https://github.com/mozilla-services/heka-py) and a (rudimentary) Go client (https://github.com/mozilla-services/heka/tree/master/client) but Memcached and PostgreSQL connectors aren't yet in place. Fleshing out our plugin set (especially the inputs) is one of our highest priorities, so those should be coming Real Soon Now(tm). Contributions welcome!
Lean Product Testing with Angular.js
Microsoft readies 'Mohoro' Windows desktop as a service
London - Mixlr - DevOps engineer

We're looking to meet a forward-thinking DevOps engineer to join us at Mixlr and take responsibility for our comprehensive web and live streaming architecture.
Mixlr is a platform for social radio. We make streaming live audio easy for tens of thousands of broadcasters streaming to millions of listeners every month - this means our entire architecture has to be both rock-solid and amazingly scalable. We've already moved mountains to make this happen, and are hugely proud of the system we've built. Now we want to meet the engineer who will take us to the next level of scaling.

We would like to meet a highly competent engineer who has a passion for both music or radio and systems engineering, who will be responsible for maintaining, improving and evolving our entire technical infrastructure. This will include the configuration, deployment and performance-tuning of our live streaming services, web servers, databases, testing services and overall physical and virtual hosting.

Find a longer description of this role here: http://mixlr.com/devops

We're also looking to meet C++, Android and Ruby on Rails developers: http://devblog.mixlr.com/2013/02/01/were-hiring/

Thanks but we are not seeking help from recruiters at this time.
Agree with you there. I have some friends that do the kinda dev I feel is radioactive, but then they tell me about their benefits and wages and I'm like "where's the hazmat suit?"
I didn't downvote, but programming is nothing like playing in the NBA. The NBA is zero-sum: There are by definition (15 players per team * 30 teams) NBA players in the world. There exists no such hard limit on "good programmers"; if there were more good programmers people would pay them to solve problems that currently go unsolved.
We have no way to gauge your skill. But I'm wondering: why do you think $88k does not reflect supply and demand.

There have been a number of articles pointing out the "myth" of the tech talent shortage. Perhaps the shortage really only exists for "top talent"
My understanding is that all the slot/video machines have highly regulated payouts. The law states they must pay within a certain range, and they are verified by state employees on a regular basis.

If he is causing the machine to pay out at a level outside that allowed by the law, then he's breaking the law as much as the casino would be to make it pay out differently as well.

Edit: To clarify, I don't think he should be tried for hacking. I think he should be tried for circumventing state gaming laws, if applicable, or released. If they don't cover this, they it should be legislated if it is deemed important enough. Going after someone through some loosely affiliated law because you want them to go to jail even though what they did wasn't strictly illegal in wrong, IMHO.
Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/jobs), San Francisco, Full-time

We're hiring engineers. If you want to do Rails, iOS, Android development and revolutionize the book-reading world, apply at the link above or send an email to jobs@goodreads.com for questions.

- work with other book nerds
- small team of engineers (15 rails, 1 iOS, 1 Android)
- agile development in 2 weeks sprints
- your work will have high visibility
- work on performance, growth, scalability problems
- competitive salary and benefits
- enjoy tech talks by your peers, as well as catered lunches and monthly book perks
- if you are a reader and book lover, that's a big plus!
The same argument applies to writing normal code. The semi-colon exists so that you can put more statements on a line, and make your code fit into your editor, right?

You don't agree?

What is the difference between coding in that language and SQL? I submit that it is only the amount of it you write.

I spent several years of my life focusing on reporting, and spending more time writing/maintaining SQL than writing any other language. In that time I discovered that complex SQL queries are a language like anything else. For "hello world" you can get away with anything. But as soon as you are doing complex stuff, the layout matters.

Did you know that it can make a difference whether a condition is in your ON or your WHERE? It can. (Think left joins.) Did you know that the location/order of the ON statements can make a difference? It does. Is it visually obvious where this particular condition is? It should be. Did you know that the order you put things in in your query can have performance impacts? It shouldn't, but it does (particularly for MySQL - MySQL is stupid).

If you've got 200ish character lines and you are unwilling to format, well, I'm glad that I don't work with you. Because I'm likely to be asked to figure it out at some point, and I don't want to maintain crap like that.
Be extra cautious of early decisions in your development cycle
On the other hand it's not really fair that Netflix becomes a monopoly and everyone has to agree to Netflix's prices or lose most of it's audience. Even if Netflix is completely fair about it, they are still have to somehow divide $30 per month per family, among all the videos they watch (and no advertising revenue either.)

But you are right that 50 different competing video services would be absurd. Perhaps it would be better to distribute videos in a marketplace, like steam did for games. They set their own prices so they don't have to worry about "exclusivity". And then they could allow for subscriptions to watch unlimited content for a set price, for people that value that.

The weird thing about movies is that they aren't like other commodities. People want to watch a specific movie, even if there are others that are just as good. Supply and demand doesn't work as well.

But I am worried about Netflix becoming monopolistic. They aren't now because they do have competition and have only a fraction of movies and TV shows available. But if it or something like it becomes the dominant video streaming service, they could charge consumers or producers whatever they want (within reason) because there are no other platforms to distribute your movies, and no one else has the ones you want to see.
How The Hallway Usability Test Can Make You Lose Your Job
The hallway usability test is a quick way to test how user friendly your project is. Not too long ago, a coworker got fired because I used it and the results affected her.
Although I like SDF, a physical letter is a lot more evidence and perhaps hassle than what you'd incur with Tor and some boring free shared hosting service, or running a Tor hidden service if you want interactivity and don't mind slowness, or even joining a Bitcoin mining pool and using the (minimal) payout to anonymously pay for hosting.
I don't think the GP was referring to development environment setup time as a significant amount of the spin-up time of a software engineer. If it is, you've got bigger issues.
Spyware used by governments poses as Firefox, and Mozilla is angry
There is a tremendous difference between being able to "program" (the ability to type out syntax that will execute) and being able to design large, complex systems. Stop and think for a moment about the complexity in interaction between components in a modestly complex software product. I know plenty of people who can write code competently, but cannot design software very well.
It chugs on the 360 too. It's just slow in general and has only gotten slower/less usable since I started using it 2 years ago.
JavaScript is almost the same way. It works in some browsers, but not in others. :-(
Piracy it is :)
Thumbtack - San Francisco

We're "Amazon for services". It's a big vision and our sights are set high. You can visit Thumbtack to hire any kind of person from home contractors and DJs to French tutors or wedding photographers. A quarter of a million small businesses around the country have joined the network. We've been in business for four years, are essentially profitable, and growing quickly.

We're looking for great engineers to join our team. H1B and new graduates welcome. We write in a mix of PHP, Python, and JavaScript. We value extensive A/B testing, excellent software engineering, bottom-up decision making, and collaborative development cycles.

The office is a fun place: we eat lunch together everyday (and dinners once a week), all food is cooked fresh by our in-house chef. We brew beer, hack on hardware, and play foosball in our spare time. The office is full of many warm-hearted and wonderful people who will be your friends as well as your colleagues.

Learn more at thumbtack.com/jobs and thumbtack.com/engineering

Any questions, please email chris@.
That's why fallback techniques like the ones in this article are a great idea (assuming that they are reliable).
Omaha the latest city to get gigabit internet
I'd focus more on what the breakdown is for people below the median income. Obviously at a certain level, people can afford the more expensive, but the people in the lower echelons of society are the ones that are funnelled towards "what's cheap" when it comes to food choices.

That's not even getting into whom the largest consumers are. I'll bet that there is a lot of interfacing between companies like McDonald's/KFC/etc where other corporate interests are attempting to push down prices. Then you end up with multiple layers of corporate interests that end up insulating the consumer.

All of this can also be side-stepped (at least in this case) by moving to a vegetarian or vegan diet, but that's a large leap for some people and there are stigmas attached to it by some in society (i.e. 'dirty hippies,' etc).
If everyone got $36 million dollars a loaf of bread would cost $36 million dollars. If no one got $36 million dollars there would be no bread.
1) I'd imagine programming ability is fairly correlated with IQ, which puts a limit on the percentage of the population that has the requisite analytical skills to be effective programmers.

2) Programming is as much about communication as it is about writing code. People have this idea that you can reduce a program to a precise set of specifications that can be formulated by non-programmers and shipped off to China to be coded up. I find the idea ridiculous. People don't come with to lawyers with the precise contours of the case they want to build and simply ask for the lawyer to write up the briefs. They don't come up to doctors with a precise treatment plan and simply ask them to administer the medications. Programmers are problem-solvers, and that's a two-way street, and that makes shipping critical programming work over to China and India untenable because of communications barriers.
If I could watch TV shows from multiple major networks as they are released and there were same month movie releases, I would be willing to pay near $30/month.
I was hoping to see some examples of more complex WHERE clauses. They can get a little messy when you start mixing ANDs and ORs at different levels of nesting.

Also, why are

wine_tags as (
SELECT DISTINCT
unnest(tags) as tag,
wine_id
FROM
app_rating
GROUP BY
wine_id, tags),

wine_detail as (
SELECT
app_wine.name as name,
app_wine.id,
app_winery.name as winery
FROM
app_wine,
app_winery
WHERE app_wine.winery_id = app_winery.id
)

handling closing parentheses differently? This affects how you organize nested parentheses.
In theory, it sounds like a cool idea but I think it will be an overkill and of not much use. Not to mention that now everyone will know who is voting on what. That could start other flame wars besides the point of HN.

From what I have seen being on HN, the front page is usually of good quality and i m sure the voting ring detection mechanism is already decent.
"Remote work is fine." "...though unfortunately we are not currently hiring remote employees."

What?
If you're in the Seattle area, Sporcle is looking for a web developer.

You'll work in a team to maintain and improve our profitable flagship site as well as other web properties for the Sporcle brand. As a fast-moving startup, we want to bring on talented, energetic individuals with a passion for developing platforms for fun and innovative games that are played by millions. We strive to maintain a casual and fun work environment (bring your dog or goldfish!), but we're serious about meeting our deadlines to produce the best experience for our users and contributors.

Responsibilities:

-) Design, develop and test optimized web applications using CSS, HTML5, Javascript, working with PHP, MySQL, 3rd party libraries and services

-) Work as a team member to ensure that implementation details translate through to testing plans and deployment on our sites

-) Show product ownership through collaboration with product managers, designers, other developers to build scalable robust applications.

-) Excellent inter-personal and communication skills, including clear and concise writing for specifications, documentation and test plans.

-) Ability to switch rapidly between different projects in a fast-paced environment

As the next Sporcle employee, what you should bring to the table is:

-) Enthusiasm and passion for web applications and mobile gaming

-) Attention to detail and a hunger for stability and performance

-) Familiar with the quirks and limitations of css and javascript in a multi-browser environment

-) Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em; Understand when to embrace and extend existing code, not just rewrite from scratch.

-) Comfortable working in a Linux & open-source environment with source control and other content management tools.

-) Able to commute to Sporcle's office in Seattle, Washington (We're in Fremont across from the Burke Gilman trail)

-) BA/BS degree or higher, preferably in CS or a combination of education and applicable experience

-) Entry level applicants with relevant experience are encouraged to apply. Being part of a small company means that there's no help desk, no formal review committees or rigid structure. We work as a team, but everyone is expected to be an independent problem solver with the ability to research and solve their own issues. We have plans and goals, but also embrace change and a little bit of chaos.
Already a Sporcle user? We'd love to know more about your experiences with the site or our mobile apps. Include your Sporcle handle and tell us about your favorite games.

Apply here:
http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/sporcleinc/web-developer/aSoESi...
This is a breeze. Don't make me paste some of the wacky SQL I've seen generated from Oracle's BI tools when they are being abused.
The NBA has a fixed number of players. The analogy doesn't fit at all. I'll bet if you made 10 new teams, and only allowed them to sign players that other teams don't want, that a number of them would be better than the worst teams in the NBA right now.
There is absolutely a market for really good creative people who aren't obedient or subordinate. You have to be able to back up your disobedience with results, though.
Alameda, CA - Makani Power Inc.
http://www.makanipower.com

Control Systems Software Engineer

Makani Power, Inc. is seeking a control systems software engineer to develop the flight controller and simulation environment for a utility scale airborne wind turbine.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Develop and maintain airborne wind turbine simulation environment
- Develop fault-tolerant flight software architecture
- Implement control system algorithms
- Write automated diagnostic tools for flight critical sensors and actuators
- Write unit tests for key flight controller and simulation components
- Work with close-knit team to develop the software that controls the future of wind power

REQUIRED SKILLS:
- BS or MS in computer science or related field (Ph.D. is a plus)
- Extensive experience with C/C++
- Knowledge of control theory and digital signal processing
- Experience developing high-reliability embedded software

HIGHLY DESIRED:
- Experience with autonomous aerial vehicles or other robotic systems
- Experience with C programming for real-time, embedded systems
- Knowledge of MISRA-C, JPL, or equivalent coding standards for high-reliability software
- Experience with real-time Linux or VxWorks
- Experience with DO-178B software certification
- Knowledge of aerodynamics and dynamic simulation
- Python and Bash scripting
- R/C plane enthusiast and pilot

Apply to: jobs@makanipower.com
Quicksort with Python
> $10 million/year in revenue in the 6th year doesn't sound like a VC-compatible growth rate.

Interesting point. Come to think of it, online backup services have existed for a long time, I remember using a similar service at a previous job 6+ years ago. I recall that it was quite expensive and certainly not unlimited. I seems clear that Backblaze was able to get to $10 million revenue by competing on price - dirt cheap pricing. And the dirt cheap pricing was made possible by not paying salaries, running a "data center" in an employee's apartment, building servers from ultra low cost hardware components, violating residential zoning laws, oversubscribing storage capacity, etc. One can only wonder what kind of sacrifices were made in terms of physical and network security. I wonder how many of their first customers realized that their backups were sitting in someone's apartment ... somehow I doubt it was disclosed at the time?

The problem with this kind of business model is that it is effectively a small business owner mindset. $10 million revenue after 6 years of toiling away ... at $5 per month, this means that they have something like 2 million users ... considering all the other backup solutions available (including far more secure solutions), it seems quite possible that their growth will stall or slow down as their target market is going to be relatively small and already saturated and you can't go much lower than $5 a month to continue competing on price alone. Incidentally, I noticed that their website actually says "as low as $3.96 per month" ... so they are continuing to push the limit on price. I'm not sure that a price war / race to zero is the optimal strategy for this business ... this is like trying market the world's cheapest helmet or life vest - how many people would seriously want that?
Nice article. One factor that seems to overlook is the cost of an early decision that becomes impossible to change as the project matures as I descibe here: http://www.codingismycraft.com/2013/05/01/be-extra-cautious-...
great story.
Hi Chris!

So yeh, it's not quite as simple as Homebrew, which is definitely optimised for that use-case, but it's still relatively straight-forward.

Taking the 'tmux' package as an example:

https://github.com/jsonn/pkgsrc/tree/trunk/misc/tmux

The main guts are in Makefile. DESCR is a few lines of description about the package, and is used by package managers. distinfo contains SHA1 and sizes of the source tarballs and patches. PLIST is a list of files the package will install. And finally, the patches/ directory contains per-file patches which will be applied to the source prior to building.

Due to the cross-platform support, there is a huge range of functionality available for Makefiles, and so some of them can look pretty complicated.

However, it's pretty straight-forward to get started, and there are various tools (e.g. pkgtools/url2pkg) which can make things pretty simple to get started.

I'm planning an introductory blog post on this at some point which should hopefully cover all of the basics.