skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seeking Work - Remote, London Timezone (can adjust to US Time)

Full-stack Rails developer - 2 years building products

Startup guy, doing consulting to pay bills. Can translate business strategy into code. Portfolio on request.

10h-20h/week

$50/h

Email at railsguy7@gmail.com
> ...with no problem.

For certain values of "problem" as defined by the builder? Sure.

For what a buyer defines as a "problem"? Highly debatable.

Even in house construction, an activity that has been performed for literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS, there is no commoditization. If nothing else accounts for this, the bewildering array of local building codes assures that commodity construction as presented by a builder (like a national prefab builder) is really a business-level API that presents a uniform interface to buyers that hides a team that handles all the local idiosyncrasies underneath.
That's not what I mean. I think that any half-decent implementation in C would have been better than their current Ruby solution. And instead of spending all that time to research Judy arrays and other magic bullets, they could have already identified another problem zone and fixed it.

This just feels like "we have this huge and slow Ruby behemoth here, but using magic Judy arrays we made this little gear turn insanely fast!".
Yes... they change it to the original unless it's really clear the original change was super necessary. In cases when the original title tells you nothing of the content, they change it to something useful. Seems like a pretty transparent and reasonable heuristic to me.
I use this formatting style as well - it's also easier to format as the columns can all be aligned with tabs.
Two reasons I recently switched to FreeBSD on my home servers, Dtrace and ZFS. In GNU/Linux I would need sort combination of strace,mpstat,ltrace,vmstat,iostat etc.. to find out the the things that a simple Dtrace script can tell me and also without dramatically affecting a running daemon process as the ptrace* system calls do.
The author of this would have his answer if he understood the IQ floor necessary to be a good engineer, access to computers at a young age and willingness to troubleshoot obscure problems is relatively rare in the population.

There are far less high IQ individuals in the world than the world needs right now.

We can teach coding to young people, but as of now we can't reliably increase IQ.

We have studies that prove agents such as piracetam administered to pregnant rats increase the intelligence of their offspring.

If the Tech titans that want cheaper labor really want to solve the problem of lack of quality engineers they could think long term and throw massive amounts of funding at neuroscience and nootropic research.

In the information age we all live and die by our wits. Policy and R&D money should be directed at raising the mean intelligence of the population through novel scientific breakthroughs.

Far easier though to just lobby for government policies that make it easier to import the rare kind of people Google, Microsoft and Facebook need.

So we have a situation where no one is focused on solving the root of the problem (a need to increase the cognitive abilities of humans) and no one is lobbying to protect the financial interests of working coders in the United States.
For Y combinator graduates, timing Should be everything
We shouldn’t let an artificial release of a “class” of startups determine how prepared they are to enter the market. Rather, we should strive to foster an environment in which startups don’t feel pressured to fundraise before being absolutely ready.
Ask HN: Has anyone here gotten a good job via the traditional hiring system?
I'll define traditional hiring as getting a job via the "Career" or "Jobs" section of a company's website or going through a staffing firm (except for small startups which is a completely different category).

Personally, as one data point, I've never found a good job by this system. To be fair, I've been offered jobs but the jobs offered have been less than stellar. Often times, I'm told I'm highly unqualified by the staffing firm except for the most basic of jobs.

I'm curious, has anyone here found a good job via the traditional hiring system? If not, does anyone have a clue why so much resources is spent on this system? What does this system actually accomplish?

Asking jobs from acquaintances I've met throughout my life feels like supporting the "Good ol' Boys" and could be unfair to others who might be better than me but so far it's the one that worked best for me :(
Thanks for sourcing my statement. I was worried for a minute that I'd misremembered it. (I'm also glad that's a word!)
Linking a time to a physical location is not optimal, with the number of cameras around.
Have a look at Crystal as well.

https://github.com/manastech/crystal
FULL TIME or INTERN - Priceonomics (YC W2012)

* We build things and ship fast. We're looking for people who do the same.

The rest is negotiable :).

omar+hn05012013@priceonomics.com
Well, see, that's the difference between a house builder and a programmer. Not just anyone can write a program with "no problem". Sure, sure, anyone can learn to write one off hacks (much like building couch forts), but building something that doesn't fall down when the first woodpecker comes along takes a lot more experience, training, thought, effort and time.
Jeff Dean.
I wonder if something like Crystal could have helped.

https://github.com/manastech/crystal
Where are you located? Geography is still a big factor in hiring decisions, so demand is not evenly distributed. In Silicon Valley, $88k is what good-but-not-great fresh college graduates get paid.
It seems you could learn a lot about a person by what stories they upvote. Is there some way of anonymizing this data enough to prevent deanonymization, without making it useless?
Because the demand isn't actually high.
I wonder why so many people hate writing sql with such a poisonous intensity these days. I remember my database-systems class being one of my favorite classes when I was in school. Whats wrong with relational algebra and writing sql? I always thought they were fun.
How Foursquare is Merging Online and Offline Data
On the other hand, you can't automatically assume they don't care about it at all.

I build most of my desktops, and I certainly want to reduce power usage when I'm not using them. Enough so that I'd pay for a power supply that supports the lower power states.

Not everybody who builds their own PC is doing so to make a ridiculously over powered system.
Java hot reloading (free alternative to JRebel)
The complaint was about UNIX alternatives, not free beer.
>> If the function is small <<

And if the function is not small?
Maybe because we're in it for the work, not the money. $75-100K is enough to provide a comfortable life suitable for supporting that work. Not enough of us hold out for bigger offers to push the line up; pay enough to support coding something interesting 8-10 hours a day and we're happy.

A friend noted "as engineers, we would do this stuff for free - it's just all the ancillary BS we get paid to put up with."
Video now live: http://vimeo.com/65057265 [Slides in sync with audio]
I would say programmers are like skilled laborers in this simile. Some are plumbers, some are electricians, some are woodworkers, some are handymen. I wouldn't hire a plumber to wire a house, nor an electrician to plumb it. Either might be able to do the job, or might not. A handyman probably can, but most likely not with the same quality, or knowledge about how to fix more specific or harder problems.

I don't expect a programmer that's been steeped in the world of UNIX daemons to write a good customer facing website on their first attempt, and I wouldn't expect a front-end Javascript programmer to know how to deal with multiprocess programming in C/C++. Asking them to do so may not result in something "with no problem". At least not in an acceptable time frame.
I think the point is "there cannot be bugs, so obviously he hacked it!"
The complaint was about UNIX alternatives.

Linux distributions are not even UNIX, just UNIX compatible.
Attention-Deficit Drugs Face New Campus Rules
Video now live: http://vimeo.com/65057265
Agreed. This is just going to push people towards piracy.
My experience.

Changed formatting is a shock the first time. But it does not take long to retrain yourself to find it aesthetically more pleasing.

When you're making a quick fix to a batch job that does not hit the problematic query for 30 minutes, the cost of messing up the comma is 30 minutes. (Yeah, I know, it all should be properly factored out, and unit tested. But there is a lot of lightly tested code in the real world that behaves just like I said.) Because SQL is stored as plain text, there is real value in making your mental compiler have to do no work to notice stupid syntactical stuff.
> Programming is like a house builder.

Sorry, but that analogy is completely wrong. I would recommend reading Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man-Month" (among many other books on software estimation) to understand why.

He argues that unlike activities involving physical mediums like house building, computer programming creates with an intractable medium. You would be surprised, in the field of programming, that many so-called "programmers" cannot even build a simple house that is stable on its own foundations.
You can bring even more value to the table in terms of interoperability if you have the mongo api implemented on the client. No more looking at a different set of docs (backbone/angular/spine/ember/etc...) to figure out how to query the cache on the client differently than you do on the server.

The meteor guys have implemented this logic in a package called minimongo: http://bit.ly/YmS3Y1
SEEKING WORK - Hartford, CT / Remote OK

Full stack ASP.NET Developer with wide range of experiences including startups, high traffic ecommerce retailing and facebook games and line of business applications.

C# Asp.net: MVC, Web Api, Entity Framework, NHibernate, RavenDB

Javascript: Vanilla, jQuery, Knockout, AngularJs, Require

johnefarrell@gmail.com
https://github.com/jfreal ( most of the "good" stuff is private )
I've always had amazing support from the rsync.net guys. Great service, amazing price, and surprisingly knowledgeable staff (I use duplicity to backup my home Linux servers, and they were able to help me diagnose a problem when I went to restore my backups a few months back).

I believe it's ran by the same folks who run JohnCompanies...
Thanks Will!
Not sure if intentional, but Stonebreaker is an awesome misspelling of Stonebraker.
> 1) Is there an easy tutorial somewhere on calling out to native code from Ruby?

The canonical documentation is here: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/README.EXT
Just a tip, you'd probably get more traction if you mentioned names of the companies and what they actually do.
My summary:

Your code should not deal with things at a lower level of abstraction than itself. External libraries tend to expose lower level interfaces than you need (because the API needs to be flexible enough to deal with a variety of use cases) , so build an abstraction in the middle between your code and the library that gives you exactly the functionality you need and nothing more.
Would you pay $20-25 a month for Netflix?
Drive or Be Driven: Google’s Driverless Car
Fix Your Broken Stand-up
Amobee -- Silicon Valley -- H1B, Intern, Full-time

I'm the technical lead at Amobee on our PULSE 3D platform, looking to disrupt the way we consume and create mobile advertising. We're looking for developers on HTML5, WebGL, iOS, and Android to build the next generation of rich media as well as touch-based content creation tools from the ground up.

We believe that ads should actually be fun; as fast, interactive and personalized as the best games and apps. That's why we built the world's first 3D platform for display advertising. Our startup, AdJitsu, was acquired by Amobee almost a year ago. Our team continues to operate like an autonomous startup, with the added benefit of our parent company's resources.

Our PULSE 3D platform combines WebGL (or native OpenGL on iOS) with HTML5 to create a designer-friendly environment for building interactive experiences powered by programmable shaders. You can have a look at some of our ads here: http://amobee.com/3d.

As a startup within a startup (we're a team of six people including three engineers with a lot of autonomy), you'll have the chance to own and solve problems such as:

* Build the next generation of realtime rendering and user interaction on mobile
* Rethink content creation tools, from the ground up, for multi-touch interfaces
* Design immersive, sensor-driven user experiences for clients
* Analyze billions of data points from user interaction

We touch everything from SIMD assembly and fragment shaders, to Hadoop and Pig, and almost everything in between. Objective C, C++, HTML 5, Javascript, WebGL, Python, git and more are tools we use every day.

Our client include brands like BMW, Samsung, Autodesk, and Nokia. Our team brings experience from Apple, Cooliris, Dreamworks, Microsoft, Namco Bandai, NVIDIA, Ubisoft, and more. We're backed by the likes of Accel, Sequoia, and Singapore Telecom.

If this whets your appetite, get in touch with me and let's talk!
That looks amazing! Hadn't seen this before, but it's what I've been after for a long time.
Gccgo doesn't work on OS X (or any other non-ELF) platform, and it's useless on anything but Linux anyway as segmented stacks are supported only with the gold linker, which is not ported to non-Linux platforms.
For the same reason there isn't a glut of NBA players. Anyone can play, few people can become good enough. Next question.

Edit: disagree? Downvote if you want, but please counterpoint.
I was puzzeled over that number too, as putting up a site like that, even if you are buying the servers from scratch and hire a first rate web dev, shouldn't cost more than 10-20k$. I went through to the linked artice, and appeareantly, most of it went for consultants.
I mean there are consultants out there that are worth their money, and I bet the site is kai-zen optimized very nicely, even though I can't tell, but 327 million $ is quite a hump for that website. The main problem seems to be that government contracting is not a regular market, else joe's jquerry shack would have ourrun and outpaced accenture in both cost and quality.
Zerigo sells their customers email addresses
Cambridge, MA

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Where else can your passion for programming and open source tools take you?
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I see your point but I think "forgo" is a strong word. I have made and will continue to make a great salary with great benefits and be able to choose companies based on cultural fit.

That's something that I would never give up for an extra 50k a year.
The point still stands, unless you work for the handful (or less) of companies that pay FU money to their engineers, you're still paid equivalent of what a Dentist makes, and much less than what a good salesperson makes in a much much smaller city.

I think the answer is that the demand isn't actually very high. Programming is still considered a cost center for most companies, the quality of the product is determined by how much they are willing to spend on salary, not vice versa.
This reminds me about something that I like in C#, you can leave an extra comma at the end of a sequence and the compiler doesn't freak out on you.
> But the casino had been suspicious, and Kane didn’t collect the last win

Bad move!

This reminds me of Louis Colavecchio. He made quite a lot of money off Atlantic City casinos using counterfeit slot machine tokens. The casinos KNEW they were being ripped off by a counterfeiter, because their token counts at the end of the day were coming in consistently high, but they were stymied because they could not tell which tokens were counterfeit. That made it hard to even get started tracking their origin. Even the token manufacturers were not able to determine which of a set of tokens were authentic and which were counterfeit. [1]

Colavecchio's downfall came one day when he was playing a machine, and it jammed, eating his token. He simply moved to the next machine, and continued playing. That caught the attention of the guard watching that row of machines on the security camera. These machines were something like $10 or $25 per play machines. When a legitimate gambler has a token of that value eaten by a machine, they don't just let it go and move on to another machine. They report it and make a fuss until they get their money back. The guard realized that one person who would just move on would be the counterfeiter--he would not want to draw attention to himself by making a fuss, and psychologically would think of his tokens as only worth a few cents and so would not be upset at losing one.

With that lead, they were able to watch Colavecchio and get enough evidence to nail him.

[1] Years after Colavecchio was caught and convicted, his counterfeit tokens remained in circulation in Atlantic City casinos, because they never did figure out a way to tell which were real and which were Colavecchio's.
I'm not sure I like this idea, it would mean all our votes are no longer anonymous. I think there is something to be said for not having to publish what you are voting for. You could anonymize the data with hashing but to make it useful it would still have to be able you to see what other items were voted on by one account. It would then not be too hard to match people to a hashed account is based on low voted items with only a few comments as you could assume they had also been one of the votes, with enough points of data you can then make a fairly safe judgment on who someone is.

I beleve PG has implimented a fairly sofisticated voting ring detection tool, I think I remember him talking about it before.
When I looked at this six months ago the answer was thinkpads. But there is still oddness. I got a X1 Carbon which is a fantastic system once you get rid of the awful Windows setup it ships with but I ran out of time to mess around getting FreeBSD right and moved to ubuntu which is adequate.
Great coder can't understand why there aren't more great coders around. Film at 11.

Perhaps Greenspun has "suffered" from working with too many great coders, or finds programming easy, so he can't understand why there aren't more great coders around. Maybe if he studied more sociology, or IQ statistics, or hell even economics (in the form of market demands) he'd be better equipped to understand why there aren't more great coders.

I know who Greenspun is, and I have a lot of respect for his programming chops, but this comes off as someone either disconnected from reality, or someone thinking that because they are expert at one thing, they are expert at everything.
Isn't Judy Array patented? What's the legal status using it?
Handybook: Not as Handy as They Think
> In fact using bitcoin would make it far easier for someone to start tracking anyone who used the service by tracing back the transaction chain from the wallet of the hosting provider.

Assuming all transactions will go to one address or come from "traceable" sender addresses is a bit presumptive.

Why not let the users sign up for the service (over Tor or whatever), then generate a bitcoin address for them to send BTC to? Then every transaction has a new address.

Besides that, there are a ton of ways to keep it anonymous using bitcoin.
Gaming site hijacks players' computers to mine Bitcoin
Hi all,

A while back there was a post on stand-ups being poisonous. I have a video course on fixing common problems with your stand-up, so I thought I'd offer it for free to the HN community.

Hope you find it useful.
Why would it be considered fraud?

Doesn't it speak more to the lack of operational oversight of the casinos? I've never worked in the gaming industry, but I have to think they have metrics showing a flow of winnings/losings.
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The app keeps the fonts in the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\skyfonts-google folder - that's a terrible idea, since the Temp folder might be nuked. It's meant to be for temp files, not cache.

Also the systray app does not respond correctly. And then the manual download of font? What gives... I'm totally missing what's this about (I'm not a designer, so I probably don't know much).
I would tend to normalise arrays too, but I can see the argument that when getting an 'app' and turning it into an object in $programming_language (say), it's rather a pain to have to go through the sql result set building up an object from the denormalised data (and arguably results in a lot of wasted data being transmitted). It gets particularly bad if you have more than one 1-many relationship on the object you're trying to build up.