skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but one million dollars just seems like a huge sum to give up for one project to me. I'm not saying they made the wrong choice, it's just one I can't see myself making. $1M is a decade of $100k a year. Money might not be /everything/ but that's a pretty comfortable life while you work on other projects or hold another job with no fear of running into serious financial problems as long as you don't do something ridiculous.
What makes me happy about Clojure is that it has the potential to become mainstream, at least among the top 10%.

I know a couple of people who've secretly used Clojure at their Java jobs. I don't know what will happen to them when they go through code review, but it's pretty cool that they can do that.
I wake up every morning with my ears ringing because I have no other way to work open floor plan
Those programming challenges are silly, completely unrelated to real-life programming. Staying awake for 24 hs, writing ultra-optimized snippets of code that barely compile with zero documentation. Training exactly the kind of programmer that is useless in any organization except for programming challenges.
Poll: long-term contractors, what is your hourly rate?
As per the original poster request https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5769170

I made less choices, to make it less confusing and easier to read.

Original text:

For those who work for their clients/employers relatively long term (e.g. > 6 months).

What is your hourly rate, or your monthly salary converted into hourly rate (divided by ~165 hours) in USD?

EDIT:

for Software Engineers, [UX] Designers or any other profession with a "similar" responsibility.

So it is NOT for lawyers, doctors, financial consultants, CEO's, etc...
15 or less
15-30
31-50
51-70
71-90
91-120
121-150
150+
> Turns out that the BackBlaze filelist service (that watches for changes to files) is very poorly behaved. Initially we discovered that it fights with apple's mds

That's really disturbing, does it misbehave and interact with /dev/fsevents directly instead of using the public fsevents api? If so somebody needs to get flogged over that choice.
> I initially discarded financial as I assumed it would be long hours and legacy code (and I don't dig suits) but a recent oconversation mention that it may be normal hours (37.5h/week), very decent pay and benefits and interesting technology. Is that true?

You can end up in finance doing SAP integration, spending most of your day thinking about the quickest way to get fired... or, you can end up in finance writing distributed real-time software for high-frequency trading, solving cutting edge technical problems while also raking in cash. The choice is yours.

(I mention this only because I once applied for a London based job. The description was almost exactly what I just wrote, with a salary of 150,000 GBP annually. Unfortunately I didn't get the job, but hey, worth a shot :)
I don't understand this thing where people can't get over the existence if null. If you ask your ORM for something that doesn't exist in the database, what exactly are you expecting back? Sometimes things just aren't there.

I dunno, perhaps I am thinking too simplistically about it, but as a concept it seems sound to me. The problem is when our logic is broken with respect to the thing's existence. Not null itself.
There you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5769348
My Language Design Deal Breakers
Shaving a few hours won't open new markets or otherwise fundamentally alter our relationship with distance. It's telling that "convenience" is the selling point, which implies a difference of degrees rather than kind, and shows a lack of ideas of what we could do with this technology.

The next great hop in transportation would have to be instant or near-instant teleportation. And faster jets don't meaningfully bring us closer to that.
I think the trick is that any programming language that lets me operate on bytes (and hence makes me care about things like memory addressing) shouldn't prevent me from having nulls.

A NULL (usually defined as 0) is a valid memory location, especially if you are doing certain types of systems work--the fact that we've used it as a sentinel value in C/C++ is a separate problem entirely.

Maybe we need to use a taxonomy where languages that do not express anything about layout in memory (as bytes, quibits, or whatever) are kept separate from other languages.

The issue, of course, is that eventually you need to move out from algorithm space and start dealing with real hardware, which speaks bytes. Then again, a model where you only interface over JSON blobs might obviate the need for that, provided you don't talk to anything that speaks in something other than numbers and human-readable strings.
I prefer instant messaging to start a conversation... it's asynchronous. You can ignore it for a little while if you need just a couple minutes more of flow state
I am Swiss-based and for senior software developer roles my freelance daily rate is equivalent to USD1000 (one thousand) per day. The contract duration has no relation to my rate.

Although, I agree with zacharyvoase that I do not see the point of your question.
Completely agreed. I mainly fly internationally, and while shaving 2 hours off a 8 hour flight would be wonderful, it doesn't help me, as the majority of my time is spent in airports between the flights.

For me to get to where my family lives (one layover), it takes me:

1 Hour drive to airport

2 Hours because it's an international flight

8 Hour Flight

2 Hours Immigration / Baggage

1 Hour Re-checkin

3-5 Hour Layover

30 Minute Commuter Flight

30 Minutes for baggage

30 Minutes drive home

So for my entire flight, the flying (even on a 8 hour flight) is less than half of my total time. By lowering the amount of time between connections, or lessening the amount of connections that need to be made, you can get greater gains than by flying faster planes.

Cheaper planes and cheaper flights could actually make overall flying time SHORTER, because there would be more planes in the sky, and less time between fights.

-----------------------

Long rambling story:

When I first rode the bullet train back in college, I thought it would be like riding an airplane, at least from a management perspective. My friends and I bought the ticket a week in advance, made sure we were packed, and got to the station a good hour in advance of my train leaving.

It was only then that I realized that the security for getting on a bullet train is "show me your ticket" and that if you miss your train, you can just sit in the non-reserved seating on the next available train that will be along in under 5 minutes. (Back then it was more like 10, but still)

While you can't really compare trains and planes (and automobiles) in these situations, it still makes me think that the solution to faster travel is not faster planes, but better infrastructure and administration for travel.
Thank you very much! Now lets wait for results.
There are other aspects to this issue. I'll preface this by saying that I know this will be offensive to a number of people. So be it.

American secondary/high-school education, outside of schools and communities outside the norm, is horribly bad. This is the reason Americans have a reputation for being ignorant. And that they are. I would venture to say that the average European secondary school graduate runs circles around American kids. I do realize I am generalizing to a grotesque degree. However, I have had the experience of hiring and working with a number of first year college students. A few surprise you because they are outside the norm: thoughtful, respectful, inquisitive and reasonably well informed. They generally came from families that valued education and somewhat old-fashioned cultural values. The rest? Well, let's just say they never lasted very long.

College, for some, is a required level of remedial education. Kids are coming out of schools valuing drinking, partying and drugs far more than hard work, dedication, the ability to communicate, think and write.

I have seen horrible examples of non-degreed individuals interacting in the context of a professional business environment.

So, yeah, you get to 30, 40 or 50 years of age and things are very different. The cool coder with the dreadlocks and no degree might still be able to get a job. However, unless you are a superstar or run your own business you will have to go up against others with degrees during your job search. In a lot of cases you will loose, regardless of what your actual capabilities might be.
Yes but trip duration in terms of number of stops or speed of the jet that takes you there?
I was referring to actual images used or featured in the table cell, not tiled backgrounds via UIColor colorWithPatternImage like you mentioning. But yes, it is important to do that as well.
I'm not so sure about that. See for example hushmail in 2007:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

While with this specific case here they intercepted the passphrase server-side, they specifically hinted that it wouldn't have made a difference with their java applet.

"The extra security given by the Java applet is not particularly relevant, in the practical sense, if an individual account is targeted"
GCC 4.8.0 vs. LLVM Clang 3.3 Compiler Performance Three-Way
Welcome. I added your edit.
Yes. I was basically interested for software engineers only, but made it bit general for the benefit of e.g. designers.

And this post could just serve as an idea for a more elaborated Poll. I mean, all the previous hourly rate Polls were tailored for short-term freelancers.
Hoping for some more exciting discussion here than what could be found in /r/programming sigh
It's culture. People do it because everyone else is doing it. And hey, it's less expensive and more flexible, not good reasons to buck the status quo.
This is what people will say about Twitter, Facebook, and Gplus in a year from now.
Self-employed, I'm the one working on that fashion thing.
I don't get the following requirement:

Great Windows support

That doesn't have anything to do with the programming language. That's all about the libraries and toolchains that the language ships with. Sure, when I evaluate a language, I also take into account the maturity of the libraries and tools that the language includes. But I don't think lack of library support (especially for a single platform) should be a criterion in judging the design of the language.
Hard to say, every country has its own market gotchas. Those 50k something devs are almost always working in salaried positions.

I can count in one hand the number of technical freelancers I've ever seen or heard about but I also have never actively searched for one. On the other hand there are a lot of companies that act as middlemen between contractors and companies. These contractors are employed and paid by the middlemen, but they go on to work directly on the client's site. These middlemen make a very decent profit since they pay their employees the usual (20-40 euros/h), while they bill them out to companies for up to five times as much. In some languages these companies have a specific name but I don't know how to translate it. I think they're a bit different than the agencies in the USA where as far as I know they take a percentage of the contractor's hourly rate.

In any case I guess Linkedin is a decent starting point. In some European countries it is used by huge percentages of the working population.
Let me share a similar story.

A long time ago, I did my undergraduate thesis at UW on a project called Kimera [1], a bytecode verifier for Java back in the days when such things were still pretty novel. I came across a nice fuzzing technique to test our verifier using Sun's and Microsoft's (all other verifiers being the former) as oracles. After we found all our bugs using this method, we began to notice bugs in the other verifiers, and we were able to turn one of these bugs into a full on security breach in the Netscape browser.

So we got Microsoft's attention (not that far from UW), we met a few times, and they offered to buy our test suite/technology for an amount of money where my share would have been a lot for the time. However, the professor in charge decided to spin the tech off into a startup. The startup eventually failed, but I think the decision was reasonable considering this was during the first dotcom boom and everyone else was doing it. I also got some nice consulting income out of it, and the whole Java thing at Microsoft came tumbling down a few years anyways.

At the end of the day, I still wound up working for Microsoft after grad school :)

[1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/kimera/
Makes sense. If only it were always so easy. Thanks :)
It was ultimately a business decision - the same kind that leads to product shutdowns and all the other "evil" things that new Google does.
Sounds like sour grapes to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_grapes
Open plans benefit only two categories:

1) Lazy managers or PMs, who either won't expend the effort to use ascertain on their own how things are progressing (code review, ticket / task lists, reports), or don't have the discipline to actually manage without continuously interrupting with questions about things they should already know.

2) Bean counting finance or facilities types, who foolishly look at cost as the primary design factor largely ahead of productivity and work quality (not quantity).

Giving people an environment where they can focus when needed (an "office") along with areas where collaboration can occur when desired ("war rooms") is the only approach that gives people the opportunity to excel.

I am extremely doubtful that the time and effort to go find someone in their workspace is more time consuming than the cumulative impact of constant distraction, be it visual or auditory. If it is the case, then these people can team up in a single office or work room.

Especially in tech, where more and more companies proclaim they provide choice and flexibility in tools, workstations, and even nutrition, forcing everyone to work in one, unfiltered common area is equivalent to putting them in a henhouse.

TL;DR - open plan offices are trendy bullshit to avoid spending enough for a comfortable workspace.
From first glance this appears much better than Pelican...
"To turn this around, why should businesses pay former students to learn about this on the job instead of paying them to be productive?"

Because it's expected that entry-level employees don't have a lot of experience. It's even possible that these young people have taught themselves all sorts of useful things on their own already, but haven't gotten around to teaching themselves version control or the particular database system or development environment that your company uses. I think it's a better investment to hire someone who is smart and a fast learner than it is to hire someone who happens to know the particular tools you currently use.

In the software field, we've somehow decided that it's normal for entry-level employees to have lots of practical experience. But in most other jobs, that's not the case: they learn at their employers' expense. How many new hires on Wall Street have ever used a bond trader's workstation? How many newly-hired railroad employees have ever driven a train? How many newly-hired lawyers have ever represented a client in court?
> Don't be a moron. Get a degree.

According to the stats for my region, 56% of women and 45% of men start into a degree program, yet the degree attainment rate is only 25%. I find this attitude a little bit troubling when such a large percentage of the population are already trying and failing.

Given the costs – actual and opportunity – involved, unless you are certain you are in the top ~25% of students and can derive value from that expense, it seems rather foolish to follow said advice. Do what feels right for you and your situation. You know yourself better than anyone else and if you are truly doing what you want to do, there should be no regrets either way.
I feel like a lot of people commenting here are correctly identifying that being dirt poor sucks. But they are then confusing this with a general linear (or near linear) relationship between money and happiness.

If you are doing a regular skilled job in a Western country I would argue you will have enough money to pursue happiness/not be overly blocked by lack of wealth.
A few things to consider:

1) The $1MM will most likely vest over 2~4 years.

2) You will lose 40-50% of the money to taxes depending on your exact situation.

3) This was the Clinton years where taxes were higher than they are today.
Give my weekend project a shot.
www.snaphost.me

No email support at the moment, but automatically updateds markdown files in your Dropbox.
Awesome Infographic on the Psychology of Color
Eventually, it catches up with you, and either austerity ensues or you go bankrupt. Happened to me a couple of times as a kid (via my parents, not my spending of course).
Yeah but then you need to support AZERTY (French), QWERTZ (Central Europe) and lots of other layouts too if you want to cover most people.
So, I had at least one project at school fail completely because we weren't using version control. Had the culture of the institution been "You will use a repo for this class, and you will learn to like it" this may have been averted (worse, I already knew and used repos for other things--I just derped with my partner on that project).

I think that including these basic tools in an intro course (perhaps as a first or second class topic) would be a good idea. The minor waste of expensive education time will be more than offset by the added productivity in later courses, and a grading workflow built around test suites that one simply pushes code to would probably make students and graders lives easier.

An anecdote:

One of my CS courses spent a week or two going over C and its pitfalls. Now, one could argue that any sufficiently bright student should be able to pick C up incidental to completing a course on programming in 'nix, but the fact is that the additional material covering things like dumb use of unions and linker errors and whatnot saved the ass of several classmates time and time again, both in school and in later years.

You can't have a purely theoretical education, especially in a field where at the end of the day you need (to quote Zed) "programming, motherfucker."

Students will in all likelihood get far more mileage out of a fast intro to VCS and *nix over the rest of their academic and professional careers than learning one more esoteric data structure.

By similar logic, mechanical engineering courses should never require students to learn the rudiments of welding or machining.
Going to school later on isn't a bad idea or impossible. It could be a good idea for some. I would guess for most it is difficult, if not impossible. Throw a couple of kids and a mortgage into the equation and it's really tough to make independent (and risky) decisions.

At some level I am suggesting this has nothing to do with earning more money but rather being able to get a job and not loose it to someone with a degree.

I don't know the answer to this question: How many technical people work at places like SpaceX without having at least a BS? Probably few, if any. You'd have to have a pretty serious track record to get past the filters at companies like that.

I am not being elitist here. Not at all. I am merely suggesting that the reader consider want it might mean not to have a degree later in life.
Liking someone's photo is just as much of a social interaction as complimenting someones dress in person. Just two different mediums.
You should not be 'angel investing'. Here is why: you don't have pre-established terms and contracts that state the exact terms.

If you gave me money with the only requirement being that I 'pay you back', all that means to me is. Give me $XX... I'll give you EXACTLY that amount back later on. No more, no less.
I can help with that:

"Workers in open-plan offices get sick more often" - Only supported by one study done in Denmark. Not enough research.

"Open-plan offices are less productive" - Supported by a study which only identified some of the negative effects of a open-office plan (such as the effect of irrelevant speech). That study didn't attempt to measure the benefits of an open office, or attempt to exhaustively list all of the effects of an open office, so it doesn't speak to the overall effect on efficiency.

All the other claims were either focused on employee opinions or were about things other than an open office plan.

You can guess what my opinion here is. At my previous company, the floor plan had both offices and a wide open area, so we could choose where to sit. I picked the open area and loved it. Being able to eavesdrop on the status of other teams, or having really easy group communication (as easy as yelling across the room) was incredibly valuable. I think the open office is especially nice in our industry since we really tend to suffer from under-communication and a lack of cross-team networking.

Anyway some folks at our company chose small offices and I think they enjoyed it. The ideal floor plan would have a mix of both I think. But I don't think Facebook's new one-giant-open-area building is nearly as awful as people make it out to be.
Saving General Yang (2013), Watch Movies Online Free, Full Download
I think your experience is probably better expressed as:

Poverty != Freedom

(Or rather, being dirt poor can get in the way of the good life.)

Most people in Western countries are not forced to borrow shampoo. If you are scraping around for basic needs than obviously your life choices are limited, but you don't need loads of money to move beyond this point.
You can see if pre-rendering is being triggered in chrome://net-internals#prerendering.

See: http://www.igvita.com/posa/high-performance-networking-in-go...

And "yes": https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/0f3592b8-d72c-40f7-9bbf...
Choices is countable, so thats "fewer choices" not "less choices".

Breaking open 150+ might be useful in some countries.

Where I am, basic consulting would get someone $500-$750/day. With 5+ years experience in a language/library that would be $750-$1250. 5+ years experience with languages + specific domain knowledge would be $1500-$3000+. eg. Codec implementation in assembler or VHDL/Verilog.
That is perfectly valid, to me. However, there is no reason to spread misinformation to cover such a decision and to bluntly cut off existing communications between people outside and inside of the Google Hangout domains. Without any warning to the former, even.
I certainly don't mean to equivocate developed and developing poverty, but I also don't agree with the inverse. Yes, we are not starving or threatened, for the most part. But in both worlds, poverty means dependence. It means not having options, or not having the ability to take opportunities. It means being stuck in a bad situation because anywhere else is worse.

My friend who works at Macy's does have clean water coming out of her tap, and that's something to be very thankful for, but that by itself doesn't make her free.
> In a developed country like the USA, if you gave a person on welfare a pile of cash, they'd most likely just go mad with it until it was all spent, then revert to their prior welfare lifestyle.

Some people surely will. The question is, are those the outliers, or the mainstream? And, even if people do that, is that a cheaper way than the current social welfare provider industry structure to keep them out of prisons or emergency rooms or other expensive institutions?