skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The startups are there and they pay well for someone in his 20s, but by the time you're 35 and looking to raise a family, you've priced yourself out of non-financial jobs (if you need to stay in NYC) unless you're independently wealthy or extremely well-established.

This is much of why I think the future is elsewhere. Not NYC, not the Valley. It's going to be somewhere where it's possible for a normal 40-year-old to have a career as a programmer (not a manager who occasionally codes) because it genuinely takes decades to become great at this stuff. Most of these "social" apps could be built by anyone, but if I needed a medical device, or an extremely high-performance numeric library, I'd rather the code be written by a seasoned gray-haired guy who understands technology at a deep level than by the sorts of people in charge at a lot of the startups where I've worked.
Oh, a _business_ decision. I guess we can just let them continue to embrace, extend, and extinguish the commons we've built over the last decades, then. No complaints necessary.

(I'm not a GOOG shareholder, so their business needs don't matter to me. I _am_ now going to be cut off from my contacts, though. Part of markets is the feedback that comes with mis-steps, and saying "it's just business" does a dis-service to those of us who feel that Google has been over-stepping their bounds.)
Concurrency in Clojure [InfoQ]
At 29, I was married with our first child on the way. So 6 digits don't really stretch all that far. Of course, there is a huge difference between 100,000, 500,000 and 800,000. All 6 digits...
The economics behind the failure of the Concorde are far more complicated than "people didn't buy enough tickets". There were an extremely limited amount of routes (basically you could fly out of NYC or Washington DC to either London or Paris), mostly due to the problem of sonic booms, but also because the plane design was such that there was essentially a minimum travel distance for it to ever be reasonably economically viable. It isn't like there was a Southwest offering Concorde flights from LA to SFO at 1.5x or 2.0x times the price of a normal ticket. The Concorde actually sold pretty well given how limited the routes were until the entire airline industry started to crater around the turn of the century (9/11, etc).

There was also a lot of politics behind the Concorde discontinuation that had nothing to do with pure economics.

Having said all of that, our cheapness does seem to be doing harm to a lot of industries over time, where if you want to buy a new product your choices are like a dozen shitty things made by the lowest bidder in China or 2 "premium" choices that are only marginally better than the cheap shit at like 5 times the cost. Something similar to the capitalistic middle-class squeeze we have been going through seems to apply to product choices as well.
Having read a number of your posts Michael, I can't help but see a pattern which is skewed by 2 things:

1) you seem to have worked a quite a few terrible companies ("salary is how much it costs to waste your time"?? Really?)

2) your attitude is almost always negative, which may have had a significant effect on #1

Don't chase money. Go for experience. And that's not just career experience. Life experience. Travel. Choose adventure, and connections with others.

Some of the best things that happened during my 20s:

- getting fired from my first job after only 6 months. I didn't demonstrate my value to the mostly non-technical management enough, and a later hire above me made it seem like my role was unnecessary. He got a 30% raise and 14 hour days, I lost my job

- after working for a few years and feeling confident in my skills, pushing pause and leaving to travel the world for the better part of a year. During that time I learned to ride motorcycles and scuba dive which have become my non-code passions

- deciding that coding was not just my job, but a craft and skill I would make an effort to always try and improve

- most recently, joining a group of awesome folks to do a startup that has already begun to change people lives for the better, and I hope will continue to grow and do so even more

There have been ups and downs, I've never fought super hard for the highest salary possible, but I've always felt fairly compensated and been comfortable. Most importantly, I've learned to enjoy every experience of it all, even the bad ones.

When it comes to your career, it's pretty simple: have a good attitude, be honest, do the things you say you will, to the best of your ability, and always be improving (aka learn from your mistakes and move on). Out of that, you will have a career. There is no end game, there is just the journey
> All that talk about Client Choice, Service Choice and Platform Choice has been replaced with "if the other big players don't play, why should we?".

It seems like the impact of the other big players not playing is down played here. Did it not allow facebook users to start conversations with google talk users but not vice versa?

Playing the cooperation card first is what google did, but in the iterated prisoners dilemma you often need to play the non-cooperative card if that is what your peers are doing.

That really seemed to be the core of the issue. Now 5-25 years from now maybe google will have an entrenched culture of playing the non-cooperative card and will not reach for the cooperative card first but I do not judge this to be the case yet.
> Unfortunately, the meds are giving me side effects (increased heart rate).

That's because it's speed, an amphetamine.
Thank you for your input. Just a little more information don't know if it changes anything but the startup came to me with nothing but an idea. No proof of concept only an excel spreadsheet with potential revenues etc. The money I loan them gave them the necessary finances to start the company and I would go out on a limb to say without the money the company wouldn't be in existence today.

Ps. I also purchased equity initially with an investment of 75K for 30% of company. 3 months in the company needed additional funding as development of the application went over schedule and budget.
If you make an investment into a company of $50k with no terms than do no ask for nor expect a repayment greater than your investment. It is your responsibility to lay out terms as part of an investment rather than make the assumption of your return based on their perceived worth.
All your citations are third world countries.
Maybe we could sleep better in such an airplane. How do they protect the crew from radiation in a nuclear submarine? Can't they do the same in a very big and silent plane?
I've found that automated testing helps with prototyping because you can make changes to tests for your program and the tests let you know when you missed a spot, those locations could live for months in your code in a project without tests.
Debating How to Market an iPhone App
No. I don't see it IPOing as don't think it can no more than 20-30 Million Revenue Company. Don't see it being sold as it's very specific to a particular subset of people.
I'm not 100% clear on your last point, are you saying that if the send you Business-class you'll be able to get some amount of work done on the plane that you won't if Economy? I'm not arguing here, just trying to understand.
Earphones that actually block sound are far superior to noise canceling headphones that degrade the sound quality of whatever you're listening to.
Actually I think daily might work out better for most people since it allows for smaller projects and also taking single day holidays etc. when on a long contract. I used to charge £500/day until I went permanent. I only went perm. because of the additional benefits etc was higher than the tax benefits.
because creating a function using a string is the same as using

new Function("code");

which makes use of eval() for the code
Misinformation can be beautiful too
it would be passed into eval()
Why the obsession with weed?
I was confident of a good outcome either way. Microsoft was a safe bet, but for the startup, I was foolishly optimistic. It did work out well, but I was very lucky.

As it turns out, Microsoft would have been several times better financially, (primarily due to stock appreciation), but I really couldn't see staying there for the five years required for everything to vest.
Ocaml? Static types, garbage collected, not sure about windows support, and it still has null (IIRC). http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/62685/why-isn...

It's C-fast.
I personally get more angry with bad design annoyances that will probably never change. Like the way YouTube videos stall and reload when you click back in the video or not begin able to filter out certain news items on Google News etc.

PS. I was kind of teasing. Don't take me to seriously ;-).
Ask them what they think is fair, and also give them the option to wait longer. They may be willing to give 10x if you are willing to wait until they are at $10m revenue.
I live in Australia and occasionally have to fly to the U.S. for business (the Pacific flight alone is a 15 hour trip one way and an 18 hour trip return). I would lower my consulting fees and channel the money into my airfares if I could get a flight that would do it in half the time. 24+ hours travel time (including connecting flights airports and taxis) is torture.

Sadly, I don't think I'll get the opportunity for anything quicker in my lifetime. I predict there will be humans on Mars before a supersonic cross-Pacific passenger aircraft.
The main issue with free is that there's a mismatch of incentives, since the devs ultimately have to consider their own economic situation.

As soon as the situation looks troublesome for them, nothing's stopping them from leaving. So in the worst case, they can code their way into a corner, leave you with the bill to get someone who can fix the mess, and then claim the work as experience, whether or not it was good work and fit the goals of the company.

One way you can bring the incentives back into alignment is to make the projects they work on open source and open development(high public visibility). That may not fit your existing business...but you aren't paying for them yet either :)
(a) This poll tops out way way too low. Put the plus sign on $400.

(b) Based purely on statistical intuition a lot of you people are undercharging.

(c) Don't charge hourly.
Whether you have null pointers in the language is orthogonal from having control over memory layout. You can have nullable pointers at the machine level without introducing them into the type system. (The typical way to do that is Maybe/Option types.)

What the author is talking about is the idea that a pointer dereference operation will never result in a failure (exception, segfault, panic, etc). That's a separate concern from control over memory layout.
Sorry, but no. It was the wrong choice financially, but the right choice for my emotional well-being. I also reasoned about regrets years down the road -- I'd probably regret not having tried my own thing.

And I don't explain this "every chance [I] get". I think about it rarely, and discuss it even less. I've done well enough financially that giving up the Microsoft cash just doesn't matter. I just mention it here because it seemed relevant to the topic at hand.
This reminds me of myself because I've been trying to get $100 to make a website, but not one person has given me a single dollar...
another important feature: virtual file systems

1. upload something at http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/dnd/all_types_of_impor...

2. see files list here filesystem:http://html5-demos.appspot.com/temporary/

3, wat?

explained here

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/#toc-...

as someone who worked with HTML5 FS API before, I can tell you its async API design ins PITA to write with.
No offense, but my lawyer doesn't even charge me $400/hour. Who is paying that much and for what? I've been in the contracting game for almost a decade now and have rarely, if ever, seen anything like that for programming work.

I'm not disparaging, I'm really just curious. Thanks.
Yeah, this point is just plain dumb. And although he says windows is an extremely popular o/s, it might be, in general, but not for software engineering. A unix like environment is far superior for software dev, unless you stay in visual studio all day (or eclipse)

The other points are largely flame bait too. A competent developer can manage just fine in java, python, c++ or a host of other languages that fail his tests.

A classic case or the bad worker who blames his tools. My response to this kind of blog post is grow up, deal with the reality of the languages that are in every day use and stop whining about things like null pointers!
It varies by client and job. 12+ years on my own mostly doing asp.net web stack stuff, SQL Server etc. Mobile with Xamarin quite a bit now.

Rate between 125 and 195 depending on various terms.

Also more interesting, I have been able to convert nearly all my projects to a retainer based - pay ahead - model. Usually in 100 hour blocks.

In Louisville KY and most of my clients are elsewhere. 5-7 years ago the expectation was largely on-site. Now 100% remote save the occasional meeting.
I believe I get to downplay that because the federation they joined helped grow their own network, and allowed them to do Google Talk for other domains. I know many companies that have moved their XMPP stuff to Google for that.

Now those outside contacts are cut off, without any warning. Worse, they see their inside contacts online, can send them messages that never show up in Hangouts!

Those big players are hardly affected, though. Also, Google could simply block those entities that don't fully federate (only).
rta, he specifically mentions mod_rewrite
I agree with you that JavaScript crypto is dubious in many applications, but as a note, I believe that HTML/JavaScript makes a good cross platform application platform that, due to the lack of difficult to reproduce compile steps, has the potential to provide increased security over traditional applications. In particular, it should be possible for something like a Chrome application to not update until it has received signatures of the source code itself from multiple trusted sources who have supposedly reviewed the code, which, while not perfect of course, is better than the usual model for native applications. That's one of a few reasons that the Web Crypto standard should be encouraged, IMO.
Although we wrote this article informally in 2011, we stand behind it in 2013. I'd also add, in case Nadim was wondering who reads info@matasano.com, that I'm a Matasano founder and not an employee.

Don't build cryptographic features using browser Javascript.
I wish we had more trains. Not just for passengers, but in general. They just get the best cost per mile per pound were gonna get on planet Earth, since the physics of cars requires constant acceleration / deceleration and 2 dimensions of movement, and planes require lift.

I'd love a train from Miami to Boston that hits all the major cities and averages something between the terrible 80 mph Amtrack trains and the way too expensive per mile (or km in a more civilized country =P) bullet trains in Korea or Japan.

Also, that doesn't cost $200 and doesn't take 2 days trip. It should be so much cheaper taking a vacation on wheels than paying the cost to get luggage airborne, and it really is the infrastructure being awful.

Wow, a round trip ticket to Austin is around $800. That is just unacceptable.
Yes, but this requires the additional steps (and work) of making the changes to your tests. Tests give a good approximation of what static analysis gives you, but it is more cumbersome. (Of course tests can also do things static analysis can't)
Canada is not a third world country...
Not sure about python or web work, I mainly do C/C++/hardware/Security/Performance. I think Python+web sort of projects would best be charged as a whole or page-by-page / feature-by-feature. ie charge by outcome.

Its hard to build a case for differentiating the value of one JS/Ruby/Python programmers hours against another as the barrier to entry is low without a context.

Where as you can differentiate with a Portfolio of completed projects and indicative prices.

The other thing to look at, is can you convincingly argue 5+ years experience, or is that 5x 1 years experience? (ie doing the same thing for 5 years, versus really having moved up the expert scale).

The question to consider when you sell yourself, what is the lowest realistic substitute the person hiring you could use? How do you contextualize and stratify that decision tree?
Yeah open carry of any knife is illegal which sounds like that's what they charged him with.

http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/LAWSSEAF.cgi?QUERYTYPE=LAW... seems to indicate that gravity knives are legal but perhaps there are other laws that apply. http://www.akti.org/action/new-york-city-knife-code doesn't seem to indicate any others though.
Unfortunately, the guy responds with his own misinformations.

Google said: "For example, mobile has several requirements around bandwidth and battery that are simply not part of the standard"

He says: "This glances over the the fact that the X in XMPP stands for eXtensible, which still results in proposals for new protocol extensions every month."

His misinformation is this: XMPP is XML based. The bandwidth that Google most likely refers to is a result of verbosity of XML. You can't eliminate that by extending XMPP, something that a guy who serves on XMPP Council should know.

The only way to fix that specific problem is to change the protocol. Which is what Google did.

This is an example a bad advocacy: badmouthing companies that decided to no longer use something you work on.

I also find troubling the pounding Google gets for every little mis-step.

When it comes to using and promoting open technologies Google is seemingly from another planet compared to other tech giants (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, you name it).

And yet the furor is not about Microsoft using completely secret protocol (Skype), not about Apple promising to publish their secret protocol (Facetime) and then not doing it, not about Apple preventing fair browser competition in iOS etc. but about Google no longer using XMPP.

A lack of perspective.
> No offense, but my lawyer doesn't even charge me $400/hour.

Just as with developers, if you're getting $400/hour you're not an ordinary lawyer working with ordinary people. You can get that if you've experience and knowledge in a particular domain.
Schmidt: Teens' mistakes will never go away
Could they use a drone instead of manned aircrafts to address point 2? So there's no need to shield and thus saving the weight.
Haha, 3 people on here that are lost. Being on hn and not having a smartphone seems silly. I'm guessing these are just people who like to lie on polls.
I caught this episode a few days ago and I totally didn't expect this conclusion. Planet Money does a superb job of coming up with relevant topics and episodes way way beyond their original mission of explaining the 2007 meltdown.
It wouldn't be for programming work qua programming work. It'll be soft skills, specialist services and consulting related to that work.

Eg, penetration testing. Software project management advice. Audits of IT processes. Requirements gathering workshops. Etc etc.

Also, $400/hr would be high for a general suburban lawyer / solicitor. It's low to mid for a specialist. And suspiciously cheap for a barrister / trial lawyer (multiply by ten).
I think that my anger/negativity come from two sources, that I've conflated even though they're separate.

1. I consider the ratio between how much value programmers do add and what we could add to be unacceptably low. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... .) It means we have low leverage, few opportunities to excel, and that we can rarely become financially independent. It sucks to lose 90+ percent of what we're capable of to the fact that the wrong people call the shots.

2. I had a 16-month period (1/11 to 4/12) in my career that was astonishingly negative. First, I had a startup fail for reasons that were not my fault and completely out of my control. Then, I had a manager at Google for whom I found out recently that recruiters consider him to be the worst manager in Google NYC (my perceived pattern of him using fake performance problems to tease out health issues then fuck with people is actually well-known; N >= 5 and probably 7, but not knowing all the individual details, I'm unsure on duplicates). Third, I observed something that I can't talk about but would be legendary if it got out. Fourth, I worked for a startup with the most unethical management I've ever encountered (worse than Google; Google's a good company with some really bad actors and terrible HR infrastructure, this company's management was just rotten all the way through) and, after I left it, the CEO (the black sheep of a powerful family) mounted a personal campaign to destroy my reputation.

So... (1) is why my fights matter to the world. We really do need to unlock the trillions of dollars of value we'll add to the world by making programmers more autonomous and powerful within organizations. It's probably (2) that's behind a lot of my personal anger.
How Drupal's huge open source community is managed
The second, in-depth reference([2]) takes place in Canada... a third-world country?
Personally, I assumed that whatever followed "If I recall correctly" would likely not be expertly sourced. I did look at that Wikipedia article-- it has 102 references, many of them offline. So hell if I know if there's evidence in there, but I'm certainly not complaining that I don't know where to read more for myself.

But like the GP-- It's something I want to believe, it's very well-credentialed, and I've seen some encouraging but inconclusive evidence. So naturally as a skeptic the main thing I'm looking for now is the strongly negative evidence, if such a thing can exist. Do you have any leads?
That's really cool. Can you explain the retainer thing a bit more?
We are so hung up on the idea that "you can teach a man to fish and that will feed him for a lifetime" in reality if you give a man a boat and fishing gear he will figure out how to fish on his own. The US doesn't have the same credit issues as uganda but we instead have the wellfare trap which could be easily solved by raising the minimum wage to above poverty level, heck raising the minimum wage to $30/hr would solve a lot of our economic problems.
The Future of Business?
I seems that many big companies are buying smaller companies (which are also pretty big!). With Facebook buying Instagram, Yahoo buying Tumblr, and Yahoo attempting to buy another company, it seems that the future of starting a business is going to be selling to the "big guys". Sooner or later, I believe that there will only be a couple of companies (like in Wall-E) that will dominate the others. What do you think?
Article talks of mach 5 but fails to mention that our best body designs begin to melt at mach 3.
Save for the Windows requirement, I think the author would actually really like Objective-C. The compiler checks types. Messages to `nil` resolve to `nil` (0), so no null-pointer exceptions. Automatic Reference Counting gives you memory safety.
Airports and airlines advise [1-4] arriving 2 to 3 hours before the departure of an international/long haul flight.

If airlines and airports have the capability to get you through security quickly, they don't do a good job of publicizing it.

[1] http://www.portseattle.org/sea-tac/passenger-services/pages/...
[2] http://www.flysfo.com/web/page/orphan/faq/#2
[3] http://www.stanstedairport.com/stansted-airport-guide/checki...
[4] http://www.jfkairportguide.com/arrivals-departures.html