skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was once on my list of things to learn, because every time I looked at Flash, I saw that Adobe wanted a three-or four-figure sum for the proprietary toolchain, and the open-source toolchain was very poorly documented (and what little documentation existed seemed to expect you to know the terminology and workflow of the proprietary toolchain).

Imagine a world where gcc is the only open-source C compiler, and gcc required you to run preprocessor, compiler, assembler and linker directly, manually, and you had never used any compiled language before, and the gcc docs assumed you know which of these programs you needed to run, and in what order, to compile your programs, and these components were each separate downloads written by different people and offered for download alongside all the individual tools in the binutils suite. So you have no clue which of the dozens of tools you actually need, in what order you need to run them, you've also never written in any language but Python and Javascript before, and the things you need to do to get programs to run in those languages is nothing like what C wants, and none of the information you lack appears to be written down anywhere that your very best Google efforts can find.

In this world, of course you can pay Microsoft $300 for a C compiler with an IDE which takes care of everything for you, and a lot of people swear by C and do amazing things with it, but really you don't want to spend that kind of money for a tool you know nothing about, and so you just sort-of limp along with Python and Coffeescript, and miss out on the C world entirely.

That's the situation Flash development was in before Haxe came along.

Of course, now you can use HTML 5 canvas for stuff that previously required Flash, so Flash is kind of obsolete.
If other specialized blogging engines had one-tenth the extensibility that WP has, then I could see myself switching. But when you have hundreds of thousands of people willing to write plugins for free or very little money that integrate with the most complex payment systems and third-party APIs, you tend to deal with the crappy core code of the main module.
Exactly. Just because you're trying to accomplish something "no one has done yet" doesn't mean that you aren't going to be building on top of things (software, frameworks, paradigms) that have been around, at scale, for years. The older engineer is more likely to realize when a problem has already been solved, or during a crisis can connect the dots from previous experiences to find the solution.
UTIs Are Better Than You Think — and Here’s Why
A number of items on that page aren't clones, they're the original game. Strange.
List of projects accepted into Google Summer of Code 2013
My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before reaching 60.

Yeah, I realized that I disliked management (the concept) when I realized that managing is, in most cases, just as bad as being managed.
Spelunky, Hotline Miami and Super Crate Box were all made with Game Maker. All very successful, critically acclaimed titles. Granted, it's hard to know how much GML (Game Maker's programming language) was used. But just the fact that they were made in Game Maker alone is a pretty strong testament that these tools are really coming into their own.
Centuries-old frozen plants revived
Any clue why their previous undertaking, btapp.js, disappeared into oblivion? Aren't the apps listed on http://torque.bittorrent.com/labs/ incredibly useful? (They forgot about Linux, so I didn't even have a chance to run these things)
Nice work. It looks good (on desktop browsers anyway). Please read my other comment in this thread and keep it simple as to something which is easy to use but doesn't 'want' too much. Looking forward to my invite!
Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me as bullshit.

At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem.

New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough for all, as long as you've got something to contribute.

Maybe at one point 35 years ago simply having a degree from somewhere great was enough. I don't see that today as being a thing that makes someone immediately awesome.

Invest daily in your education. It doesn't stop when you're 22. Today, instead of doing consulting- I'm learning about Google's Polymer framework/platform.
I listened to the snippet (thx for link). That wasn't an explanation, that was a slogan. If the Facebook product already promotes openness, they should dogfood it by having everyone work from home.
"Make fonts bigger in Safari. I set her up with Safari just because it's bundled with the OS and is the most straightforward, although surely Firefox and Chrome have similar options."

Being not so young anymore, I also like to set my browsers (Chrome and Firefox) to use bigger default fonts. But I find it amazing how many web sites out there have their layouts completely screwed up unless you use the default font size. When this happens, I have to hit ctrl-minus a few times for the site to look readable again. I've seen this kind of breakage on the web sites of major newspapers and other big businesses.
Ask HN: Comp Sci or Data Science/Analytics?
If someone had a choice between an MS in Comp Sci or Data Science/Analytics, which direction would you recommend? Why?
I always wonder how changing "Favorite" to "Like" would affect the frequency of the action on Twitter. To say something is your favorite is kind of extreme, right? - you can like lots of things but you only have one favorite. Interesting point you make though, because in an argument you'd be more likely to use a "favorite" to select the better stance.

Disclaimer: I'm a terrible Twitter user, and still trying to figure out what I'm doing.
Whenever I read an article drawing conclusions about the world based on interviews with those attending a school reunion, I consider the inherent selection bias. If I'm an unemployed 60-something, I might consider a class reunion to be a great networking opportunity. And, of course, my time has a low opportunity cost. Conversely, am I willing to fly across the country for the weekend if I'm working a lot and need to be in the office on Monday morning? Also, those whose lives at age 60 aren't all that fulfilling professionally or otherwise might be more likely to attend a reunion where the could be reminded of better times. [I say this as someone excited to attend my 20 year high school reunion this summer.] A survey of Stanford engineering graduates done by random selection would be much more interesting.
IndieGoGo has nothing to do with this, aside from it being on their site. It's a poorly written headline. If anything it should say 'Gawker fund raises enough money...'

But yes, i'm very happy to see others succeeding at crowdfunding outside of KickStarter, and I firmly believe those with large followings don't even need to be using an outside source, but could be doing it on their own websites.
>>"Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years."

Do you mean 'software' engineering? Given its about a 40th reunion, it's likely the comment was about a more established field of engineering.
I don't care about the look, bootstrap whatever.. it works i'm fine.. great work.
of course, you are both comparing the difference to... zero?!

(you should compare the price difference to an equivalent laptop (however defined) if you're talking "marginal")
> There would be no one left doing the sorts of critical jobs that make civilized life possible for us pampered engineers.

I don't think so. If a job is critical for a functional society, "market" will ensure that it will be done. Right now, lots of critical fields have low paying jobs because there is high supply of labor.
The Complexity of Greatness: Beyond Talent or Practice
That's true, but there is a special case if both computers are on the same LAN, the Dropbox client software will sync locally which is much faster.
3.6 was a while ago, and I believe you didn't need add-ons to have the trouble you describe.

I use Firefox and Chrome every day. My results line up with recent HN comments about how Firefox is competitive, uses less memory at scale (lots of tabs), still janks worse, but may be actually more stable at the moment. Flash is a big source of instability still, for both browsers.

My bottom line: both Firefox and Chrome are competitive, leading-edge browsers. Firefox on desktops is pure open source, Chrome is not (if that matters to you; it does to me a bit, but I'm a realist). AwesomeBar wins for me over Omnibox.

I hope you'll give Firefox a try again.

/be
> You need to explicitly specify how variables should be captured in lexical closures.

I prefer that to some "it's automagically captured" behavior (in the context of C++). At least so I know and can choose if the closure captures a reference or makes a copy - which can be a very important detail.

For the stuff I usually do in C++ I love this kind of freedom. For other stuff where speed and/or memory layout/usage are not that important there are higher level languages like Python or Common Lisp.
http://www.volunteermatch.org/

http://seattle.craigslist.org/vol/

http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-for-activists-and-campaigns
I think you have a pretty bad view of managers. There are plenty of management positions that are a) necessary, b) challenging, and c) very technical.

"Moving to management" doesn't mean you suddenly just create Powerpoints all day. If you're a good technical manager you can suddenly use your skills to multiply your contributions far beyond what you'd be able to do as a single person.

Let's start with the common premise that a good programmer is 10x better than a bad one. A good first level manager, who has 10 reports, could effect a difference of 100x. And a good senior manager, who has 10 midlevel reports, could effect a multiplier of 1000x.
if you spend 35 years as a[...] VC, you'll likely be retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the pyramid than working for someone at the top.

Fixed that.

However, if you have a Stanford degree, you have an inside track on being a funded entrepreneur, so it may be a safer path.
Seems like a bait-and-switch. Horrible.
I use a competitor of yours called WebDrive.

Can you discuss how you may be better then they are? I am actually a bit unhappy with them, as I occasionally have strange behavior where a file refuses to upload, or the cache sometimes quits updating. However, my version is a few years old, so perhaps they fixed these issues. I have thought of buying their new version, but I am open to hearing why I should switch.
TED’s Chris Anderson's Top 3 Words Of Advice On The Perfect Speech
The designs seem to show an interesting facet of DIY design. It's better to focus on what something should do rather than what it should look like. The most hopeless of the designs are those that try to mimic the appearance of a successful design.

I suspect the hopeless cases are vastly over-represented because they make for an easy news story fluff piece. Actual innovation is frequently subtle and boring unless you look at the detail.

I think jdietrich has a point about the implication that this is a Chinese specific phenomenon. Every country has people working on projects like this. I'm in New Zealand and we got jetpacks and cruise missiles made by guys working in sheds. Neither the crazy people nor the brilliant geniuses are representative of the population as a whole.
Almost forgot http://www.w3schools.com/css/
Is this just a delay-bandwidth-product problem? Are you not using tcp window scaling for some reason?
But why? Serious question. It's a programming language and a library for (mainly) 2d stuff. It's cross platform and has some graphical tools. But I believe good games have tons of GML in them. So what makes them different from the many other 2D game frameworks & programming languages besides that Gamemaker looks easier. I do welcome it's success though; more tools is better for game makers.
How i found BUG on hackernews
hackernews is more about off-topics... titles doesn't match content.
I like to enable SSH on my parent's laptop, so if they phone up and ask for help with something, usually I can SSH in and fix it remotely.
I'd call $9k a year average tuition cost where I am from (at the time I studied). New Zealand. This figure excludes living costs, includes uni fees only.
that's awesome! That's exactly the service I was looking at. Thanks for creating it!
Pure Javascript HTML Templating for jQuery and Node.js
I don't think it makes sense to correct for inflation given that the $7.57/AAPL price was in 2003 dollars and the $216,678 is in 2013 dollars.
hackernews is more about off-topics... titles doesn't match content and posts like this make hackernews full of shit.
Store hours, probably the Chromebook. She ended up using iOS more because of the versatility of it, but she still uses the Chromebook too.
Closures work pretty great with std::shared_ptr.
Ramil Farkhshatov's implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/gravicappa/shen-py

http://www.shenlanguage.org/
Silicon Valley is often quite pleased with itself, and there's more than one "Ignore the complexities of your problem, what would solve this is five guys in San Francisco and a hackathon!" article drifting around out there.

I suspect that's what gets things laid on the shoulders of SV. If its teeming with smart, driven, visionary people with Yankee Know-How and a Can Do Attitude (tm), surely they can do something genuinely spectacular, instead of just inventing a clever way to order pizza.
It's funny. One of my friends lost his job in a round of layoffs recently and was lamenting that his skills were based way too much on their internal technology for him to ever find another job.

I walked through it with him and explained that you don't realize how much stuff is the same anywhere. Communicating with customers & stakeholders is the same anywhere. Working with your coworkers is the same anywhere. Managing a project has the same steps in every company and if you're good at it it will translate. Likewise requirements gathering. Your knowledge of various domains that you pick up. Etc etc etc.

MOST of what you're trying to do has been done before. All the day-to-day work that makes your business successful has been done thousands of times before. The only thing that's new is a few minor implementation details.
I've been listening to Let's Talk Bitcoin
Being a new engineer is easy. You have boundless energy, passion, and time. You can only get better. You're a sponge taking in all new information. As you get older, you have less time and patience for the next new thing that comes along, plus all those things you learned years ago aren't current any more. Plus, people hiring you have a bias that you aren't current on the latest things since you are older.
Ask HN: Help me price my product. What's the most you would pay for this?
Hi,

I'm toying with pricing on my dedicated server offerings, detailed here: http://superspeedyservers.com/Our_Product.html

The hardware configuration is as follows:

Single Intel E3-1290v2 3.7GHz - 4.1GHz (Turbo) Quad Core (8 core HyperThreading) CPU

32GB RAM

1x 228GB 10k RPM 6Gb/s SAS Drive (3x3 HW RAID10 w/ 2GB Writeback Cache)

1x 64GB 6Gb/s SATAIII SSD (1x1 HW RAID1 w/ 2GB Writeback Cache)

1x static IP on a 1Gb NIC/Link, bandwidth in your choice of 20, 30, 50, 75, or 100 TB tiers.

Daily onsite backups

Thanks,

-c
People never talk about age at work. They talk about "graduation date". If you work in recruiting, you have companies asking that question all the time, "What's his graduation date?"

I wonder if there could be a boom, especially with the online options, in mid-40s programmers getting graduate degrees so as to jam the signals. That's what I'll do if I end up facing age discrimination, so long as I can solve the money problem.
I'm 45 and easily the oldest on my team. Next to you, guys, I feel like a toddler. :-)
This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but reading comments to some other posts on this blog almost made my jaw drop.

"The reason why California is flooded with thriving Asians is because the Golden State is a beta state, and all California cities are beta towns with a beta White majority. Smart, talented, and hard driven good looking – alpha Whites from different parts of the country leave for places in the Northeast, especially NYC. "

lolwut
"Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have."

Why would you think so? I left home at age 18. My parents were 37 and 40 years old at the time. At that time and for many years after that, I had tons of non-work priorities, certainly more than my parents. And I don't think that's an exception. Most people never really make work their priority. Don't mistake that for an age related phenomenon.

"Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?"

No. Is it an example of racism if you didn't want to hire a drug trafficking nigerian scammer and pedophile as a baby sitter for your 5 year old daughter?

The idea that these are even relevant examples is ageism or racism. I don't know a single 45 year old software engineer who knows Ada, Cobol and Forth. They didn't serve in Vietnam either.

Everyone knows they have to be up-to-date with current technologies and it becomes easier with age because many changes are very superficial to the point of being trivial.
In what field of engineering is this person trying to find employment?
with such a great variety of features the learning curve would be rising very slowly over time.

That is not necessarily true. The point behind C++11 is to provide new features that are easier to learn than the features they replace. So C++11 on its own has a lower learning curve than C++03.

Of course, if you're maintaining older code, then your point stands, and the learning curve would be rising because of the extra new features.
The problem with the DOM is not that it's intrinsically slow, but that it's very easy to do slow things with it inadvertently. There are often N different ways to do things, due to the evolution of HTML. The newer approaches tend to be designed with things like GPU acceleration in mind (e.g. CSS transforms), whereas older methods often had lots of heavy interactions and computations because they weren't expected to be used dynamically.

Just like optimizing any software takes skill and knowledge, so too does writing HTML, whether dynamic or not. Tools for understanding what's going on with the DOM and with dynamic HTML are slowly becoming available as well, which will help with this.
I wish I could ignore it, but the problem is that it's something my clients have to see too, and it's very prominent. They want to hire me, I want to deliver quality software to them, but in between us is "level up to earn a free T-shirt".

Perks and rewards are OK, but the prominence the XP/Badge/level system is given presents a very unprofessional image to potential clients. It's a distraction, a sideshow that's given center stage. I'd love to do enough professional-grade work on freelancer to earn a quick chat/consult with you (or even something like a free t-shirt), but I don't want the site inundating me and my clients with bullshit that doesn't add to either of our bottom lines. Our business relationship is not a game, but Freelancer surrounds it with excessive of game terminology and game mechanics, which gives off an air of "this place isn't for serious developers".
> Can I say for sure one thing that between dedicated vs VPS you will surely choose dedicated?

If they have the same specs and the same price, dedicated is probably better.

> Are there any downsides to dedicated servers from customer standpoint.

1. Price.

2. For a dedicated server I want a serial console and out-of-band rebooter, so I can fix it myself when I bork the bootloader or hang the system. This can all be done in software with VM's, but may require additional hardware for dedicated servers.

3. Monitoring of disk failure. On a VPS, the provider typically handles RAID, and is pro-active about replacing failed disks. On a dedicated server, RAID is up to the customer to manage, depending on your setup it might be the customer's responsibility to alert support that a disk is bad, and diagnosing a failed disk remotely might be challenging.
> How well does "move into management at 40" scale?

Not so well. Pyramidal company structures get narrower as you go up.
> 47.6 percent The nation’s poorest kids primarily live in households headed by a single female (pdf).

Exactly how is being poor the most common situation? Are you under the impression that everyone is poor?

What?

Read my post. My point is that you don't have to be poor to lack access to fresh produce and in fact, if you're poor, chances are you have better access to it.
Ugh...

> UPDATE-- MAY 27, 2013, 9:46 AM EASTERN EDT: We have had no further contact with the people we believe to have custody of this video since the last update.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Our confidence that we can consummate this transaction has diminished.
No, it's a Google thing. No American company has ever asked for my GPA, but the Google HR person next door said that if I wanted to interview for a job at Google, HR would demand my GPA (from decades ago!) and would not grant an interview unless it was above some (secret) threshold. If their recruiters reached out to me, HR would still require the GPA, but she said that the interviewers might not care about it.
There are absolutely no scientific citations in what you posted. The link between saturated fat and heart disease has been debunked repeatedly. Ancel Keys, the originator of the saturated fat = bad meme has repudiated his own early research.
I agree that the code generated by most software writing tools is horrible. That's why SteveApp doesn't even try to generate code in any programming language (unless you consider HTML a programming language of course).

The trick used by SteveApp is to generate dynamic HTML views which have the ability to save the data over a standard server API. Dynamically generating a markup language is easier, and I think it can be done successfully with a software writing tool.
have you seen http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/?
That doesn't matter, any more than a "gentlemen's agreement" to not hire any black people matters. All it takes is a demonstrable history of rejecting older candidates.
He said officers, not everyone
See the description of the promotion "zones." In practice its really just once because its rare to be promoted on the second chance. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/promotions/l/blofficerprom.ht....
'They talk about "graduation date".'

Good luck with that if someone files a suit.
Thanks! I replied to your comment. It was very insightful. You will get the invite soon. :)
What you describe -- "imagine every one having to go through a DOM interface and every button and UI interaction being composed of DOM elements and re-styling these elements on every interaction" -- is exactly how Firefox is built. The desktop Firefox UI is all DOM elements (not HTML, but still the same underlying DOM code).

Hovering over a toolbar button or a tab causes a CSS style rule for a :hover effect to be applied. Opening a new tab uses CSS animation for the transition. Moving tabs around manipulates the DOM and moves the tab elements (which are themselves composed of images, labels, etc.).

And yet, the Firefox UI is plenty snappy -- yes, you can argue that there are slowdowns and issues that need to be fixed, but no more or less than in many "native" apps.