skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I noticed is you should try to check the length of the target video - I got a 1-hour-long mashup of songs.

I'm wondering what the algorithm for this is - "Reddit" got me a rickroll, "4chan" got me a Pokemon/Belair mashup, "Hacker News" got me Lil Wayne.

...actually, you gave me an idea.
Statistically speaking, you can draw the conclusion that your salary is substantially lower than typical of people who responded to this poll. You can't draw any conclusion about your salary in relation to the overall market, because the poll respondents are not randomly distributed among the population of the overall market and you have no information about the demographics of who chose to respond.

But if you drop the strict statistical sense and just look at the results with common-sense realism, yes you can figure that the poll generally reflects the broad reality and aiming for the middle of the poll range would be reasonable to request.

The people shooting down the first line of thinking are being pedantic about statistical rigor and the meaning of a conclusion. The poll is not statistically reliable because the sampling is not truly random, and it's not at all useful for making fine-grained distinctions between $120k and $125k. They are right, but you can ignore them and apply common sense for broad realistic purposes. The median salary in Silicon Valley is clearly not $40k.
I think it's interesting how few comments clojure posts attract. Given pg's love of lisp and how amazing clojure is (at least in my opinion) in terms of language design and what features we'll need in the next 10 years, I would have thought the HN community would be jumping all over it.

This isn't meant to be anything more then an interesting observation.
No longer full time, but I thought I'd share my salary journey.

Graduated ( computer network management and design ) working in Portsmouth started on £16k (software developer).

Three years with the same company progressed to £25k.

Moved to London salary £33k

Two years with the same company salary rose to £40k

Went travelling, came back, started freelancing/consulting earned ~£50k last year.
Pretty much any full-time developer gig in the US will include employee-provided health insurance in addition to salary, so salaries are still pretty much directly comparable in that sense -- take-home pay shouldn't be that different. I could see that argument being used to justify higher salaries in the UK, since employers don't have that additional expense, but not lower ones.
I think you might be looking at this a little too black and white. Perhaps a robot won't replace an electrician, but an electrician with advanced technology at his/her disposal can do the work that in the past required several electricians.
I think that going forward, we will see a smaller and smaller percentage of the population producing increasingly larger portions of the wealth. These producers will produce more than they can personally consume. The problem then becomes one of wealth distribution.
We need to find a new way to structure capitalistic society so that wealth producers can be rewarded for their efforts, but those not able to as effectively produce wealth are still able to live well. Ideally we should implement a system that can scale all the way from where we are now, to the point where very few people are required to produce wealth.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlmclb_arsenal-09-max-headr...
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Um, no. Legos are not about building sets, playing with them, and then disassembling them and not touching them. The important part is when you throw all your pieces in a big pile and start mixing stuff up, making new stuff. How are you going to do that if you have to send back all the right pieces?

Maybe more importantly, how are you going to get back "a set" after it inevitably gets mixed up with others?
Of course I wasn't saying that applies in every single case. I even double-qualified that part ("probably tend to"), but you still responded with "not everyone." I give up. :)
San Francisco isn't the only place in the US that makes software, you know. Seattle is a great place to live, has better salaries than SF considering cost of living, and has a healthy startup culture.
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I think that getting decent speedup on this kind of non-obvious GPU problem is an impressive result. Their presentation here is somewhat lacking in academic rigor (I for one would have liked to see a description of how they got their timing results, as well as some tests with a smaller source file, or possibly many small source files), but given that they've provided the source code their results should be easy enough to verify.
It's very definitely a pay issue. It's also a hiring issue: most of Silicon Valley deliberately makes it as difficult as possible to pass the hiring bar.

There is one company with whom I've interviewed once, gotten an offer, and then been rejected when I applied later in a separate round after a year and a half doing other things. There's another company where I interviewed once, got an offer, did something else, interviewed later, got rejected, was recommended for an internship later, got put through such a bureaucratic fuck-up that I didn't even receive a technical interview before they'd selected interns for all their slots for the year, and they still regularly try to recruit me every few months (including this past month), despite my being a grad-student right now. Then there's a third company that keeps continually sending recruiters my way every so often despite rejecting me with no reason given every single time.

I'm not naming names, but these are big, famous companies. Literally everyone on this entire board knows these companies and "knows" about their absolutely ravening hunger for engineers, "knows" about their six-figure offers for new college grads (I never got one of those, but I graduated in 2011).

If these are the recruiting, filtering, and hiring practices at three of the world's largest technology companies, then I have to declare, fuck it, there's no shortage of "talent", aka: skilled labor. There's a shortage of top-5% skilled labor willing to jump through the right hoops, with the right Luck Bonus stat on their character sheet to get through the outright random filters, who are willing to take the salaries on offer after all the crap they just went through to find a job.

By contrast, I'll tell you how I found my (No evil eye /spits!) internship for this summer. I checked the "Who's Hiring" thread on Hacker News for interesting internship positions, sent a bunch of cover letters, had one Skype interview with the CTO of a very nice company, received the initial offer, negotiated a bit (nothing too heavy, it's an internship after all, but a slightly nicer deal on tax status and travel expense), and accepted the offer. As far as I can tell (again, No evil eye /spits!), they're a very nice company doing highly interesting work that could even potentially inspire me towards new research directions in my grad work, and I'll be pretty glad to spend my summer vacation with them.

And at no point whatsoever did I have to recite the definition of a red-black tree, figure out how to jump out of a spinning blender when I've been miniaturized, or solve an Advanced Algorithms exam problem.
Feels like they misunderstand the point of Legos.

The great thing about them that I remember from being a kid was having bins of the things pile up -- each new set I got added to the creative possibilities of the whole. And when I made something extra-cool, that was like an art piece that I'd proudly put up on a shelf or somewhere for months until I got tired of it and recycled it into my next creation.
Finance is like its own universe. The salaries for software are like nothing I've seen anywhere else. I get the sense there's so much money sloshing around it doesn't seem that out of wack to anybody. The investment guys probably can't even figure out how anyone could even live on 250K a year.
Indeed. It's a shame to see that they manage to hire some young talented people. I'd rather go to Google. Better experience regardless of future path.
Artificial Magnetic Monopoles Discovered
Like many brilliant and pure souls, Mr. Stallman can be naive. Here he is uncritically regurgitating other people's political propaganda:

http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html
It's hard to consider beagrep a true "online" search mechanism. It's based on indexing. It's unquestionably a useful approach, but kind of apples & oranges from an algorithmic perspective.
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Yes. A reasonable one bed (not a studio) flat in zone 2 will be around £1000-1200 pcm.
Thanks. Was on a phone last night and wasn't able to find the sources easily. But there's still a lot of unknowns in the article to try to repro.

So one thing that's interesting is that both rsync and rm stat every file in each directory to determine whether to use rmdir or unlink, and to perform a depth first removal. I wonder if it would be faster to skip the stats, just call unlink on everthing and check errno for EISDIR (not POSIX, but returned by Linux), then descend as needed and use rmdir on the way back up.
Unethical social design of Quora & Spotify
Front office rather?
It depends on cost of living. What is a McDonald's (or similar) manager paid in London?
I understand your anger. But exiting a blender when minituarized is really necessary!

Honestly, if they do not TALK with you, it is probably a worthless job. And by talk I mean questions and answers are full duplez, like POSIX sockets.

Blender!
I think it's fairly obvious that there isn't a shortage of applicants, but of highly skilled applicants as determined by a somewhat arbitrary and flawed interview process with a strong preference for false negatives over false positives.
I have CrosswordPuzzleMaker.org. It was an attempt to copy Bingo Card Creator for crossword puzzles. I have about 300 trial accounts (with email addresses), but no paid accounts.

I'm on the second page when you Google Crossword Puzzle Maker, but that only brings in about 10 visitors/day. Getting to the first page could bring some decent traffic.

The site works, but its features right now are pretty minimal.
I've had a similar idea for a while but never executed it well. I wanted to have my personal website merge all of my various feeds from other services into posts on my site to be the "one feed" of things happening in my life.

I suppose API access to that would be a logical extension - this is very cool.
Great article, it's nice to see someone take a simple statistic that may tell a misleading story and dig deeply into its causes. Macroeconomics is a complex topic that generally deserves rigorous analysis.

The article mostly looks at gender and class, I wonder how immigration has affected the shifts.
Maybe I'm having serious reading difficulties, but I believe your link refutes your claim:

>Multiple studies have shown that EVs and PHEVs reduce total pollution compared with conventional gasoline or diesel-fueled vehicles, even when batteries are charged with electricity from coal plants.

I've run the numbers myself several times (simply Google for 1. coal's CO2 output per KWH, 2. miles/KWH, 3. CO2 output per gallon of gasoline), and coal-EV has always come out as a super CO2 efficient way to travel, the equivalent of a 50-60 MPG/car, if I recall correctly.

Do you have any sources of contention for that?
Parallelizing by line is a decent choice, but there's overhead involved with determining where the line breaks are. That overhead is probably a limiting factor. The other problem with grep on a GPU is that natural implementations of automata search are based upon conditionals, and GPUs are really bad at evaluating conditionals. Bit-parallel grep algorithms are a more natural choice for a GPU.

Ultimately, though, unless you have very complex automata, you get bit by the memory transfer latency of a GPU, as the authors note.
I'm thinking of moving across from a financial IT consultancy to a hedge fund. What are the hours like? I'm not that interested in working in a large IB (e.g RBS,CS pr ,MS) I've done that before and the work in that space is a lot less interesting now and has stagnated somewhat. I know this is a bit long winded but your skill-set matches exactly what I have but I don't have much opportunity to use it on a daily basis. Any comments or pointers will be really helpful.
Enough people for companies to invest into theirs.
This article is needlessly sensationalistic and the claim that there is a "shortage" of ultra-elite engineers illustrates a basic misunderstanding of math. But it does show us what a red herring the phrase "STEM" is.

Let's not get bogged-down in STEM, or the differences between Engineering and Computer Science. There are massive differences both in the curriculum and quality of instruction even inside the field of CS.

I believe there is a massive shortage of people who are capable of programming in mainstream languages and platforms. The tool chains that have been developed to solve problems for online retail, advertising, travel, media, entertainment, etc are now in the process of being applied to virtually every other industry.

I think the failure of our industry (post-2000) to attract more people to this field is sad. I think the emphasis on ultra-elite SV talent ignores the broader application of programming to the world at large, and perpetuates an attitude that people who program are special, as opposed to simply being passionate practitioners of an increasingly creative trade.

Below are some interesting links I've picked up on this subject:

http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/29/calling-all-hackers.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien...

http://readwrite.com/2012/05/17/computer-programming-for-all...
Unless you play demanding videogames there is litte point to having a discrete videocard so it's still a valid comparison. That said I have a 2600k @4ghz and there does not seem to be any reason to even consider an upgrade which I find rather disappointing.
Barely, if your lifestyle is western (can't leave in bad area), you like to have holidays abroad and what to save some money as well.
Yahoo buying Tumblr is not a turnaround story
"The City" is usually taken to mean the world of London finance, and in finance, bonuses are generally huge.
From the article:

"Once your kiddo completes the Star Wars X-Wing Fighter, toss the pieces in the prepaid box and send back. They’ll be fully sanitized for other little architects, and your tiny tinkerer will receive the next kit in his queue."

Who uses Lego like that, using the blocks as if they were puzzle pieces for only one particular puzzle?

The magic of Lego is that you can use the blocks to build whatever you can imagine, and you can only really do that once you have enough blocks with enough variety.

I pity the kids whose parents think Pleygo is a good idea. What do the parents do if the kids start building their own ideas? Punish them?

There is a market for used Lego, but I suspect that market is already well-served by the likes of eBay and Lego forums.
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Sure. Consider incentives though. A false negative is cheap (at most you spent the time interviewing the person), while a false positive is expensive (good luck firing the person in our litigious environment).
Of course if Silicon Valley CEOs were smart about immigration they wouldn't try jumping on the "comprehensive immigration reform" bandwagon. Or even pushing for an increase in the number of visas.

Instead they should be pushing for a H1B salary floor in the 90k-100k range. This would allow them to claim the majority of the existing H1B pool, and it's hard to argue that jobs like "Food Service Manager" are jobs America vitally need foreign workers to fill.
We do a lot of experimental iterations, sure, but that's not the same as stimulating others with different interests and talents.
I lived comfortably in zone 2 on £40k a year.

I was paying £250 a week rent for a one bedroom flat in a complex with gym + pool in zone 2.

Rent prices are a little higher than they were two years ago now though!
IPad vs. Windows - Side by side comparison
Unions ain't gonna happen. Not accepting low salaries could be a start.
The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. You gotta be churning out new stuff at minimum, hopefully on sexy new products, maintenance of the old stuff is less sexy and doesn't give you the promotion/bonus. Of course you can reimplement a cache server every 6 months, if all else fails.
V8, SpiderMonkey, and jsc also all have regular expression JITs.
In my books there is a (huge) difference between destruction for the sake of destruction, and making barricades.
As a contractor you can spend a lot of time just marketing yourself, invoicing, etc. I'd imagine this is more like 50k per year in practice.
If you want a unicorn at any price and your business simply cannot deal with the fact that unicorns don't exist, then you suck and you deserve to fail.

I don't mean you in specific, but this is the simple fact about unicorn hunting.

EDIT to note: this does not apply in the mythical "Lake Wobegone"-like areas people are sure to point out to me, where I've heard that a full third of the population are unicorns ;-).
If someone makes exactly $100K, which do they choose? Also, you don't care to know the difference between $105K and $195K?
Prices are generally higher now. How much were you spending on commute?
You have quite different intentions when you're punishing your child because he didn't do his homework vs. when you're punishing your friend because he stole your girlfriend. In one case you aim for blood, in the other - for betterment and growth. Intention makes all the difference here, otherwise, they are, like you say, both just forms of violence.
Can someone please shed some light on this relatively recent APU race? I understand it seems like a good idea for OpenCL, but when they increase their APU performance while actually stagnating their CPU performance I am just completely lost (as is the case with the i7-4770K).

What is the market for desktop CPUs where the desktop buyers don't also have dedicated video cards which can do a almost a magnitude better job than the APU?
The thing is, I'm not so much angry about being turned down as I am about the bureaucratic randomness and then being recruited by the same companies months later. Either I'm good enough to fill some job opening they have when they interview me, and they've got lots of job openings, or I'm not. Wasting weeks of my time when I could be saying "yes" to someone else (which is exactly what happened) is a problem.

There's a saying: Killing your parents is insanity. Pleading to the court for mercy on grounds of being an orphan is chutzpah. We should call this the Dungeons and Dragons Job Interview: tune up your resume, practice all your best skills, compile them all down into a number (via computerized HR systems), and then use that number as your bonus on a D20 roll to see if you get through each stage of interviewing.
Why would your car be towed for having open windows?
Also there is a risk of being fired with a one week notice and not being able to find next gig for a couple of month. So 400 is not a lot, it is just an adequate minimum for London.
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Well that changes everything, maybe we should reboot this entire thread.
A false positive is expensive for more than just litigious reasons. Hiring a bad apple can destroy the culture of a small company. As Steve Jobs said, "It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players."
CPU doesn't matter on the desktop unless you're doing something wrong or interesting. Hint: if you're paying for your own CPU intensive thing, try "engineering sample intel xeon" on ebay.

If you can stand the sunk cost it's a LOT cheaper than AWS. Horses for courses YMMV etc.

I buy not-for-resale chips on a dodgy basis for fuzzing (MOAR VMS!) but on the whole, bucks per MIP, or MIPs per watt - who cares?
As I remember it, HP-UX had some very poor performance characteristics once a single directory started to get into the thousands of files. It slow down for all read / write operations in that directory. We are talking multiple seconds to read a small 1K file much less write.
The average hours worked in France is 1500, UK 1600 and USA 1800[1]. Therefore if you factor in hours worked, a developer in France should be paid 83% of average salary in America and 94% of average salary in the United Kingdom. This of course assumes that everything else is equal (which is untrue). A 30k salary in UK should translate into 28k salary in France when you factor in the number of hours worked. We should really find the difference in hours worked for softare engineers, of course.

1. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS