skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you're first starting, you have to be simplistic. That is the target audience anyway. The ability to write code is going to continue to be in demand, and there are not enough people with the necessary experience to fill some of the positions out there.

How to solve the problem? Start developing tomorrow's programmers today.
Always do whatever you want to do. Do it with no reservations, no limits and no regrets.

And if you wake up at 50 and want to change directions again...that would be ok too.

Life is too short for half-measures and self-doubt!
In short, no. Employers are not allowed to ask for your age, it gives them grounds to discriminate against if you tell them how old you are. Don't put your date of birth on your CV.

Good luck! :)
"there are a lot of quite frankly better options where no one's going to think twice about your age"

What are those options?
I got confused. Are you intending to move back again out from India or to India?
For several years running (5?), I made most of $200K, 3500 miles from Silicon Valley (and 120 miles from the nearest large city). It wasn't for being a rockstar, it was from stacking two fulltime jobs. It was a lot of hours, and it sucked. Industry was 'webdev', and it's as stable as you want it to be.

Anyone can do it today. I still could. I just refuse to, now.

My advice is to not worry about a magic number, as long as you're comfortable and happy. Nowadays I don't even always hit 100 in a year. But we old guys really do get high off of things other than money. Things like a happy wife, a house full of animals, and a sailboat that goes where the wind takes it.
Awesome!! Gives me hope that I can go back and study someday! I'm not a celebrity or anything, just a regular average guy who missed the opportunity to study programming and science in school! .. Good for her!
As I read the OP's comment my first thought was "I know what he means but 'she owes me' is probably not the best way to state it". I think you ran off on an unnecessary tangent about the term "owes". The point was "I'm glad she doesn't run me over but that's something we should expect vs be grateful for given we'd like the same courtesy applied when we're on foot"
> I've read the quote several times and while it does say that things generally aren't private online it also clearly suggests that you shouldn't be doing things that you don't want other people to find out about which itself suggests that anyone wanting privacy is doing "bad" things.

I found it's surprising that you interpret the quote this way. Here's my interpretation: privacy on the Internet is an illusion.
MySQL in the cloud at Airbnb (2010)
it'd be nice to instead post when there's actual content to share...
That's a hard question to answer. There were a combination of motives and opportunities. Motives were things like a strong desire to prove myself combined with an anger at the lob sided salaries.

Opportunities were a major application that was written so badly (in java) that I learned a lot by fixing and refactoring. A poor social life that came from a divorce and moving states gave me an opportunity to spend an additional 40+ hours a week after work coding and experimenting and seeing what I could do.

In a more general sense. Giving myself a goal and working on figuring out how to achieve it in code was far better for me then merely reading a text.
> You're doing that, right? Keeping track of how well your hiring process predicts performance?

I've read http://matasano.com/careers/ a couple of times (because perhaps sometime I'll be interested in applying, or perhaps because I may end up stealing bits of it) and I think you guys are on the right track. I'd be interested to read about your experiences refining that process and what sorts of things you've learned along the way.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

Henry David Thoreau
All of these questions sound like things that a lot, I mean a lot, of other companies say (Culture fit, tryout projects, why are you here?)

Culture fit seems to be one that leaves a lot of wiggle room to assemble a team of clones, but you really have to look at what that company stands for. I'm more inclined to want to interview for a company that has taken time to define it's culture, and what they stand for, and aren't just looking for technical skills alone.
I use it exclusively in Chrome OS, but I'm sort of cheating :). If nothing else, I work at Google (although nowhere near Chrome or Chrome OS), and a lot of our non-coding workflows already favor browser-based tools.

The vast majority of my day is spent in the Chrome SSH client ssh'd into my desktop Linux box where I've usually got a half dozen windows open in a persistent tmux session. I've bound tmux to switch windows with alt+function keys, so this is pretty comparable to working on a good old-fashioned text terminal with much prettier type. My development life is largely writing C++ in vim. These days with a suitable set of plugins, vim can make for a really solid development environment (with semantic completion, file navigation, etc.).

For the rest, well, most of that happened in a browser already anyway. Reading docs, writing docs, code reviews, code browsing, e-mail, calendaring.

Prior to Google I was definitely a Mac guy. At times a miss it, but not as many as I was expecting, roughly two months into this little experiment.
The great big bullet point features (like OpenGL) are getting added. It's the small, subtle features that are being neglected.

The test case that I'd like to see is someone replacing notepad.exe with a webapp in such a way that an end user cannot tell that a change has been done. It's the Turing test of usability. Web Apps can do an excellent editor, but the finer details like (associate *.txt, save, save-as etc.) are still a problem.
There's a lot out there that is not in the VC-funded ecosystem. Sure, most corporate jobs are crap whereever one goes, but the odds aren't any worse than in VC-istan, and the ageism problem is less severe.

For one example, banking is considered ageist (most people retire by 50-55) by society-at-large standards but no one is going to look askance at you for being 40 and a non-managerial programmer. You should be at least VP by that age (and preferably ED/MD) but you don't have to have reports.

One nice thing Wall Street has done for its top (non-managerial) traders and programmers is use the title system to validate non-managerial high performers: you can be a "Managing Director" without having to manage other people. If you're going to have titles, you have to start giving them to engineers... even though a part of me would like to see titles just not exist.
php, mysql and js for loading the social network data
What a great loss. Mr. Reisse sounds like not just an immensely talented hacker, but someone with the selfless attitude that our world needs more of.
There is an opposing viewpoint, i.e. if you actually need an int, casting to int is one of the most reasonable ways of getting it.
You could go to jail for a year for sharing HBO Go passwords
Will be interesting to see if anything starts moving with this. I drive by it everyday (our office is downtown Detroit) and it never ceases to amaze me how you can practically 'see-through' the building with all the windows missing.
The US spending on Medicare/Medicaid is roughly $2500 for each person in the US and only provides coverage to a small fraction of those people. The NHS spends roughly $2900 per person.

So, clearly either the private or public healthcare, possibly both, in the US is run very inefficiently.
If you don't know if you do want to work at a company, then you either haven't done any research on that company whatsoever, or you need to ask yourself if there's even a reason you are applying, outside of the money.
Thanks for the link to a counterinsurgency manual; here is my favorite work in the genre:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/liebercode.htm

It describes the code (developed by Prussian jurist Francis Lieber) used by the victorious Union to suppress armed opposition ("insurgency") in the defeated Confederacy after the end of the American Civil War. If you compare its prescriptions to those in the "modern" counterinsurgency manual you linked to, you will see why the Union succeeded where present efforts fail.

You don't go into neighborhoods, kicking in doors with guns blazing. They recently did that in Detroit to serve a warrant.

No, you start by declaring martial law and enforcing a curfew. Santa Ana's gangs are a military problem, and they demand a military solution. If you're serving warrants, you've already lost the battle.

I understand that this is off the political map. That's the point. The kinds of policies needed to successfully defeat these gangs are anathema to prevailing civil libertarian views. But civilized 4th Amendment–style liberties only work when basic conditions of law & order hold; they don't work in a war. Indeed, when applied in a war, they only make things worse. This is why the present system, which serves warrants to soldiers in the opposing army, is complicit in their crimes.
Forget passwords take a pill let your body log you in.
Actually, in some ways it's easier for those of us who work in the infrastructure groups to demonstrate monetary value. Google has a very large number of machines, and an even larger number of hard drives. Hard drives have fundamentally not changed seek times in over a decade, even as capacity has doubled (up until relatively recently) every 18 months. So more often than not, for many work loads (not just at Google, but across the entire industry) are seek constrained, not capacity constrained. So when Google migrated from ext2 to ext4, it's actually pretty easy to calculate how much money was saved by utilizing disks more efficiently, and the team which spearheaded this _was_ in fact recognized by the company and by the founders.

As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels?

Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.
Every time I resolve never to read HN again, something like this happens. Damn you. Excellent post.
Tbh I would expect higher intelligence among engineers vs the general public if only due to selection effects. Smart kids tend to be more pushed towards professions under that label and are better able to meet the challenges associated with getting a job there such as earning a degree or learning enough to be useful.
"Nobody forces you to use Google" is an example of a very problematic common bit of rhetoric. You can also say nobody forces you to use the internet or have a car or whatever else. Google is not a true monopoly, but they are monopolistic. They exist in a world of oligopolies. There is not as much choice as there should be, and this is a threat to privacy and to freedom.

Having non-democratic oligopolies is already a threat, period.

Forced to use Google? No, but Google is certainly interested in convincing you to use them. So many people are convinced and aren't aware of any issues.

In the end, "forced to use" is bad rhetoric because it is a straw man. Nobody was arguing to the contrary. Tearing down that straw man fails to address the actual problems.
I'm certainly inclined to agree with you. However, many of the people I've discussed this with think the middle wouldn't be so productive if their livelihood didn't depend on it.

Most people are stuck in a mindset appropriate to a world where the most productive people are 1.25-1.50x more productive than average ones and reducing variance (bringing everyone to the middle) has expectancy.

Now, it's 10x. Everything a company does to detect and punish slackers takes several times more productivity off the best people-- who might drop from 10x to mere 4x-- than it induces gain. To quote Gus Fring, "I don't find fear to be an effective motivator".
Why The Game Music Bundle Was Hit With A Takedown Notice
The world (at least, the business world; I don't think public-sector "politicians" are that bad, the worst are rarely worse than the constituents who elect them) is run by some of the worst people imaginable.

Most of your comments don't seem particularly anti-business, but this seems fairly out there. What's your basis for this particular claim?
It happens all the time. Nothing to be afraid of.
I've done two projects-as-interviews for two different jobs, one paid, one not, both a week deadline if I recall, and around 20 hours. These were both in the midst of applying to a bunch of jobs, getting the interview based on portfolio/resume, and then, due to anxiety, completely bombing out when the technical questions started, or when they sent the do-these-problems-in-an-hour test.

I got both the jobs where I did the week-long projects. They took a while, but it was completely stress free, and allowed me to show what I can do under more realistic circumstances. I realize that some "rockstar" programmers might scoff at someone daring to take up so much of their free time, but these are the people who probably do well at the classical interview, so more power to them.

Overall, I enjoyed the project-as-interview process. Two things though: (1) I was a youngin at the time without much responsibility. Ask me to do the same thing now, with a family, and it can't be longer than a few hours spread over a week or two, or I just don't have the time. (2) As an interviewer and fellow human being, I'm very respectful of people's time. I'm uncomfortable asking someone to commit so much of it, even though for me personally it was OK.
If they cannot contact you then you have been breaking the law. Why?
This could be very good future authentication mechanism which can be used to authenticate and authorize anywhere. If they can combine it with the biometrics then it will be impossible to crack it.
I'm just going to leave these inspirational quotes here:

"a year from now you will wish you had started today."

"i never regret when i do it, i always regret when i don't."

"there are seven days in the week and someday isn't one of them."

"every accomplishment starts with the decision to try."

"if you don't build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs."

and last, but not least:

"quick slackin' & make shit happen!"
The funny thing is that according to Freshwater Railway's fictitious "history of Michigan Central Station" page [1], 2013 is the year that the Marouns sold the station to Freshwater Railway Corporation to begin constructing a commuter rail depot.

[1] http://fwrail.org/mcs.htm
The way to align interests with the consumers is to be consumer-owned, i.e. a cooperative. Reality is that all businesses have a huge range of complex interests.
The problem with libc++ the last time I tried it was that it was heavily focused on MacOS, and didn't even build out of the box on Linux.

Maybe they've fixed this by now, I dunno. [Though the wording in that blurb, "100% complete C++11 implementation on Apple's OS X" doesn't inspire confidence...]
4 years old Asus K40AB with the performance of a 6 years old. Still saving up for a new machine.
How are you better off if an overpaid VP is laid off and replaced with a cheaper VC? Try to be specific.

The word "irrational" doesn't mean "idiotic", by the way.
Are you doing work worth 250k a year? Why are you accepting 100k for it? Do you think every dollar generated by a company is allocated to salary? That's a company with a 0% (or worse) margin.
gcc also has various c++1y features already, although I think different ones than clang.

Neither compiler team is resting!
Ask HN: Who's working on strong AI?
If you're working on strong/general AI 1. Are you getting paid for it? and 2. How are you attacking it? Linguistics/semantics first, robotics, something more abstract?
Ha, this reminds me of an interview I had recently. After 3 hours of interviewing with 4 different people from the company, they sat me down to complete a technical test for 30 minutes.

Something I really liked about it was that they were fine with me searching up things I did not know (IMO, Googling is a skill and asking candidates to answer trivia questions solely from memory is quite unreasonable).

What was a bit inconsiderate was that they made me do this on a Mac. Now I understand most people have used a Mac before, and I certainly have worked with people who used Macs. Unfortunately though, prior to this, I had never actually used a Mac (let alone write code on it). I thought this could have been done better, but I do realize being someone who has never had the opportunity to use a Mac, I am part of an extremely small demographic.
I'm not sure I follow the logic. Large financial institutions hold a lot of stock, and their ethical track record is.. fraught.
I met an elderly woman that lived on a cruise ship. She need a walked but was otherwise in good health. She knew everyone on the ship, and made new friends with every cruise. To her it was an awesome life, rather than being stuck in some home. The discounts you get for multiple cruises made it quite affordable for her. Eventually she would need more healthcare but she was going to stay as long as she could.

I wouldn't mind it either if the internet was better...
Relatedly, if you watch the social climbers, they don't do a lot of real work. If you get even passably good at their game, you can get by with a couple hours of focused effort and that leaves 5-6 for self-directed learning. (Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home.) Don't feel wrong about doing this; it's a crooked game and that makes criminals of everyone. Work is (for 95+ percent of people) just about advancing your career; the other shit is stuff people say to distract the naive and clueless.

This reads a lot like @vgr's description of the career trajectory of the so-called "Sociopath". More specifically, the transition from Loser to Sociopath.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
Try A Small Orange.
For an entire year?
What's the point of inspiring me to apply to DBC if all SF cohorts are full until 2014?! :)

You guys have a waitlist for July?
Are 1,000+ models really necessary for a recipe sharing application?
Makes sense. If they demand equity, how would you respond to that? Are there legal ramifications? ( putting your friendship aside.. )
Economics is one of those subjects where simple questions have complicated answers.
At a basic level, we have more than ample resources to give everyone ample food, shelter, etc. However, because of the way money is distributed, it is more profitable for producers to create less nessasary items for those with a lot of money. With a Basic Income, producers would have a reason to create more of the basic goods now that more people have money to give for it.

Of course, the fact that these people are now spending more money does have a significant positive effect on the economy, as it is essential the definition of not a depression.
I totally agree. I get incredibly uncomfortable in those situations. Forced small talk, fake/made up emotions and laughs, awkward moments, and perceived camaraderie that is really just superficial.

The bitch about it is, you can't say that to anyone or you sound anti-social. My skin crawls when I think about being forced to go to a "mixer" or a "meet up" or something like that. Growing up in a family where I was the only boy with 3 sisters (girls, of course, being known as the more "social" sex) and a mother who seemed to make friends with everyone, I am still scarred with flashes of awkward moments that happened years ago.
Both are fulfilling roads to go down. It all depends on what kind of person you are and what you want out of life...

All I'll say is, if you get into academia make sure you do internships in industry, so you get to see both sides. All the best.
Need advice on deciding signup flow
Yes, and given that (IIRC) $_GET always returns strings anyway, casting to int before adding to a database makes sense. Even so, you should still attempt to validate the string with ctype_digit() and make sure it accurately represents the integer you expect. If you just cast directly to an int, you can't really predict the results.

And also, doing the cast inside the sql statement makes it difficult to see. It should be done, if at all, outside the query where it's obvious to anyone looking at the code that this is something that should be paid attention to.
Um, promotions every 18 months is not unheard of, but it's not what I would call typical. There are lots of people way smarter than me at Google, so I'm sure some folks have managed to reach Staff Engineer in six years, but IMHO it's a bit unreasonable to assume that as a normal pace.
And a far richer and more thorough expose on the subject is @michaelochurch's Gervais-Macleod series. To whom you responded.
Unlike people who read articles I like to talk with the working folks when I am on a cruise. Yes they work long hours for often 7-9 month contracts. But the pay they get is better than anything they could ever get in their home country. A lot of them get to spend several months at home for every contract but are always eager to go out again. It's isn't an easy life but looking at it from a rich country it seems like slavery. But most of them find the work acceptable for the pay compared to their home. Some cruise lines are much nicer to their employees than others and most of them know who.

I bet that nice piece of fruit you are eating was picked by someone from a poor country who is likely working illegally because the money at that farm is pretty good where they came from. Yes it might seem exploitative to us but their own country is much worse. Something we might not be willing to do for any money other people are happy to do it for any wage.
How old is this article? The bit on thresholds? Yeah, they are WAY over thresholds and in fact Dries has admitted the thresholds system doesn't actually work. Also they're about 2 years behind on Drupal 8.
This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet.
New York, NY

I recently created an online-education site with Ruby on Rails and I'm looking for another technical co-founder who knows Rails and Javascript well. I'm also looking for people who can create educational content. Email me at ak[at]zappable.com if interested.
June 1st:
31 Critical bugs (D8 + D7)
161 Major bugs (D8 + D7)
47 Critical tasks (D8 + D7)
160 Major tasks (D8 + D7)
There are things native can do that webapps can't, but the two examples you gave aren't among them. You write custom shaders with webgl, and make use of multiple processors with web workers (though they are more analogous to processes than threads, as they don't share state).
The generic design might be something that works, but if you don't account for materials, tolerances, etc that are associated with the building of the device, it could be broken.
Then I'd say at the very least the friendship's over.

You might look into hiring an attorney to defend yourself, but I wouldn't worry about it too much since their demand wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on being that there was never any written or signed agreement stating they were due any equity.

Let them sue you & lose I guess.

But then I'm no attorney, so don't take my word for it.