skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess this shows that people can achieve a much higher return on capital investment in the bay area. That's the only way that they'd be able to afford the significantly higher salaries per worker.
Which comes earlier, HTH or HHT? Generic solver.
"How do you come to this conclusion?"

1. Why do you equate mtgoxUSD to the US market? The majority of MtGox customers trading USD are non-americans.

2. Only ~20% of the Bitcoin connected nodes are located in the USA: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-27/mapping-bitcoins-gl...

3. Only ~9% of the world internet users are americans, making the USA a tiny market with respect to the potential future of Bitcoin.

4. bitcoincharts exclude many foreign exchanges (metabank in Russia, where Bitcoin is HUGE), all private trades (eg. Avalon claimed they sold all the bitcoins they needed to sell to build their 110nm ASIC at TSMC, to private buyers in China; the fact they were able to do this with no pb just tells you how big private trading is in China), etc.
Just going to add a bit about some potentially fertile intellectual grounds for bipartisan support for some form of universal minium income.

From the right: F.A. Hayek, another right-leaning Nobel-winning economist, also supported a universal minimum income (not a negative income tax, but similar, of course. He also added a caveat that he thought it should be implemented IFF it was implemented everywhere).

I like the idea because it doesn't involve eliminating market economies. It's kind of like food stamps, but for a broader array of things: You can competitively purchase basic goods and services, which generally drives down costs and drives up quality.

From the left: One big concern with cash transfers is that some goods are complicated for consumers to understand (healthcare, for example). So, if you are left-leaning, maybe you can support a universal minimum income because the government could have a big role to play in, say, acting as a neutral agent and creating web portals and apps that efficiently disseminate excellent and easy-to-understand information about the types of healthcare plans available for purchase.
While I could be fooling myself, I can actively recall thinking "blerg, blog posts as top results" and moving down the list.

Funny thing is, I don't have a problem with blog posts, it just comes across as commercialised and my brain doesn't generally associate commercialised results with value.

That might be irrational, but that's what I'm going to continue self-reporting. :p
would be helpful to specify units and show $ equivalents
> So real example in their case, a guy that makes a minor non-critical mistake after 20 years of loyal service gets punished equally as the guy who has 1-2 years of service and bad mouths the company at every chance. Is that fair? I don't think so, maybe you do.

If that's the case, and the other employees share the same sentiment, then they can talk to the union leaders to try and change the rules. If the union leaders refuse, then the employees can vote them out.

> To be up front, I generally dislike unions, but feel they did have a place in a previous time when employers abused their employees, and in rare circumstances still do.

Just because there are laws on the books right now to assuage employer abuse, doesn't mean that companies and third parties aren't actively trying to repeal said laws. Last election we saw a presidential candidates suggest that we get rid of janitors and replace them with children. It's really not "rare" for employers to treat their employees bad, unfortunately.

> Please don't get me wrong, people in unions are generally good, hard working people; but I feel the union itself on the other hand is only out for its own interests (not yours) and that means raising dues and collecting more money, which they do by getting higher wages and more retirement benefits etc.

Coming from a union family, I couldn't disagree more. My dad is 53 and has worked for a major telecom since he was 18. Without the union bargaining for proper healthcare and dental insurance, we would be screwed. Every time the bargaining contract is up, it's a great deal of stress for my family because management is always fighting to give less and less in terms of benefits. I don't blame them, their job is to cut costs. But someone needs to represent the workers and this is why we have unions. Are they perfect? Not at all. But they have changed my life for the better.

> See what it costs taxpayers.

If you really want to talk about cost to the tax payers, let's look at the amount of Walmart employees on food stamps and other aid programs because they aren't making enough money to make ends meet.

If employers treat their employees well, then their is no need for a union. Unfortunately, there are many industries that don't treat their employees well and you are really underplaying that.

The Internet is a major game changer when it comes to unions and we haven't really seen it utilized at all.
Good web software could cut down on a lot of the overhead costs associated with a union today. It could also help keep accountability and what not.
You never get the time commuting back. If you want a better work-life balance, move closer to work, or work closer to where you want to live. Switching jobs is not as hard as people make it out to be, esp. if you're good at "the game".
£26k is low for London but should be fine outside London - I would assume that it would increase to £35k after a year or two if he was staying in London.

Most people in the UK don't have health insurance because it's not needed because we have the NHS.

Student loans will most likely only be with the government's SLC agency which only takes 9% of your salary above £21k.

Many people who live in Lomdon don't have cars because there is little point, however travel cards still cost a lot anyway.
[1] is grossly outdated: it was last updated in Oct 2012:

$ HEAD http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/countryHostsMonth.png
[...]
Last-Modified: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 05:05:27 GMT

Things change quickly in the Bitcoin world. Stats that are 8 months old are absolutely not a good indicator of today.

And indeed, [2], which is from this week, directly contradicts [1]: it shows that the share of Bitcoin nodes located in the USA is only 20% (and has been dwindling). China already equated or surpassed the USA (they are also at 20%).
My younger cousin is a Lego fanatic and he essentially plays with the sets as a single use model. I can imagine him liking this service quite a bit.
Agent Orange is a herbicide. It is not colored orange.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-Huey-helicopter-sprayin...
>"What if we could have a world where work was the pursuit of intellectual growth rather than the pursuit of money? What would it be like?"
Non-existent, because people are greedy and will always want more than their fellow man. Even if /you/ don't personally, most of the people around you probably do.

This is the #1 reason I get depressed about this life.
To be fair, the last recession in the US officially ended 4 years ago this month. But in short, I don't know. I imagine it's useful to have capacity ready ahead of time considering how slow laws move, perhaps.
Because their work was temporary and they don't have any skin in the game, I feel like equity is a bit much. I was thinking some other type of remuneration instead
The author's point is that "valuable" isn't the same as "valued by others who are willing to pay you", and that the latter can interfere with the former.
"So I think that's where Racket is apart from the Lisps and the
Schemes: its core language is syntactically minimalist, as a Scheme,
while it strives to have a vast standard library, as a Lisp. Three
years ago, they renamed it from PLT Scheme to Racket for this reason."

Chicken Scheme is in the same position. It has a pretty extensive library,
extends far beyond R5RS, avoids R6RS, and plans to be R7RS compliant.

It also has the great advantage of compiling down to C.
[edit] I think you mean 'sandstone universities' [1]. 'Brownstone' is generally a US word (plus most Australian sandstone is not brown).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandstone_Universities
Thanks for the note -- the performance problem was in set(), not get (that was lazy of me).

We didn't have a lot of triggers running -- we spent a lot of time looking at performance traces. Just initializing models on page load was incredibly slow. It was particularly bad on a retina iPad.
Currently, the use of PDO is preferred and anything involving the mysql libraries should be avoided, and support for them is being deprecated in PHP anyway.

I found this interesting, though, regarding specifically SQL injection when mysql_real_escape_string is used: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5741187/sql-injection-tha...

basically the argument appears to boil down to mixed character sets causing escaping not to act as predicted. I can't speak to the validity of it though.
I think you're right, but for a disquieting reason.

I think the reason this process appears to work is that all the other conventional hiring processes are equally bad; if you're shooting for "reject obvious crazies and incompetents and then accept statistically insignificant deviation from random chance", sure, choose the technique with the least overhead no matter what.
I've been working and getting paid well, then not trying to save a ton since I could die any day. My generation probably won't get to retire, and so I'm trying to live now while I'm young. I usually try to do crazy stuff on the weekends that other 20somethings wouldn't be able to do, and I'll bring my friends along if I can.
just work for an employee-owned company.

How is this different than, "attaching yourself to a community," which you denigrated above?
Can You Tornado-Proof A Home?
People usually tell me I'm living in a bubble and that the general public is too lazy for this to work.

Right now, we have a problem with parasitic moochers who ruin society-- a parasitic set of nonproducers who have destroyed our values and bankrupted us. They're at the top of it.

If the worst thing that happens out of BI is that there's a class of parasites at the bottom, that I can deal with it. It improves the leverage of the productive middle against the parasitic, progress-averse top of society, and that's a really good thing.
Are you required to keep search logs? Are you required to correlate searches with users? It seems like it's the choice to retain and analyze those that puts you in the position of having to turn them over.

DDG doesn't do that. It's a participant in the same legal system.
300k for 40 hours a week in quant finance after 5 years in Boston? You are very lucky indeed. Most people don't make this much after 5 years in New York and usually work much more.
Good point. I hope he won't mind. I think it makes his story the more remarkable (and an example to follow for many other people).
Maybe equal to the cash value of the 30 hours of work. If you were to sell shares in the amount their work was worth.

But most likely you just pay them in cash & call it a done deal. Without written documents awarding equity I'd say an expectation of equity is out of line.
Not Getting Paid.
low quality leisure time? how is this defined?
Why do identical twins end up having such different lives?
People are missing the main point here. This was a terrible, but not a senseless, tragedy, and there is an important lesson to learn.

It's not "be more careful when crossing the street". Being a super-defensive pedestrian might have saved Andrew Reisse, but that's not the main point. It's not "don't have high speed chases". Perhaps different police policies might have averted this tragedy, but that's not the main point, either.

The main point is that roving paramilitary gangs rule large swathes of Santa Ana, California, and virtually every other big city in America. These gangs have not been broken because the police lack the mandate to break them. (My father consulted for the Santa Ana police department for nearly 30 years; they feel powerless against the gangs.) The gangs probably wouldn't last a week against a vigorous application of military-grade force, but such an application of force is politically untenable at present. This means that the current political system itself is complicit.

Don't blame the pedestrian or the police. Blame the gangs and the system that protects them.
>There is a natural law that applies to politics as much as anything: If you think you can't do it, you don't try. And you can't do it if you don't try.

I agree with this. It's absolutely true.

That said, I don't agree that government is necessarily the right place to "try" things as the nature of government is fundamentally VERY different than product design or other entrepreneurial endeavors. If you have a theory about how the business world should be and you fail, the company folds and it's undone. If a law is passed and it's imperfect, bad, or horrible we'll likely have to live with it forever or nearly so. The majority of the laws ever passed are still on the books today. The Patriot Act and the Brady Bill are the only two things I can think of that had an automatic expiration.

In other words, in markets there is virtually no hysteresis. When talking about conglomerates or other big, big businesses there is definitely some. When dealing with the law, hysteresis is the rule not the exception.

It is for that reason I find I am always hesitant to argue that we simply have to pass "A law stating X" and that we can fix things.
Writing for the Sake of Writing.
Yeah, that's really hard to believe. I know some 3rd year associates (meaning they've been coming up the ranks for about ~6 years) in Goldman Sachs who don't make that much.
Seriously misleading title. It seems to me that this particular experiment did not prove that "anyone could make a nuclear bomb". Rather, it demonstrated that a group of highly-educated physicists, when provided with the necessary resources and enough time, could develop one.

I sincerely doubt that reading this study would lead one to conclude that a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe could do the same. Perhaps "anyone" should have been substituted with "any industrialized country" in the title.
Julius can be off the mark sometimes. Do you think CMUSphinx is a better option as an always-on listener? I haven't tried it.
This. They deliver the flat packed boxes to you for free.

Plus you can buy USPS priority shipping online (at a discount) when needed, and drop anything that will fit in a USPS mailbox (the 15-ounce rule is for mail bearing only stamps). Or hand it to your (or any) mail carrier out on their rounds if you prefer.
Marxism has a lot to do with freedom. Unfourtunatly the only form of socialism that was ever tried was Leninism, which is a specific form of state socialism. And Leninism is easily corruptable. ( Or perhaps was designed to be easily corruptable.)

And your decentrelized economy sounds to me a lot like socialized ownership of capital, the very definition of socialism.
I really don't get why you consider 30 old or even near that. In my opinion it is a good time to do some self education, maybe change careers because many people don't realize what they really want until 30 or so. "Industry expert" on the other hand sounds plain boring.
You can take buses from anywhere, I think you're forgetting. That's still a good deal.
It's not. The preferred method of preventing SQL injections is via prepared statements. mysql_real_escape_string is only suitable for strings (as the name implies). Something like

SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=$_GET['field']

where $_GET['field'] has been passed through mysql_real_escape_string is still vulnerable. Using prepared statements forces php to send data to the DBMS in such a way that it cannot confuse user input from the actual SQL. This is due to the fact that preparing data forces you to give types to the data before you use it in a query. Escaping input (such as with mysql_real_escape_string) makes this confusion still possible.
If such a world wouldn't be a zero-sum game, then the greedy could have their wealth, and others could pursue other things, and those two goals wouldn't conflict.
I agree, and I wasn't trying to diminish his role. I was just trying to understand where the "co-founder" in the title came from. How did the submitter know he was truly a co-founder?

I couldn't find mention of this anywhere, so I was assuming the submitter knew some history of him that I couldn't find on their site.
No, especially since you're 25. Plenty of people came into software engineering late, even people who are 'famous' in the field now.

I'm actually 30 (well 31) and feel like I'm starting over again very year or two given how fast things move, and have just got on to a MSc software engineering course, so.. why not? :)
Honestly - I feel like I don't have enough time with work to be able to "prove" myself enough to get hired. (and also when I study by myself, I get about 0 feedback from others, so I feel like I'm learning terrible practices). I guess two specific questions: 1 - how can I "prove" myself? and 2 - what kind of places actually take junior programmers?
Might it be easier to start with Clojure and make it more like Processing, since it can already use all the Processing Java code from the start?
Well sounds like you have a good handle on your health inputs! Good on you.
Absolutely not!

I'm one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com) and the median age for our students is 28-32. We've graduated dozens of students over the age of 30 who learned to program at DBC and they went on to work at all sorts of awesome places.

Felix Tsai was one of our students last summer and was 42 when he entered DBC. He's now an engineer at TapJoy in San Francisco.

About Felix: http://devbootcamp.com/2013/02/05/felix-tsai-of-tapjoy-on-le...
Is [USNews & World Report](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...) a good source to decide which Masters Programs are legit and which are just junk? Seems like there's a lot of crap around...
I feel that. What spurred you to take the plunge?
Most Scientific Theories Are Wrong
Totally agree, love the midwest and the south!
trivia night

Just to bring a personal anecdote why meals are less problematic: Trivia night would be the fastest way to push me away. I hate made up, faked up bonding events that have no other intention than to force me in a social gathering. At least try coming up with something creative, e.g. Lego night or something like that.
No idea about parent's background but in my experience those jobs are almost impossible to get if you are not already "inside". HFT is probably the most competitive part of finance for software engineers and the market is not expanding anymore. Same goes for other kinds of quantitative trading, but they generally pay less and are less competitive nowadays.
Ask HN: What can I do to impress you as a Front-End Developer?
Seems like everyone is a "front end developer" nowadays. What can I do to set myself apart?
Yes, I'm glad, but I don't feel like she's going beyond what she owes me.

Nobody owes you anything by default. We might agree to mutually abide by rules not to harm each other, but you are not owed anything for free.

This is part of "free markets", and indeed used to be part of being a citizen of a country; the country provides you with various things in exchange for things you give up such as some freedoms, some money, and perhaps other things too.

Given the norm of people being completely self-centered these days, and being proud of it on top, I think altruism should be applauded and encouraged whenever it happens.
> The flip side of this, if it helps make the point clearer: you're a $100k/yr dev. The VP at your company is already making $50k/yr. This is good how? By any logic you could employ in the above scenario, you're worth more than $100k/yr in this scenario too.

The difference is in one scenario you're talking about a company that can pay out 300k a year, and in the other it's only 150k. Fairness is not about absolute numbers, but relative numbers in proportion to the total available.
And since you already have a bachelor's in something else (I assume), it probably won't take you four years to finish the CS degree anyway.
What I actually want to build is multi-backend. It's running off of CMUsphinx right now (which was a ridiculous pain to build, but also taught me a lot about the things that power it), but I want the audio backends to be switchable at the change of some strings in a config file, and of course, the proliferation to more platforms.

The output/initialization/running of julius and cmusphinx are very very similar.

I do think CMU Sphinx is pretty good as an always on listener -- I've had times where it would suddenly die after running for hours (which I tried to debug) -- and times that it would run fine after me playing hours of music non-stop.
> Felix Tsai was one of our students last summer and was 42 when he entered DBC. He's now an engineer at TapJoy in San Francisco.

If you know, could you please tell me if Mr. Tsai had any other qualifications before joining your program? Did he have a Science or IT degree, or have any relevant qualifications?
It may suggest TO YOU that "anyone wanting privacy is doing bad things", but that is not what was said, and it is not what was implied. Maybe you're projecting?

Let's try a hypothetical parallel. "If you really don't want to go to jail, maybe you shouldn't be smoking pot in front of American cops." See how in my statement, there's no value judgement about smoking pot, and there's no value judgement about wanting to stay out of jail, there's just an observation about the realities of the world. This is NOT the same as "only bad people want to stay out of jail", nor "only bad people smoke pot", NOR EVEN "only bad people want to smoke pot and also stay out of jail". It's just "people who want to smoke pot and stay out of jail may be at the mercy of forces beyond their control."

I have no idea what Eric actually thinks. Maybe he does actually think that privacy should be outlawed or some other hilariously socially-unacceptable belief. But in the much-quoted quote, he said nothing of the kind. Protestations to the contrary are simply "I want to believe he's evil" paranoia.

Disclaimer: Googler
Each decision builds a foundation of a status quo, defined as the sum total of the "this is not evil" decisions and designations made in the past, which constitutes a form of momentum (especially among those who don't want to rock the gBoat).

This momentum is a force that affects the value system of the company's implementors and gating roles. It boils down to "bad things can happen even if everybody thinks they're working for good." Myopia becomes a bigger problem the older a company gets.
They sure do :) Can't name names but I know at least one of the biggest (and wealthiest) companies in the Rails apps scene pays its remote employees a fair wage by where those employees live, not by what would be acceptable in Chicago.
The product of your work goes directly into my eyes; show me something I haven't seen before (an interface, design style, interaction point, etc).
If you majored in something quantitative there is just no need to take CS courses in a traditional college format. Online courses are on the same level or better if you can study by yourself and know enough math.
Some tips I learned from my commute from south bay <--> SF for two years.

- Take caltrain for normal days. Drive for days with evening events. Trains are far slower in off peak hours.

- Use a bike for station to home/office. Bart or VTA are shit.

- Get up early, use bullet train (last one leaves Mt View ~8am)

- Use a data plan on train to catch up on emails, code reviews, etc. Or type up some code that you can finish up compiling debugging when in office.

I probably would prefer this commute over 30minute drive within south bay.
Though not living in the first world, I feel it the same way.
I like it because it presumes that people are capable, when left to their own devices, to make decisions on their own.