skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And in my experience, if you are willing to pay the price, either in salary or in training investment, you will find yourself an engineer. Note that I didn't just say salary. Compensation includes the whole package, including, yes, the locality whose cost of living you're paying for, and especially the skills training you can provide, which is often not nearly as expensive as you think it is.

Not to say there aren't some limits. There are obviously a limited number of people with expertise in kernel-level scheduler algorithms at any given time, for example. But as several of us have said below: if your business model relies on consistently finding and hiring unicorns, that is your problem. Either stop relying on unicorns or move your corporate HQ to the magical land of Equestria.

Still, the BigCos almost all hire people right out of college and actually relocate and train them in the industrial environment, so I wouldn't call it a labor shortage until I've tried competing with that.

(None of this is to say that I'm not trying to take advantage from my side by deliberately getting as close as I can to Unicorn-level expertise. Of course I am! But most of the time a well-run company built to grow should want my hardworking front-end, back-end, every-end web-dev friend who's less egotistical and doesn't rant on Hacker News, not a unicorn.)
For context, the US national 2010 median pay for "Software Developers" was $90,530 per year according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I believe is data provided by employer surveys.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/S...

Here is data for San Jose:

http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1627.txt

Computer software engineers, applications, Level 12 $58.23 median pay per hour ( $121,118 per year)
Cartoon RHONJ
So if a normal work week is counted at 40 hours, and there are 99 hours of leisure according to that chart for a modern man with a degree, then it works out that the average person on that plot line is now working 168 - 99 = 69 hours on average or 69 / 40 = 172.5% of a normal week. Sounds unbalanced to me.

Juliet Schor has an excellent book on this subject The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure http://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Unexpected-Decline...
Ask HN: where can I buy custom icons for use in my mobile app?
I'm working on a recipe app, and I'd like custom art for the ingredients. I know there are a bunch of free/paid image solutions for pre-made images online, but it's hard to find art for some more obscure ingredients. I'm interested in figuring out how much it would cost me for a set of custom ingredients if I can provide a list of what I need.
We've lost one of our own. May the oculus team benefit -- not suffer from his passing. Makes me sad.
It's not for freelancers, no. You can go to Germany and stay up there for up to six months while looking for work, but to get a Blue Card, you have to have a contract with an annual salary attached to it. Your Blue Card is good for the length of the contract plus three months. However, as mentioned, if you stay long enough, you can apply for permanent German residency.

Keep in mind that the German government has been tweaking the Blue Card law, so you probably want to reverify what I've said if you go that route. That being said, I just received a PM on Reddit from someone who moved to Germany after seeing a post I made about the Blue Card and they just got a job offer. They're going to sign and apply for their Blue Card with that contract.
Manufacturing did not leave the US.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO
I built a really simple horoscopes app while playing with the mirror api. glassscopes.appspot.com

This site is bizarre, though.
It all depends on what kind of app you're building.
Lots of people are telling me most apps are crap and they say they use no more than 5 - 10 apps : Mail, Maps, Messages, Camera, Twitter, Music and the browser.
If you're building a podcast app, then you should absolutely build a native app.
That almost makes German/Dutch wages seem good... (average wage for a just-graduated developer is around 35000 euros in both countries).
False.present? is false
Then those other companies are not competitive and will wither away in a Capitalist economy.

Problem solved.

tl;dr: paying high salaries is becoming a competitive advantage.
I worked in central london for RBI in part of Reed Elsevier and 2 out of 3 of my younger colleagues had access to family property in London which is how they managed to live in London.

Ironically I had a 70 mile commute and I got into work before the ones who lived in London 90% of the time :-)
A better title could be: "Monopoles simulated in crystal structure".

In crystals it's very useful to describe some arrangements as fictitious particles.

For example an "electron" inside a crystal is not alone, it's surrounded by a perturbation of the nearby electrons. So the effective mass (mass * ) of an "electron" inside a crystal is different from the mass of a free electron in vacuum. The mass can even be negative! It's easy to understand this negative mass using an algebraic trick and describing this object as a particle called "hole" with a positive effective mass and a positive charge.

Another example is the perturbations of the crystalline lattice (the movements of the atoms that compose the crystal), they are called "phonons" and in a lot of ways they behave like real particles. For example the correct method to understand conductivity at small temperature is to analyze how the "phonons" can "bounce" against the "electrons" and "holes".

So, the result in this article could be useful to test what could happen if we even find a real monopole, but it's not a real monopole and it gives no cue about a possible method to create a real monopole.

Another article that describes a similar effect, but it's more clear about the difference between a real monopole and the result of their experiment: "Point-like defects in a quantum fluid behave like magnetic monopoles" : http://phys.org/news/2012-09-point-like-defects-quantum-flui...
shitballs people are making more than 200k sterling in the UK?
this one seems to produce quite a lot of false-positives though, doesn't it?
For the Rails folks out there, I have had pretty good luck with Brakeman Scanner in the past.

http://brakemanscanner.org/
Bloc (http://www.bloc.io) - INTERN, REMOTE

* We're building a vertically integrated education platform.

* We're looking for generalist developers (we're a Ruby shop)

* We're a small team of 5 (all technical)

* We pay market salaries and offer early-employee equity.

* We have traction, revenue, and funding

* Located in a really nice office in SOMA, San Francisco

* Health, Vision, Dental + 401K

We work hard and take pride in the products we ship, but we also realize that building a strong culture and team is the most important thing we could do to have lasting impact. A few highlights of our culture:

* You have a lot of ownership and opportunities to pursue your ideas

* We value the pursuit of knowledge, which means we're pretty nerdy and frequently
get into conversations about philosophy, science, etc.

* We're firm believers in enabling all of our employees to continue to grow and
master skills they're interested in developing.

Let me know if you're interested: roshan [at] bloc.io
Regarding your hesitancy to plant perennials: I plant lots of them and keep the ones that make it. After 18 years my yard looks pretty great now. It's hard to predict what will take give all the microclimates but it's fun to experiment.

Programming has some parallels, since it's easy to try new things you can keep what works and get rid of what doesn't work. After 25 years of programming I'm pretty happy with my craftsmanship.
This is a story about the literal intersection of police, guns, gangs, speeding, pedestrian crosswalks, motor vehicle accidents, and the sudden, traumatic, and innocent bystander death of the co-founder of a visible startup. And you guys expect no discussion of politics?

Can you point to a single story since the inception of Hacker News that quite obviously involved the intersection of hacker/startup culture with the rest of society where politics were not discussed? What is any discussion about wealth or economics if not politics? Is it a vanishingly small percentage of PG's essays that express a strong political opinion?

As far as I'm concerned, discussing politics as they relate to hacker culture is on topic. Discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, not so on-topic, but nevertheless people here had interesting things to say from a hacker perspective. I'll be the first to agree that political extremism is aggravating, but the solution to political extremism is not the avoidance of politics altogether.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=profit+per+employee+goo...
If you're going to renovate the building into something like apartments or offices, wouldn't you want to create a model unit to photograph (from the inside) and use for later?
We're currently making a HTML5 web app that works in Chrome and iOS Safari.

It's an audio app (SpeakerBlast) where you sync the same audio across devices; used to amplify audio amongst friends or throughout your IP devices for gatherings, flash mobs & playing audio throughout your home!

We feel it's easier for to tell your friends to go to this link to join in then, "Hey download this app so we can all play audio in sync."

No doubt that the current market says native apps, but this will change within two to three years. Web technologies are catching up in regards to what can be achieved via Android (specifically Chrome) and Apple mobile web browsers.
Yeah but after a boom and bust cycle, the guy at the 300k house will weather it fine while the 1.5m guy will be bankrupt and lose everything.
With everyone anticipating an even bigger crash and given all the bad news in May it's surprising bitcoin has remained relatively stable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/31/w...
WebAction Inc. in Downtown Palo Alto - Full Time- Hiring Front End Developers and Platform Engineers

Jobs@WebAction.com

WebAction is an enterprise infrastructure software company based in Palo Alto, CA bridging the gap between transactional and big data. The company was founded in May 2012 and it is currently in stealth mode. Founded by a team of Silicon Valley veterans with proven track records, WebAction is backed by some of the most respected names in Silicon Valley.

We offer a competitive salary, excellent benefits package, and generous equity for the right candidates. If you want to join our cutting-edge team, grow as we do and share the excitement of an early start-up environment please apply today.

Job Description: You should be a self-starting senior web UI developer with a desire to lead and mentor others. You excel in a fast-paced agile environment and will be able to collaborate with back-end engineers to design interfaces and architect interaction models, and with the product team to wire-frame and prototype ideas.

Desired Skills & Experience for Front-end Position:
-Excellent JavaScript knowledge necessary – please be prepared to show us examples of your work

-Experience with HTML5/CSS3

-Experience with JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Backbone, etc.)

-Experience with visualization frameworks (d3, processing.js)

-Know how to build drag and drop web diagramming UIs (such as mxGraph, gliffy, drawio)

-Excellent communication skills, both written and oral

-Must be able to function well in an early stage startup environment

-Must be able to multi-task

Pluses:
-Experience in user interaction design and user experience

-Knowledge of back-end web frameworks

-iOS or Android experience

For the Platform Engineering position, you should have the following interests/credentials:

Large-scale distributed systems, Highly available, highly scalable architectures, Hadoop (MapReduce / Pig / Zookeeper), Data Serialization (Avro / Thrift / Protocol Buffers), Bytecode generation and injection, NoSQL / BigData (MongoDB / Cassandra / HBase), Real-time messaging (0MQ / Kestrel / Kafka or similar), Real-time event processing, Continuous Queries

Candidates must currently reside in the USA. If this sounds like you, shoot us an e-mail at jobs@WebAction.com.
Pharma companies spend twice as much on marketing/advertising for a new drug than on its R&D [1,2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174966/
[2] Ben Goldacre. Bad Pharma. 2012. Fourth Estate
If you think that you're going to be 100% utilized, you are saying that not only do you have no uncertainty as to where your next engagement is going to be, but also that your clients have no uncertainty as to their schedules, and none of their engagements are every going to slip, change scope, or get cancelled.
SpiderMonkey uses JavaScriptCore's regular expression JIT, YARR (Yet Another RegExp Runtime).
It's not unlimited - just zones 1-2 and the tube shuts down around 12 making it a pain to come back home after a night out.
I feel like this is something better suited for a dedicated site/application rather than being slapped onto HN.

Glassdoor essentially does this already.
Seems like we need a nationalized method for finding drugs, a DARPA for pharma that spends some of the trillions from defense weaponry on defense of national health.
There's a joke to be made here about "broken crypto search".
You've learned the pharmaceutical industry's PR talking points well.
It's all specialisation and one human mind can only do so many things. The web side alone is vast now. It's a common conversation in the web community about how a new developer is supposed to pick everything up.

I agree if you're a company, you can't afford to turn your nose at one or the other. But there's few unicorns who can build excellent apps in all of web, Android, and iOS. And despite a lot of software mythology, I don't believe most programmers can just learn a platform in a few days, not to be seriously capable at it.
Yoga and entrepreneurship
What I Learned Building…Relationships with Mentors
Christianity-English-HTML
“But if you want your user experience to really excel, native is still king – for now.”
Liver damage, diabetes, memory loss, muscle problems....

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/statin-side-effects/MY00205

Clearly the medical community has decided that the benefits outweigh the risks for most people, i.e. lower cholesterol. However while statins are shown to lower blood cholesterol, benefits in terms of reduced heart disease are not necessarily clear, especially in people with no other history of heart disease. A recent study found that "Statin use is associated with an increased prevalence and extent of coronary plaques"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22981406

There is even disagreement that cholesterol levels alone are really predictive of heart disease:

http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2012/05/latest-thinki...

No silver bullets....
Meet the new wave of activists making feminism thrive in a digital age
Porn to come to Google Glass with first X-rated app
Absolutely. URLs are the #1 feature of the web that native apps are lacking.

The second being metadata and search engine indexability of the content.
It's good that you don't mind being poor, 'cause that's what you're gonna be. I hope that start-up is worth it.
Unless you are a patent expert professionally convinced of the legitimacy and relevance of a patent, you shouldn't be promoting sketchy patent claims widely. To do so aids patent trolls in their "willful infringement" claims, and spreads vague FUD that suppresses new ideas prematurely.

Following the advice of Linus Torvalds [1] and other wise, experienced technical leaders, I suggest all working engineers avoid idly reviewing patents or patent claims unless and until a patent expert representing your own interests advises that there is a credible threat of legal action and need to understand specific patents.

Otherwise you're helping trolls and wasting time getting worked up over what is, 99.99% of the time, nothing.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/7636/
Has anyone used OmniFocus 2 yet? I want to get my hands on it.
Are you contending that if they did not market/advertise their new drugs they more easily recoup their R&D expenses?
SEEKING WORK - SF Bay Area, Remote OK, Travel Negotiable

I'm an ex-startup Software Engineer. Full stack, with a focus on backend systems. I was a core team member for http://getaround.com and http://wakemate.com. Heavily experienced in consumer products, collaborative consumption and quantified self.

{Python: [Django, Flask, Bottle]}
'(Clojure Compojure)

Google App Engine, Heroku, Redis, Mongo, Mysql, Postgres.

I wrote After Credits, a popular free Foursquare plugin with ~30,000 users:
http://engineering.foursquare.com/2012/08/16/checking-in-at-...

I also have experience with Facebook, Zendesk, Twilio, Braintree and Stripe.

https://github.com/mvid | http://www.linkedin.com/in/mvidutis

And feel free to contact me: m @ facelessmegacorp dot com
this is probably the most worthwhile response in the whole tread. From running GroupTalent I have seen the most successful freelancers (those pulling in over $100/hr) do these things:
1- hitch themselves to great growing clients
2- put their clients feeling much ahead of their own
3- deliver value over and beyond what is expected
clients do not need highly paid (senior, architects, etc.) devs all the time but when they do, they need a v good one. So whatever rate they are paying is worth it.
Anybody from facebook care to comment? I wonder if this is done as a bandwidth saving measure on facebook's part, or perhaps to make chat traffic more reliable vs using APNS...
It'd be interesting to also hear some average hours worked. I have the image that the average hours worked in the IT sector in Bay area is quite high, so it's not directly comparable to the previous poll.
Welcome to Peak Capitalism
>> So, you mean that if US drug companies made more money abroad, they would decide to make less money than they possibly can in the US?
>No, I didn't mean anything like that. I have no idea how you got that out of what I said.

You wrote: "This means that pharmaceutical companies have to recoup their fixed costs (R&D) and generate their real profits from the US market" (emphasis mine). What did you mean with that phrase, if not that if they could make their real profits outside the US pharmaceutical companies wouldn't have to recoup their costs in the US?
Hmmm... I love the idea of planting lots and seeing what makes it--there' just a money/time investment that makes me hesitate (again, "just do it", right?). And what if you plant an invasive perennial?

Another similarity is compounding returns, both in terms of skills and 'on the ground knowledge'--the garden you have this year is the sum total of your efforts for previous years as well as your knowledge (unless you move).
> the web is so much faster to prototype.

We tried testing that theory, having one team prototype the same app using web technologies and the other prototyping it using iOS native technologies. iOS appeared to be the faster of the two.

The vast majority of the work was prototypeable in Storyboards directly, and only required, if I recall correctly, around 20 lines of code for supporting requirements to build out the prototype. I haven't found many tools for the web that can compete with that.

Of course it depends on what you are trying to develop. If your application is document-centric, then it will be difficult to beat HTML. That is, after all, what it is designed for. But for an application-centric design, I'm not sure it is really all that fast as a prototyping platform – unless, I suppose, that is all you know. It does take time to ramp up familiarity with new platforms.
Knowledge and experience aren't credentials. In fact, the question I asked is sort of the opposite of a credentials question.

In fairness: I think you accurately identified the subtext of my question! I like Jacques and presume that he has more knowledge than me about a lot of things, but my intuition on this thread was that he was going to quote that "How Goldman Sachs Created The Food Crisis" article, or something derived from it, and conveniently ignore the central role commodities trading has in locking in prices for perishable products in the face of uncertain supply/demand.

But just because I'm honest about the subtext of that comment doesn't make the comment itself rude; I worded it to create the opportunity for Jacques to come back with something like "I worked for years in trading markets and am very familiar with ag futures markets", which, for all we know, he still might.
As others have pointed out, well crafted or not, it doesn't add anything new to what people know can be done with CSS if you hack it hard enough; 5 years ago someone made a Homer Simpson in pure CSS (before border-radius) and it worked in IE 5.5:
http://www.romancortes.com/blog/homer-css/

If you think SVG is a craftless 'just export it' type of technology then you're not really getting it - it's xml - human readable and editable.

You get a lot more out of it if you know how to read the source, add/remove/alter the elements by hand if needs be. So plenty of valuable skills to develop, things to learn and opportuties for push yourself without resorting to yet another demonstration of how it's possible to simulate vector illustration if you apply copious amounts of divs and CSS.
Hey everyone, I'm starting a weekly newsletter for freelancers. It will be a weekly roundup of useful articles, resources and job postings for freelance programmers. I'll personally curate it, so you can be assured the quality is high (see my profile and HN history to be sure).

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I confess that I am actually interested in the salary of my job in other countries, especially when I live in a country where I earn 11k$ a year and am actually considering the possibility of emigration.
As someone who has been interested in relocating to Austin, can you explain why you say that?
Prospect represents people in the IT TMT industries http://www.prospect.org.uk/
I'm a fan of the statement made at the end of this article .. which to me boils down to that

A mobile web presence is very important and shouldn't be ignored but if you're going to distribute something as a native app it's silly to build it entirely in a WebView

also it's wise to never forget that technology changes so fast neither of these current platforms will be the same in 2-3 years .. so really just pick something and go
I think PG lives by the KISS method.

Remember "Offer HN" trends?
- the entire front page was filled with "Offer HN"

- followed by blog posts about why it sucks

- followed by blog posts telling those people calm down

- people were asking for separate URL for "Offer HN" like "ask"

These things are kinda gimmicky and will usually die off within a week or so.

Getting back to whatever I was doing...
Yes, that was what I meant :).
Totally right. Here's an example of a live-action frame from Tron. The scene was shot in black and white with insanely high contrast, then color was added by hand.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/todbot/562635012/in/photostream...
I think Oxbridge + Edinburgh is closer to Ivy League
Yes, you can do some pretty cool cross-browser stuff even today.

"Web technologies are catching up in regards to what can be achieved via Android (specifically Chrome) and Apple mobile web browsers."

This is assuming native platforms stand still, and they aren't; the web's caught in their cross-fire.

Whenever you think something is "done", it's rarely the case. (I know you didn't say that, but it's a related argument people sometimes use in favour of the web.) iOS and Android in a few years could be dealing with home automation, cars, wearables, etc., and while some developers today might say "oh but we just do mobile", in the future that might be like saying "oh we just do 7" tablets".

The "catching up argument also assumes web standards are converging, and in the past two years, the increased pace of innovation has made some web technologies diverge. Such as the offline technologies I mentioned in the linked article.