skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's actually not as easy to find programming jobs as people make it seem. It can be hard, especially if you're starting out; it's just not as hellish as for non-technical jobs.

There's a terrifying rule-of-thumb called the $20,000 rule (it gets adjusted for inflation periodically; it used to be $10,000) that says that your job hunts will take 1 month per $20,000 in salary. That seems to be accurate for non-techs. In technology, it's about 1 month per $50,000-- if you're already in the game. It's still inconvenient, but not the nightmare it'd be if that number were 1 month per $20,000.

Getting your first dev job-- without connections or a CS degree-- is hard as hell. What seems to work for a lot of people is to take a job that involves programming and use that as a launchpad. If you know how to write Excel macros, automate all the office shit work. Then learn VBA. Then learn Python because VBA sucks. Now learn some front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, Javascript). This'll take over a year, but good things don't happen overnight. Soon, you'll be a fully-fledged programmer. If you work your ass off, you'll pass the people who started coasting at 24 and be running circles around them in 5 years.
Academia has an awful lot to do with real-life software engineering. It might not be as good of a preparation as spending those four years in internships or as a junior developer, but saying that there's (literally) no difference between the software engineering capabilities of a CS grad and an English grad is hyperbole.
Twilio definitely uses ec2, it's been an oft-highlighted choice in many presentations and posts over the years.

- http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/twilio-voice-applications-w...

- http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasn...
I think a side effect of his campaign is that it will put Indiegogo into the spotlight for crowdsource funding at least temporary.
But this Ubuntu Edge campaign itself seem to me is writing a new chapter on what is possible with crowdsource funding when you hit a true market demand and when you ran a well thought out campaign.
My hope is they do deliver the to their best capabilities and make this to a successful campaign.
Reasons: longevity

Postgres has had it's failures under weird confluences of circumstances - and learnt from them a decade or more ago.

I would like to see Twilio standby their stack choices, invest time and effort and sponsorship of redis so that in a decade or two people will be taking it on faith that redis is bullet proof (well the combined postgredis datastore:-)
I don't like dev bootcamps. I think they produce people who know specific things like web dev with ruby or iOS development. They are like the java schools spolsky warned us about.

I think the best developers are generally educated in cs.
AirPlay is proprietary to Apple. The competing technology that Google (or at least Android) is throwing its support behind is Miracast (which uses WiFi Direct). I don't know if this device supports this kind of streaming, though; I get the impression that the device merely receives URLs from controlling devices, which it connects to directly.
I agree. My worry is about the long term; what happens when they stop leading to $90k salaries because there are too many people coming out of them? Who does the accreditation?

The four-year university education may be a dinosaur, but that system had sound reasons (one can debate whether those are "good") for limiting admissions.
The question is - do you have to resort to the AC adapter if you have one of the newer HDMI ports?
http://hackreactor.com
It has been many years since i have taken latin, but i am still struggling to understand his usage of "a priori". Am i reading this paragraph wrong?
It's a great way that learning to code can produce a ton of content and experimental innovation. Code Academy (and others) listen up: What if everyone produced content while learning to code?
Edward Snowden currently on top of the leaderboard. Hmm.

http://pplrep.com/leaderboard
If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable.

The basis of outsourcing at most large corporations is that people are more or less interchangeable.

Someone asking why we need to hire programmers from other countries might just as well ask why Real Madrid has to hire so many non-Spanish players. Can't they just train more Spanish players to play at the level they need?

Sorry but that is a ridiculous analogy. Most programmers here on H1B's are boiler room grunts. They work for large consulting companies where their key talent is looking like they know what they are doing. There are very few remarkable Cobol programmers working for InfoSys at Fortune 500 companies.
True, for sure.

But then perfect is the enemy of good, which for anyone doing software should remember.

Until a customer or someone important actually cares about that 2px off CSS, that refactor you want to do, or your caching/performance numbers, just don't do it. Wait till someone asks and then get after it.

I love how OP put her work out there to prove her wide array of skills, or more important, her ability to learn random skills. Who else has put out 180 sites for public review?

Awesome!!
Yeah. I'd like that functionality too, although I'm not sure how great the range would be.
Great job guys. Just created my account and have been messing around with the iPhone app for a few minutes. My first thought, the way you handle selecting multiple photos by swiping is genius.
Sure we may be graduating more STEM students, but I really hate when studies like this assume all students of a given field are equally talented. I'd say my university had a good CS program, but maybe 1/3 of our CS majors would get hired at top tech companies (Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, etc) and get those really high salaries.

At the end of the day it's much easier to import top talent to fill the gap than to cultivate more of it in the U.S. Some companies like HackerSchool are popping up to address this need, but there's a long way to go.
Good points here, but anyone trying to hire good tech talent knows how hard it can be. "Has a degree" and "qualified" aren't even in the same ballpark, but they seem to be conflated here.

I am interested in the salary thing, though. I think there is at least a little bit of companies bemoaning the fact that they can't find a person to fulfill rock-star expectations on a junior salary. It's macro 101, if there isn't enough supply then increase the price.
> Most countries have intelligence apparatus of course, no reason the USA shouldn't have something fulfilling the NSA's role.

This isn't terribly compelling to me.

I've never understood why we don't question the validity of both the NSA and the CIA, post-Cold War. Especially when our government just invented an entire war paradigm based on vague threats and the "terrorist" label, which can be applied to anyone the government wants at will.

The old paradigm of state secrets is, IMO, outdated and no longer useful. We should be marching towards total transparency of government. With the Internet and cellphones and cameras everywhere, governments can no longer hide in darkness. They have done very bad things in our name. We know better today, and shouldn't have to accept that this is just the way it is.
>chacham15: For example, websites which require back-end technologies generally fall into the latter category. The skills learned in perfecting the former are somewhat different than the skills necessary for the latter.

The funny thing is you already knows unbelievable amount of backend code for a beginner. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6099489)
I wonder how many people are effectively stuck on older devices because Verizon wants to strip away unlimited plans (Verizon ended unlimited data in May 2012 and you have to switch to a limited plan to get the carrier subsidy).
AFAIK TeX (in English language mode) puts a bit more space between sentences than between words. You can get the continental European style of equal spaces with the command \frenchspacing.
Stunning spacewalk trailer
The article is addressing a shortage of workers for STEM jobs. Quote from the article:

"If you're a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it's crazy to go into STEM." The best of these students flock to Wall Street and corporate law firms and the rest end up employed in non-STEM jobs which often pay less and underutilize their skills.

If SV companies could draw star programmers away from Goldman, we'd then be talking about a finance shortage, no?
Neither of my TVs have USB, but both have HDMI. I'd hazard a guess that the older "brand new HD" TVs that came with HDMI first will need external power, while modern ones won't need it.
Could you please expand more on those "crazy edge cases"? I've long been puzzled why compilers seem to throw away so much lifetime/scope information.
I've set up my $99 OUYA to do this (mostly). I've installed a native YouTube app on it (YouTube for Google TV) and installed Flash support for the included Android browser. I also wrote a small client/server Android app [1] that allows the client to share YouTube videos, web pages, basically anything URI-based from various apps' built-in "share" UI and the content will appear on the TV (using whatever app is suited for the URI being opened).

[1] http://bhspitmonkey.github.io/VuDo-Android/
There has been some speculation that the NSA is focusing on bad RNGs now. I wonder what the quality (overall) are of the RNGs in the servers using these keys. I also am pretty curious how such a widely needed key is protected at the scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of devices.
I don't have a problem with the guest worker programs, but I think the way they are implemented is seriously screwed up for a number of reasons.

The laws are written so that guest workers are basically indentured servants to the companies they work for. Furthermore, we basically give guest workers 6 years of well-compensated on the job training after which point we say "go home and enrich your home economy." If I were to say the things that need to be fixed:

1. Once you've been working at a company for a year, you should be free to remain in the country whether you have work or not. Companies shouldn't be able to hold you hostage. Companies should probably even have to sponsor you for some sort of H1B level 2 to keep you around past 1 year. (Bear in mind, I'm not looking for the current bureaucratic nightmare, I'm looking for companies to have to give guest workers their freedom well in advance of the current six-year mark.)

2. If you've been gainfully employed in the country for three years under an H1B, you should get a green card automatically. No waiting around, no nothing.

If we do this, wages will rise naturally, and we'll see whether companies have a legitimate shortage or they're just looking for cheap labor.
I understand why they put 128GB of flash storage in it, but that's very expensive. Why aren't they offering at least a $600 32 GB version? This would be the version for people who'd use it more as a smartphone than a PC (or not at all).
Django-getenv – use environment variables in your Django settings
The word "literally" does not mean what you think it means.
I'd love to use something like this. I run several API companies, all of which have some form of affiliate program.

Would be really convenient to have a simple API to send affiliate checks every month, instead of handling it manually.

I did a bit of research into this a while back, and there was another option from WellsFargo (I think?), but it was really complicated and required lots of talking with salespeople and the like :(
Or you blind yourself to it and learn to just treat those tasks as one more excuse to not do the real stuff. I'm battling that at work: Many people see a flood of notifications etc. and disengage totally - if it's not causing a crisis, then clearly it does not need to be dealt with right away, and so it gets put aside if it's something boring.

I've forced myself to forgo almost all my mail filters and "consume" the raw stream of notification e-mails (thousands a day) and start each day with picking a few of the noisiest ones and addressing the root causes (and where possible doing so in a way that can be applied more broadly), but it's oh so tempting to just waste time on the superficial symptoms that are easy and quick to deal with individually, but will eat all my time if I let them.
Major upgrades to Xamarin’s platform: Async is here
I downvoted him this time. Not only because I disagree, but also because espousing misinformation of that sort is genuinely damaging -- it's downright wrong, and calling something communistic carries a lot of negative connotations (whether justified or not).

But the worst part is, that argument sounds plausible at first glance. The marginal cost of data distribution is near-zero, and we've hit information post-scarcity. Reconciling that with traditional economic models is awkward. RMS/GNU already carry enough baggage, and without understanding their motivations, it's very easy to attach incorrect labels to them and their goals. You've been very eloquent in describing those, so thanks.
Until your karma count goes above a certain amount, the downvote function is disabled. So it could be the case that these new users are simply unable to downvote, not that they refuse to do so.
I don't really understand your question here. NVM is non-volatile memory. Stick a filesystem on it and it's still non-volatile memory.

Do you mean they were writing configuration files directly to a known address in Flash instead of using a filesystem? It's much simpler and less resource-intensive and doesn't require writing and maintaining a driver. There are plenty of cases where direct-writes are better, and plenty of cases where a filesystem is better, and a nice big gray area in between.
I agree - but I don't think the statement semantically means perfection. It really means "practice makes greatness." Perfect just has a P.
That's great to hear. Apple have always targeted content producers (music/video/graphics/...?) and I'm glad that this has carried over to their tablets.

I hope in time that Android gets the same amount of attention because those apps will eventually bolster the Linux ecosystem in general. It's great to hear that Fruity Loops is available for Android, I remember a Mac-head showing me an early version of it like 15 years ago! Ouch, I feel old.
I prefer hand-written. But other people like Swagger https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/, I/O Docs https://github.com/mashery/iodocs, Daux (although this is just a style framework) http://daux.io/ and http://apiary.io/
The various three letter agencies had no interest in correctly predicting the USSR's collapse as it'd get them defunded. I'm not saying that there was a conspiracy to not forewarn the various US administrations, I'm just saying that all the analysts slightl skewed things the other way, and the effect accumulated.
I don't think there's granular enough information in there to support your conclusion.

To illustrate, imagine that IT workers used to get paid a $100k real wage in 2000 and a $50k real wage today. Imagine computer scientists and programmers got paid a $100k real wage in 2000 and get a $150k real wage today. Bundling them all into IT would lead you to mistakenly conclude that a computer scientist would expect to make as much today as they did 10 years ago.

Can someone confirm this logic is correct?

I don't know what the real stats are, but you haven't provided them. I also notice that the Brookings article you linked states that real wages have increased for those occupations in the past few years, but I don't how if at all they are bundling professions differently.

"Or is the hidden truth quite simply that large supplies of guest workers allow many firms to swap out higher-paid, high-skill domestic workers for lower-paid, high-skill guest workers?"

The Brookings article you cited states the opposite. Foreign workers get paid more. If there truly are enough good programmers and computer scientists available in the states is there a conspiracy to subject oneself to the nightmarish visa system and pay high legal fees to be able to hire foreign workers and pay them more than Americans, all the while not offering high salaries to qualified Americans? What would motivate one to do that other than a shortage of qualified candidates?
Indeed. It's Econ 101, essentially.
and who didn't buy that portable usb charger from beyond the rack for something like $12? At least ~10 of my peers, me included, bought one!
It is, literally, the first time some sort of ads works for me and my friends.
I think the way it worked is 2-3 of my close friends bought one, so it started to pop in my feed too, I bought one and it continued to jump to our friends feed.
I will concede that in the current non-ideal environments in which we work and play - there are all sorts of reasons that I don't want to use a native application. For instance - I will never install a social network application even if I belong to the network. I'd rather go to the site in an incognito browser tab.

In my ideal world, I'd prefer a native app for all things. The web sucks in my opinion. Honestly, I wish there were a browser that dealt exclusively in native GUI elements and other computing resources. I'd also want some very finely-grained native resource permission controls.
I'm not a fan of this analogy, as it perpetuates the idea that SV companies need a humongous collection rockstar ninja h4x0rs. I suspect that's not the case for the majority of positions--there's probably a shortage at the tail of the job distribution, but not at the mode.
I agree with React being geared more towards interactive UI components, but on the other hand you could use Ractive with WebComponents/Polymer instead of MDV to get all this powerful component lifecycle.

Still working on a solution that mix Backbone for core models + Polymer for view lifecycle and custom elements + Ractive for awesomeness updating.

The only concern I have is that some people do not like to use logicless.. I think React is powerful for letting you declare full javascript evaluations and expressions on your template code and giving you more flexible/productive way of writing.
> There doesn't need to be an OS or a UI for the Apple TV: your phone or tablet will be a better experience for typing and searching for content every time

I could not disagree more. I understand your point, and on an intellectual level, completely agree with it. However, I never used HBO Go until it showed up on my Apple TV. I have a Mac mini hooked up to my TV, but routinely use Netflix on the Apple TV. I would kill for a Plex app for the Apple TV, even though I have it running on the Mac mini, and have it set up to use a remote. I can't explain it, it just feels better.
The Amash amendment failed by 16 votes (201 to 217).

Edit: Final tally is 205-217.
And if you're too lazy to make up fake names and grab stock photos for an internal mockup, at least use the accounts of fellow employees and not random account holders.
There are countless examples, including from Shakespeare ("and every one to rest themselves betake"). See the lists at
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html and http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/sing_they_sli.pdf. More citations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058643.
Visualizing the systemic collapse underlying organismal death
A good "second board" for learning
>"streams it directly to the Chromecast device from the cloud". So you are right about it being somewhat different from airPlay

AirPlay will send a URL to the Apple TV if possible. If you're streaming a video from a web page, it most likely will just send the URL to the Apple TV. The only communication with the device is the control channel.
Any enemy of Edward Snowden is an Enemy of the People of the United States of America.
Except the league minimum for an MLB player is quite high, and has been going up. Why is the starting salary for highly recruited devs relatively flat?
This.
10x this if you have kids, especially young kids. If they cried I wanted to comfort them, if they laughed I wanted to join them, if they were quiet I wondered what the hell had happened?!

Rent an office - mine is a cramped pigsty, and I have reverted to the orderliness of a 19 year old student bit I actually get work done.

Get an office and walk or cycle in.
Amash’s Amendment To Defund NSA Program Fails 205-217
The problem with writing LLVM IR code by hand is that is must be in SSA (single status assignment) form which is a pain for humans, and requires graph algorithms to insert phi nodes in the basic blocks. What we need is a non-SSA LLVM IR assembler that converts to SSA -- this would be nice for human authors.

BTW, I taught a compiler course where I gave a project that translated a "turtle graphics" functional language into LLVM IR: http://ezekiel.vancouver.wsu.edu/~cs452/projects/turtlecomp/....
Yes, you said it much more succinctly than I did.
If I were Jennifer I'd be flattered by the comments. It must feel great to have produced so much quality work that HN naysayers tell you what you did is impossible after you've already done it.
I see 205-217?
Meta: One funny thing about online discussions is that the activation energy required to make a post means they tend to be by people with extreme positions. The same phenomenon that leads to bimodal amazon review distributions of 1 star / 4.5 stars, or blog posts about how golang sucks/rules, means that an open-minded reader needs to continuously apply this huge smoothing windowed filter over the point-sampled views you read.

Some schools give good industrial training; some are still bemused that machines exist that perform the computations that are so fascinating to study in the abstract. We need both. It's true that schools can't manufacture stars, but they can help train those with latent ability, just as Real Madrid players are certainly helped by coming up through smaller teams.

Likewise, some places (YC startups, or forward-looking splinter groups in larger industry) need rock stars who can do a lot; but there's a huge swathe of megacorps that just need warm bodies that can tab-complete API calls; the problem with debates like this is that arguments are so rarely anchored by a clear context. Are we doomed to always argue straight past one another?
pg - I would urge you to write an essay or article in some prominent magazine. Someone of your stature voicing is critical to the high-tech industry.
George Zimmerman is in seventh place. This app doesn't really make any sense.
Why can't they just hire players from another team?

In the U.S., the reason why is "salary caps" in professional sports leagues.
Yes, that's my guess.
Certatinly, but there's a correlation present, at least between the first two.

"Star programmers" are a completely separate problem, as Joel has mentioned before (e.g., are your stars really "Stars" if they're just the best 21-26 year olds your network knows of that are willing to live in your geographic region and not interested in graduate school?). But it's the horribly poorly managed firm that can't turn an A student from a top-fifteen CS school who did any Big Project at all succesfully into a very productive team member.
Wages have been stagnating generally, including in many industries unaffected by the guest worker program, so I'm not sure they are showing a causal relation.
Congratulations. Your comment was the guide I used to call.

Think I did it too late though. Sorry guys.

EDIT: Dammit I did. Just saw the news. It was close though.
Not sure. It was interesting that both Bachmann & Cotton were explicitly stating that no one had a Fourth Amendment Right to privacy about any Metadata. For instance, what you say in a letter or phone call is private, but not who you say it to. Never even heard this idea before.