skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When people tell me that I should "do projects in my own free time to keep my skills sharp", it throws me into a fit of rage and makes me want to tear them a new one. Do you see any other professions having to do that in order to stay employable? Can you imagine lawyers having to practice law in their free time to "keep their skills sharp"? Can you imagine civil engineers having to draft plans for bridges and buildings in order not to "destroy their ability to make a living"? Or doctors or any other high prestige professions doing anything like that?

If the answer is no, then WHY THE FUCK should I have to spend my free time maintaining a bunch of projects on Github just so I could keep providing for myself? Is what I do in my day job not good enough anymore? Now I can't even apply for a new job listing "backbone.js" as a requirement unless I have it listed in my resume or have a Github project utilizing it? Whatever happened to the notion of smart people being able to pick up and learn new technologies on the job? You think it's okay to try to offload the risk and the time necessary to pick up a new technology to an employee and their free time, vs. providing the time and the resources for learning on the job?

Tell you what OP, you can take that attitude elsewhere, I'm not buying it. I prefer spending my free time having great interactions with my friends and my girlfriend, enjoying traveling and getting new experiences and just making the most of this one life that I have. Now, If you believe that my system of values is incompatible with yours/your company's, then I don't want to work for you because you're an arrogant exploitative asshole with no respect for other people and their time/life.

This is the way you should do hiring, if you happen to have any semblance of fairness and intelligence:

If a senior person with a somewhat outdated skill set applies for a job, then you're not supposed to test them on the latest technologies, you are supposed to take a look at their track record and try to figure whether they are generally a smart person and whether they were able to get things done back in the day. If someone was a good programmer 20 years ago, then they will be just as good now, if not better, because it's ultimately a person's intelligence and attitude that determines how good a performer they are, not a list of buzzwords on their resume. If you don't get this, then I'm sorry to say, you probably aren't very bright.

Caveat: if you are moving extremely fast for some reason or need something done IMMEDIATELY, then it makes sense to hire someone who already has the skill set you're looking for. If it's a long term assignment/project, what technology they know/don't know has no bearing on how good they will ultimately perform.

PS. You have inadvertently confirmed everything another blogger wrote in a post about why a career in programming ultimately has low prestige:

http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html
In a server-side context the JVM tends to be the most memory efficient out of all platforms that make use of GC. Here's for example the comparison of Ruby MRI with JRuby, showing a massive difference in memory usage, and yet many Ruby developers choose to deploy their apps on top of JRuby precisely because of much better memory usage, which is why your reference to these benchmarks is basically useless:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
This is true but the work that they do, they or their families will benefit 100%. "Free labor". It is honest equitable work. The system in place siphons that labor by people who control capital. Income inequality.
Although I partially agree, medicine and things that doctors deal with does not move nearly as fast as computig/software engineering.

I think the most important factor is the "virtual" nature of computing/software. In a relatively short period of time you can wipe everything and start from scratch.
Wrong. This isn't abuse. The audit found only unintentional spying--in other words, mistakes. No organization is perfect; bugs do exist, especially in software. It's pretty amazing to see the detail at which these incidents were logged, however.
Most good developers can barely remember a line of code, they usually have a general idea as to how you could implement aspects a concept and build on it as they go. Incremental changes
BS. The document you link to indicates quite clearly that they had no intention of making it anything less than "top secret" after it was found unconstitutional:

>in response to the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, the government has declassified certain information concerning intelligence collection pursuant to Section 702

>[the government] further provides notice [...] that it has
determined it will release to Plaintiff a redacted version of the [FISC] opinion previously withheld [but requests a delay]

It's only because the EFF requested it (after Snowden's disclosures) and fought for it in court that the finding of unconstitutionality will now be made public. Or rather, whatever parts the government decides to let go of.
It's sad that most of the people I meet today can only be described as 'careerists'. I hardly see any artists or people who really enjoy what they do. And you know what your environment can do to you: it can make you or break you. Having an unhappy person next to you is a cyclic and disturbing process. The negativity percolates to unimaginable proportions. Negativity is often more affecting than positivity. That is why it is so important to 'engineer' your surroundings with care.
Hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia and hot air are all capable of being used for aerostatic lift.

source: http://airshiphangar.com/science.html
Thanks! I'd forgotten about busybox, but that's often how your home router is doing things.

* Side note: if it is, make sure your router manufacturer provides the GPL source release.
A part of me wishes all these dossiers would become public. If everyone's skeletons were out of the closet, we wouldn't care about skeletons so much.
A real, non-secret court, with the warrant targeting individual people, with probable cause, without the ability to start surveillance days ahead of getting approval.
> Do you see any other professions having to do that in order to stay employable? Can you imagine lawyers having to practice law in their free time to "keep their skills sharp"?

I see your point but I don't think it is specific only to IT. Lawyers for example (at least in Germany) have to read a lot to keep up. So much that most of them can't do that at work.
Yes. Money is just a way of figuring out how much of the economical output of the whole system each money holder can use. By hoarding money rich don't do much harm.

But because they have so much money they can hoard resources. And they do to earn more like so: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/goldman-sachss-alu... They also hoard food: http://www.dw.de/germanys-dz-bank-ends-food-speculation-trad... They also can hoard companies. Buy them and harm them. This happens to most acquired startups.

The problem is not that they have a lot of money. The problem is what they do with the money. Of course it's not all bad. There are things that rich people made that benefited everybody, but I'm guessing most such things were created on the way to getting rich.
You clearly haven't been following the Node.js (Derby and Meteor) community very closely. They've been exposing raw database APIs (mutation, deletion, insert, the works) since the beginning.
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Except, Google might not be able to show that prefix video using the API MS is/was using, but they would be able to do it if MS supported the standard HTML5 iframe API...
How to move a DIV with your fingers… and the Leap Motion
There is a fundamental disconnect of reasoning here. What we are expected to believe is that these people at their "big, name-brand companies" are carrying on an elaborate hoax on their employers and their inability to do blank page coding exercises reveals their fundamental uselessness.

Possibly, the truth might be that the majority of serious work is done under conditions where you are used to your framework and, frankly, can easily forget how exactly to fire up a editor and write code to solve a toy problem.

One might say this reflects more poorly on the interview process than the interviewee.

The idea that there is some special magic "creativity" involved in this kind of blank sheet programming that is never required when programming within a well-established framework is pure hokum. We have a lot of well-established practices in our code base that allow us to bust out a new and sophisticated graph analysis or transformation in precious few lines of code - meanwhile, the blank sheet guys are self-congratulating because they know how to call glib's hash functions in a clean sheet environment. B... F... D... (and I don't mean the library)
I was outrage fatigued before Snowden did his leak. I'm not tired anymore.
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Thank you for bringing attention to this. So many young people move here and don't realize SF is one of the most dangerous cities for bikers and pedestrians. I see way too many people riding without helmets. Protected bike lanes would help and I would love to see them convert a few streets into bicycle/pedestrian only.
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Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups
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As Brandon alludes below monadic designs generally have allocation overheads, this is why C# uses state machines. So while they may be equivalent in some abstract sense of "power" one ends up being more efficient in practice.
> Do you see any other professions having to do that in order to stay employable?

Yes, most professionals do. Licensed professionals--doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, civil engineers, teachers, etc.--are usually required to get a certain number of Continuing Education Units every year to retain their professional license. The specific requirements differ from state to state.
The "Download Flatter UI For Free" link on your blog goes straight back to the page asking me to "Pay with a Tweet".

Is it free, or are we paying for it?

Do I need to get a twitter account?
US Government finally admits Area 51 exists
its not anticompetitive to not allow a third party to release your product on their platform without following your rules (reasonable or not).

Hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering effort and bandwidth go into Youtube. In reality Google is completely within its rights to no do anything to support any platform it chooses not to. Why allow a platform and company to leech off that if they're not willing to. Microsoft is just trying to win in the court of public opinion here.
>Do you see any other professions having to do that in order to stay employable?

Yes. My dad is a critical care doctor. He regularly spends some of his free time reading medical journals, or studying for the re-certification exam.
Or are they just waiting for everything in it to become classified?
Adding my two cent:

twistd web --path . --port 8080
Finally a Dropbox text editor that is somewhat different from the others? Would love something like this on Android (it probably exists already).
Why? It only takes one ^C
Nice to see more people catching on to this story.

The Economist covered it previously as well.
Regarding point 3, I've seen that given out as an option before in talks about interviews. I only see it as a solution that works if the person is actually hired.

If not they waste 2 weeks of their time and probably other SDE time.
It leaves no room for people who apply while still working at another job. I had to miss 2 days of work for my interview, and that was about the biggest risk I could afford. Even if you say you will pay me for the 2 weeks, I still wouldn't have a job to come back to.
It's probably still a poor job, I was just starting to get into my first task towards the end of 2 weeks. I spend most of the time just getting everything setup (granted we ran into issues that had to be resolved with another team, but still).
I really dig the idea and can see the coolness in hearing analytical data, but is it just me or is the Github real-time demo super annoying? First couple of minutes were okay, but in this instance where there is a constant flow of data playing sounds, it gets really old, really quick.

No doubt a super cool and out-of-the-box idea, but I quite personally would go crazy if I had to hear water droplet sounds any longer than an hour.
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This was a badly chosen example indeed: in many countries lawyers are obliged to continue studying and completing tests throughout the career. In fact, one of Holland's most prominent lawyers got suspended for not obtaining enough study points for an extended period of time.

Anyway, in a sense I agree with the author. To stay sharp programmers need to get out of their comfort zone. There's multiple ways to do that; side projects is one of them. If you don't get out of your comfort zone, you run the risk of becoming like a pilot who forgot how to land or take off, because you have only been flying mid air for so such a long period of time.
In ToffeeScript you can just do e, data = readFile! fname

Or take a look at CoffeeScript or IcedCoffeeScript or LiveScript back calls.
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Teachers / doctors / dentists all need to take courses to keep their skills up to date. Programming is no different. I don't think there is one profession where you aren't required to keep your skills up to date / put in extra time.
That would be OK is the rules weren't arbitrary, it is not OK to allow native API calls to some and to force to use HTML5 to others, it is inexcusable.
The world of software development moves faster than almost all other fields at the moment, particularly with regards to the tools that we use.

All other things being equal, the person with experience in the specific tools the organisation uses will get the job.

Its just an unfortunate consequence of the industry we are in.

You are of course free to not chase the bleeding edge tools in your spare time, and youll probably stay employed just fine. But there is a risk you can be left behind or miss opportunities.

The people who were hacking on early IOS, Rails, Scala etc are todays experts enjoying niche markets. The people who didnt are working on VB or PHP for a Sausage factory somewhere.
One instant cure:

Make rules in IDE/editors, for each async/anonymous closure, undo the indent for one level.
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It never had anything to do with Scheme in the first place.

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt...
C# operates entirely differently, I understand. The IDE work is massive and necessary. Having said that, a lot of this stuff is "catching up" or implementing stuff from the 70s. To be clear, it's not like type inference or closures were invented with Haskell, F#, or C#. Stuff like that is pretty well-known PL stuff, isn't it?

People would be upset if C# didn't have for loops; why aren't they upset the type inference is nearly useless?
Can't you use that exact same logic to argue that Comcast has spent billions of dollars laying cable into the ground and that it's completely reasonable for them to not allow content that doesn't fit within the goals of their "platform" like netflix traffic?
There's nothing "trully functional" about Javascript.

There's not some secret functional language waiting to get out, any more that it is in any other language with first class functions, from Ruby to C#.

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt...
"The past is created from the present, not the other way around."

"The measure of change is not whether the outside is changed, the measure of change is whether you respond differently to the outside even if its still looks the same. That’s how you know you’ve changed"

--Bashar
He was asking them to implement an LRU cache in C, hardly newfangled stuff. Plus they were kernel engineers, so it was supposedly their domain of expertise. I don't think he was suggesting that programmers have to keep always up to date with the latest trends. I think the main issue he was pointing out was programmers finding their skills being dulled because they were spending all their time maintaining old code instead of seeking new challenges. So it's like if a doctor was treating the same patient, and only that patient, for the same disease for years. But then again, you never know, they may not have been very good engineers to begin with. But also, people in high-prestige professions do pursue professional development every now and then by attending conferences and training courses. The only difference is that it's on company time and their companies pay them to do it.
I've done kernel implementation for 20 years, and this question is absolutely terrible -- unless the answer that one is looking for is an intelligent explanation of why this is such a terrible question. It's an awful question because the kernel may not be involved at all on a user-level call to malloc() (e.g., a caching allocator like libumem or a traditional allocator that needn't extend the break for a given allocation), may be involved in a minor capacity if the break must be extended (on most systems, a system call and some VM interaction), or could be involved substantially if the allocator is a mapping allocator and page faults are induced (text and data) or scheduling events or anything else that necessitates kernel involvement.

For whatever it's worth, when I have historically interviewed university hires for kernel positions, the question I ask is much simpler; namely, what does "* ((int *)NULL)" do? Sadly, most university students -- even ones who have done very well in their university computer science courses -- don't get this right. And it's sad because it's not really the question, but rather just the segue to the actual question: when a candidate correctly answers that NULL is dereferenced and the program crashes[1], I ask them to write the program (statement, really) in an assembly of their choosing (most graduates have MIPS or SPARC on the resume) and I then ask for everything that happens between the execution of that instruction and the resulting core dump and return of control to the shell. With a qualified candidate, this could easily be a multi-hour jaunt through microprocessor architecture and operating systems implementation.

All of that said: I don't really do that anymore, but rather look to a candidate's open source works. The last kernel engineer I hired had done open source work that was so impressive that my interview consisted only of me determining that he had done the work himself -- which took all of 30 seconds or so. (He had, I hired him and he's been an absolutely terrific engineer.) Easiest interview ever!

[1] Except on AIX and any other asinine system that maps NULL.
Many professions enjoy employer paid continuing education. A totally different ballgame. Staying up every night committing to Github in hopes of landing a job is a terrible terrible thing. I know because I used to do it when I was young and stupid.

The only reason why I was able to land my first dev job fresh out of college is because I had an open source project that I built in my own free time. If it hadn't been for that, it's unlikely I would've got the job and that's why I loath the practice so much.

16+ years of formal education down the drain (or 30+ years of work, if you're older), unless you adhere to some arbitrary standards by IT blogosphere keyboard jockeys.
Cool, thanks for the feedback. TitanPass is extremely secure and only you have access to your data. I made it cloud based because it was a requirement to have a highly centralized vault. The whole application is made in PHP so I won't be able to make a decentralized native app from it. Hope you still get a chance to try it out and again, thanks so much for your feedback.
Obama may not be wrong at all if these are unintentional violations. However, Obama may well be wrong if they were intentional actions in accordance with NSA standard of operating procedure (SOP). So, the NSA isn't actually abusing its powers, just as Obama stated. Just an awful NSA employee who is not following the SOP.

I think that's an important distinction and perhaps the point Obama was making.
The UI kit is free if you tweet about designed thought. You can also "pay" with facebook, or linkedin
There are no "others" and no "rules". Google makes the iOS and Android apps, not third parties. The Windows Phone YouTube app would be the first significant (1) phone OS to have a YouTube app not made by Google, there are no others to compare Google's behavior on for fairness. This is the first event of its kind.

(1) If you consider single digits market share to be significant.
I'm not suggesting there is a good way to measure inflation. But there is no objective way to make these adjustments. To suggest that the official adjustments are better for some reason is just a stealthy appeal to authority.
That's super. 99% likely do not understand the depth of this statement.
If you are on a project for a few years (and aren't doing just maintenance, in which case I'd GTFO) you should be able to show a roadmap of where you took the project, its success etc. which might not be so bad.
>I'm very aware that Javascript was inspired by Scheme. The lexical scoping for example, is obviously "functional" (indeed, whatever that means).

No it wasn't. That's an urban legend. Eich WANTED to make a Scheme for the browser -- he didn't get a permission to do it, and made Javascript instead, which is actually inspired from other languages like Self.

Nothing functional about Javascript's horribly broken scoping either...

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt...
Average world per capita income, world GDP divided by population, is US$12,000/yr (PPP accounted for). That counts as the basic poverty line in the USA.

The tiny global elite you impugne does not hoard anything relevant. They are just a hose thru which a lot of high velocity money flows, most of their income flowing right back out to others. Without them, the structure for working for that $12,000 average income would collapse and you'd be working a lot harder for a lot less net return.

Take that high density money away from that elite, and you'll discover two things happen. One, you'll be out of a job and relegated to living exactly as a large percentage of world population does: eking out a meager existence from the land to paltry returns; that elite holds the high-wage system together because they profit from it, and without those returns there is little incentive to make such systems work. Two, averaging out all income & wealth so everyone has the same would soon coalesce back into the distribution we have now: those expecting a no-effort living wage produce nothing and get nothing for it, while those enticed by work*risk=profit will find a way and earn that which the others will give to survive.

Yes, institutionalized theft: those who work and take risks having their earnings taken by threat of force by those having no moral & economic interest therein or beyond what was contracted for in a competitive market. Go live off the land for a year, excluding any connection to "the elite", and then tell me about the justice of someone taking the fruits of your labors from you simply because they exist (choosing not to produce).