skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I should be grateful that at least I have a job in this economic climate,

You should be grateful.

> and that all jobs have some disadvantages.

This is very much also true.

But neither of the above implies that you shouldn't move on.

> I feel that I currently only have my programming skills and have no idea how to safely move to something else.

This is a really excellent question. I have no idea how to answer it, as it is different for every person, but this is definitely worthwhile to think about.

The one piece of relevant advice I've read (from What Color Is Your Parachute?, which you should probably read) is to try and transition to something that uses your demonstrable skills, but that also involves being outside, and/or meeting people, and/or creating things.

Good luck to you!
I like this... I was just thinking about last night how it would be nice if I could just swap with someone.

I would note you might want to protect against things like "help me get laid" I see it it on the homepage just a moment ago. while a legit request, you'll likely lose users over it. I can imagine there will be other crazy and illegal requests too.
Stripe could work for this. There's Stripe integration with Xero, for example, which makes it trivial to issue an invoice and have a "Pay with Stripe" button show up on the Xero web page for that invoice.
It's a tough position other companies are placing on SO. On one hand you can't alienate a portion of your community by closing all API/programming questions which are of a more proprietary nature just because they're of a proprietary nature. On the other hand, the general trend these companies are starting, to not build out a real support channel, is indicative of developers who don't really understand sales channels which should not be SO's problem. I wish more start ups would get better guidance about support if their products are aimed at developers. Really, they're missing another channel of communication and new business discovery.
3 programming languages that are promising for the next years
No it's not. People may forget, but they don't rebuy things repeatadly.
What? It's the very inverse: they DONT allow people to have a useful phone for several years at a time, they saddle them with an osbolete OS and don't provide upgrades.

It's a very big pain point that Android makers don't provide upgrades for their older devices (even 1 year old ones). For some models they don't provide upgrades AT ALL, and you have to get custom-install on them to have a new Android.

That's why (Google's own numbers) older (by up to 3 years) Android releases amount to 60%+ of the CURRENT installed base, whereas on iOS over 80% of users update on the latest version on the very first month of its release.
Docker.io and Redis on DigitalOcean in 5 Min.
Unlike other sites you might frequent, Hacker News culture is generally OK with companies posting news about their products. If the news isn't interesting, it won't be upvoted and won't make the front page.
These Android manufacturers are generally not just shipping vanilla Android and have development costs on top of patents and licensing. They do this because owning the software stack gives power, and they believe it distinguishes them (although usually makes the product worse than stock Android). Microsoft want to own the software stack so shipping Windows on Nokia phones makes sense. It wouldn't make sense for other manufacturers unless they don't mind loosing power over the stack (which Samsung, Huawei, Amazon etc. don't want).

I agree with your points regarding limitations with Windows Phone. Just because an opportunity exists doesn't mean that they will succeed. Although I am unconvinced that the app market is that important. A few key apps are important, but Android app purchases lag heavily behind iPhone, and it is reasonable to suggest that feature phone users will lag even further (especially without a locally integrated payment system in developing markets).
Ballmer trumps his critics. Well done - Sir.

There is a lot of potential to eat from both iPhone and Android cakes. Android needs a beefy h/w, c'mon guys let's admit it. Windows is way faster even on the low-end lumias. Also don't forget MS Office - the sleeping giant on windows phones.

History likes to repeat itself. First Jobs wouldn't licence MacOS, and Billy rode the wave he created. Then google got the second wave. Why? The same reason, he wouldn't license iOS.

From a user perspective iOS is the best, but the new Lumias makes me think of Apollo as no less great. No matter what google does, lumia will eat big from Android's share. But I waiting to see how big a bite it's gonna be on the apple.

In the enterprise world Office on Phones is gonna pay a big role. This is death toll for blackberry, sorry to say that.

C'mon Cook, partner on. Let others make "cheap" apples. License iOS before it's too late.
Reminds me about the story of <blink>

TLDR - guys were drinking and kicked around the idea of the blink tag. One of them left late that night to implement the tag overnight.

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3865141
Is this available for other platforms as well? I see no reason why this couldn't be available as a package for Ubuntu as well, but I can't find any mention of things other than RPi images.

I run a low-power x86 Ubuntu server at home and would love to try this (I was actually planning to move my e-mail from Google to my own server).
Yup, that's always in the back of my mind when people talk about javascript-enabled user stats. Of course, it's perfectly possible that the OP IS recording accurate(-ish) JS usage stats, it's just more involved than other client stats that are readily provided to the server, so less likely. If 99.99% wasn't just a figure plucked out of the air, it sounds believable that it's being obtained 'correctly', since it's not 100% :)
One way to make the game harder is to remove clips that have obvious references to proper nouns tied to one country. Many of my correct answers came from hearing the name of a person or place associated with one of the languages.
No, absolutely not. Ubuntu on existing Android phones uses the Linux kernel with the Android patches so it can use the OEM binary drivers. It doesn't use any bits of Android. FirefoxOS is the same.
Agreed - going to add some system to enable people to flag entries as spam, at which point they will be removed and undergo moderation.
Our Newfound Fear of Risk
The classic description of this kind of thing is "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art", which is what Sol Levitt said about his work. It's a conceptual art strategy: instead of being about subjectivity, skill or the personal will of the artist, this kind of artwork is about rationality, objectivity and a neutral, abstract kind of mental process. Nothing particularly special about the pseudocode but it comes from Golan Levin's class: he is a a leading algorithmic artist (using code to make visual art). Lewitt's work could be seen as a forerunner or incunabulum in this field. http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/conceptual-ar...
It is the inevitable move. MS can't let Nokia founder after going all-in for MS.

>With Windows Phone, Nokia and Microsoft at least have some hope of carving out a profitable stake in the market.

I think you mean Microsoft, Nokia is no more. You think they'll really do it this time? They've only been trying since before the iPhone. I dunno, maybe without Ballmer, they can make something happen.

>for $200 unlocked its phenomenal phone.

Don't get used to that. It's because they overestimated demand.
I'm wondering the same. My main phone now is an Asha 501 — great phone for a light user who wants a small, light device with a long battery life.
Homeopathic HTML Solutions
i'm 21 so i don't care about that right now. but you are fucked.

Truly, the voice of wisdom and experience!
> I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my identity" attitude is?

I hope you understand that hiding own accent is not the easiest thing and requires some effort even after lots of training. Our vocal apparatus is adapted to our mother tongue, so even if we are capable of speaking all English phonemes, not all of them are "natural" for us.
And Android is complicated enough that it doesn't feel secure when it gets bloated. It is easy for someone used to windows to imagine that slowness or crashing are caused by a virus.
Not just the phone market, but any consumer market. Consumers are fickle and can love something one day and hate it the next.
> According to your logic, two bricks tied together float better than one.

A sail doesn't float and a hull doesn't move, but together they can make great boats
University services tend to be, uh, academic.

A differentiator would be the quality of advice offered, and the fact that the mentors would also be actual hiring managers.

You might be right, though I still think it's worth doing a MVP or this 'pretotype' idea.
Climate Change Archaeology
I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form questions you defined would be to go through some kind of "profile builder".

This obviously takes the app to a new place - now talking about some sort of profile system - this would obviously be a huge feature to add with a load of other implications.
I never quite worked out what "rockstar" meant, but surely choosing new tech for the sake of it isn't it.
I would certainly say that a career in IT is defined by which track you choose. Are you familiar with the growing body of evidence that shows not many people are employed in a fashion commensurate with their experience after the age of 40 to 45? That's equivalent to the partner track.

To review it slightly -- You either become a greybeard (partner), you become a manager (could also be considered a type of partner), you become a highly paid consultant but don't achieve your previous salary-equivalent. If you miss your mark and don't achieve one of those, either you wash out of the field, or you have a difficult time finding a place and when you do you accept one that is not in line with your experience. (ex: You were an AIX admin paid $120k/yr, now you are a contractor for Dell making 4-hour response service calls on server hardware.)

And I would also not say that a job at Google or Microsoft is for life (you get stack ranked out pretty fast at Microsoft as you age), nor would I say that the pay's that good unless you're really awesome. I've gotten SF Bay offers, and after you factor for cost of living changes, they're much less than I make for my current company telecommuting from central Texas.
>when a partner hits you, he's actually helping you realize your technique has a flaw

I really like that viewpoint. It's very zen. Thanks for the discussion!
I hate to say that, but I told you so! :-D

More than two or more years ago, I wrote in different places, and probably in HN that when Microsoft partners he is always the winner, and the other is the looser, and that Microsoft was going to buy Nokia at a discount in the future.

History repeats itself.
Don't think that its dirt or faulty screen since it sometimes garbles text in ways that couldn't be explained merely by my keystrokes. Text is duplicated, concatenated and moved around in various ways.
Just because it's a regex does not mean you can't document it.

You are certainly right. Especially, if you use a package for automata or transducers that allows you to apply common automaton operations (union, intersection, composition, etc.) to combine expressions.

However, that's not how regular expressions are normally used or what the standard libraries for most languages support. So, people either write (1) simplified expressions (like yours above) that do not implement the relevant standard; (2) write unreadable expressions; (3) 'compose' expressions through string interpolation, which can become unreadable quite quickly (I've seen enough in production code).

I wrote parser combinator libraries in C and one in java thinking it'd be easier to use than a parser generator like ANTLR,

However yacc (which I assume you used for C) and ANTLR are hardly the state-of-the-art of parser combinators. Try parsec or attoparsec sometime.

There's also the concern that parsers are strictly more expressive than regexes.

Not only that, (sub-)parsers are fully typed, making it much easier and safer to combine parsers. E.g., here I know exactly what this parser will give me (namely a Bar):

foo :: Parser Bar
You can try to avoid it grammatically.

@person is looking for help with PHP.
In return, @person can help with CSS.

I like this because it means each sentence is meaningful out of context and can be separately indexed, searched, etc.
It's not just one desktop and one mobile. Microsoft has native apps for iOS and Android. Their browser-based cloud apps (Skydrive, Word, OneNote etc.) work great on other browsers and other platforms.

The comparison to Maemo is completely wrong. Maemo didn't have any of this ecosystem. There was no "Nokia Drive" or "Nokia Office". The best Maemo could do was run recompiled Debian packages, and that didn't get you much (I know, I had most of the Maemo devices). Microsoft's cloud platform is light years ahead of what Maemo/Meego was delivering.
"Dullness is a virtue"

It's not as simple as that though - it all depends on the context of the project. Sometimes it is perfectly OK to go crazy and use bleeding edge technology other times that would be daft - it all depends what you are trying to achieve mixed in, as the article says, with a heavy dose of judgement.
I wonder if the Asha design will go from Meego-like with Nokia squircles to a Metro-like square theme? I personally love my Asha 501, but wouldn't want a WP8-light version.

Also, will they "upgrade" Nokia Xpress's (proxy browser) backend to use the IE engine in place of Gecko?
And multiple Chinese manufacturers taking all the dumbphone market in previously-huge Nokia strongholds like India and China.
No need for a deal. Going windows phone only made Nokia unsaleable to anyone else anyway.
The second biggest driver was a link in Ruby Weekly. [..] Not to mention, the amount of money I would get from direct sales is vastly more than I would get from the same number of sales if I were getting royalties.

I'm always happy to link to good stuff, but I must admit, if I'm not making any money out of it, I never push anything particularly hard.

This makes me wonder if I partnered with or acted as a publisher to indie writers like this, I could quite easily offer a 50-75% "royalty" yet push it more frequently and heavily to my audience and everyone wins. Indeed, I believe this is what Pragmatic Bookshelf does when it takes on previously written indie books(?)
I'm in favour of this for developer-focussed issues. One of the libraries I maintain (http://simplepie.org/) directs support to Stack Overflow, since the majority of questions are basic programming questions (along the lines of "how do I use substr"). I'm usually there to answer SimplePie-specific questions, but those are pretty relevant anyway.
The term "mentor" and getting paid for helping simply don't mix (in my mind). If you actually mean a site where people get help with writing and improving their resume/CV, that would be useful, but I'd use a word other than "mentor". If the objective is to match up people with potential mentors (keeping an ongoing relationship over some time to provide career guidance) then I'd avoid paying the mentors.
20% of the general public in Poland, Mexico and some Eastern European countries don't agree with that claim. People forget how varied is the smartphone market across regions.
Cool. Are you also seeing the seemingly random duplication as in the word "somesomethingdo"? That used to read "something to do"
It's a single block of metal laser cut to fit all the components within a solid yet light fixture. It's a power plug that if tugged will not drop your laptop to the ground. It's a backlit keyboard that feels great on the fingers. It's a beautiful screen that you can't get anywhere else. It's a large sized trackpad that answers to your fingers without noticeable lag. It's a keyboard that has all the keys on the top row to do all the things we do on a regular basis. In short it's a super well integrated machine that wakes up from sleep in an instant, has great battery life and is well suited for a worry free computing experience.
This is not correct, every time I have installed Windows 7 on different hardware the display is at native resolution, all USB devices work (keyboard, printer, mouse), sound drivers work and networking also works out of the box.
Yes. Because good judgement requires understanding complex situations, and that requires skill. And judgement is improved by experience.

For example you see a bad thing in the code? If you can understand the problem and the risks and benefits, you can make a good decision. If you can possibly make it better, understanding the time available to you, and the risk to the product, you should make it better. Not put it off and let the bad thing become more entrenched technical debt.

Making that kind of decision, requires good judgement. It requires understanding your own skill, time management, risk, and more.

Being able to exercise good judgement comes with extreme rewards for any project, as there will be less costly mistakes, and more successes and better code.
Great article! I wish all SQL libraries would adhere to this structure instead of forcing devs to write glorified (string) SQL. Ie., let me

from(join(table1, table2))
.where(table1.col1 > 10)
.groupBy(col1)
.project(col1, avg(col2))

and only in that order.
That sounds kind of like an affiliate program. I bet you could make it work with the kind of niche audiences you've got.
Maybe he's right? I wonder how many Raspberry Pi's would've sold at $150.00/ea with WinCE included? /sarcasm
And there's a Hungarian one in which I'm pretty sure I heard "Magyar" (though I could be wrong -- I don't know any Hungarian).
> First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is out, network is out. I had to burn a CD rom with the network driver to download the rest of the drivers.

That might have been the case with XP (and perhaps Vista), but with 7 & 8, basic things like video, USB, and networking have worked just fine out of the box. And I say this as an Ubuntu user.
Rackspace Cloud Developer Discount
Minimum wage, as I recall (it was a long time ago) was around maybe $7 an hour, I was being paid around $7.80. Whooooooooo.... Yeah, the reason for that is because you get a nickel and dime raises when you learn a job. That is pretty much the highest any non-manager employee got in the restaurant.

I was simply shocked as to how many people came in every day looking for an application. Every single day. It was amazing. These weren't teenagers either.

Yeah, I'm not working in the restaurant business anymore because I'm a software engineer now. However, not everyone can become software engineers, and there is still a market for restaurants. I know I enjoy them myself. There is also a latency between age of employment and age that one usually acquires skills to be hired as a software engineer and not everyone has rich [read: middle class] parents to support them through that time.

I also don't need your career advice.

I would like to also point out I would never steal from my employer, or anyone else, it still goes against my morals.
In view of this "breakthrough" leak, I am now supposing that Edward Snowden is a willing participant in psy-ops.

"An all knowing deity is a cheap cop."
Why Talented Creatives Are Leaving Your Shitty Agency
Universities often offer CV/interview practice sessions run by the recruitment team at major firms.
That was just a military exercise and a clear power demonstration.

But indeed we are very close to another war, and IMHO this time will not be a walk in the park with a possible Russian intervention on it. Remember, Kremlin always consider US a 'business partner' which can be easily turned into an enemy.
All phones running 2.3. are Google Play capable. The lack of Google Play on some phones is due to manufacturers not certifying with Google.

In my country 90% of smartphones ship with Android, so I've seen a lot of 2.3. devices (I own one).

They are usually NOT underpowered (exception: the Galaxy Mini I certainly is, and it's the "free" smartphone over here), the user experience is quite good, usually better than an old iPhone.

I have a Galaxy Ace (which I don't like), my girlfriend has a Mini 2 (extremely good value for money), coworkers have Motorola Defy, Defy+, LG P880 4x, Galaxy S Advance, SII, SIII, SIV, Sony phones... all work reasonably well, I'd pick any of them over an old iPhone (and the LG and SIV over the latest iPhone).

Sub U$ 100 phones sold here all have Google Play btw.
Maybe it's just because the post is out of date now (2011) but I'm not sure why "new technology", "rockstar" and "produces unmaintainable code" are all conflated together.
Beyond Flat
You are not allowed to be Amish except by choice after experiencing the world. Their kids are not Amish until being baptised, which usually doesn't happen till after the age of 18, which is fairly rare among religions.
Plus it's a prize Microsoft probably feels it can't afford to lose.

This whole post reads like a warning about the sunken cost fallacy!
These rugged Nokias you speak of .. these weren't all-glass-front/touchscreen were they?

I feel all the new smart phones out there are a bit weak on the ruggedness department. I recently lost a Nexus S (with a protective case!) to a drop of just a few feet. I was actually surprised that the phone wasn't able to take it.

If a touchscreen-based smartphone was truly rugged yet consumer-grade, it would really have my attention.
Interesting point - I'd originally written "hiring manager" since that was my first thought. I went for "mentor" since (a) I wanted a bigger potential set of advice-givers and (b) it's less of a mouthful than "hiring manager" and (I thought, but now not so sure) that it had the same connotations.
Somebody gave one of my students a fairly (< 1yr old) new laptop the other day because they got it loaded up with viruses, (virii?) There is a market segment with more money than brains, it is large.
A writer pointed out to me that writing a book is very similar to building a tech startup. The hours are long, it's critical to build a strong platform and there are the same swings from despair to elation.

Additional data points are always very much appreciated and it's very good of the author to release his tools and methods for others to learn from. Of course, the $5k in 2 weeks doesn't account for the time it took him to write the book or the opportunity cost of not taking other work, so this still might not have been a financially worthwhile venture, but hopefully it will keep selling and he'll publish more about it.
I've been thinking about a service like this. I think it would be very valuable for "experienced" devs (think 1 year repeated n times) or devs with a few years out of school who want to join a startup or a big co and are rusty in algo's, startup engineering, cs concepts and coding interviews. Stage 2 could even work as a sort of mini dev bootcamp, where candidates could work on not only interview techniques but also on developing a portfolio, sample projects, etc. Candidates could pay for mentorship once they select a mentor to work with.
Probably a Crack Squirrel - http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/oct/08/drugsandalcohol.pa...
Only 20%? This is not a great argument!
Sort of. I've done affiliate stuff before but I don't like the vibe it gives off. Selling the products directly in a more publisher-esque way feels more honest, although I'm not entirely sure why.