skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hold on a minute. You can't discuss labor markets without discussing productivity. In the heyday of the automotive industry, the best auto worker in the world produced about the same output as the average auto worker. Maybe they messed up less, but being a genius autoworker didn't let you tower head and shoulders above the competition, because car factories are designed with auto workers as interchangeable parts.

We've tried that with developers. If it had worked, all development would be outsourced to India and the Philippines by now, and developers would be forming unions to lobby for higher pay.

The reality is that the market pays for productivity, in the long-run. Maybe having more junior developers coming out of bootcamps puts downward pressure on wages, but as long as development is a meritocracy where the best performers are much better than the worst performers, there's always going to be a premium on people that really know their stuff. Maybe one day we'll live in a world with lots and lots of really good devs. I don't mind living in that world as much, because I can control my fate to a far larger extent that someone who moved to Detriot in 1960 and was unfortunate enough to stake their whole life on a company pension and a single industry.

EDIT: typo
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So the baseline is, and this applies to almost all kinds of jobs, stay relevant and be good at what you do.
I for one, like this. Now, the video & music are awful and definately do not support the overall presentation, but from what I understood, this seems to be pretty cool. Imagine being able to use Javascript for actual desktop application development, without having to resort to tons of html and css in the background. I do like this idea. Even better, it would allow to write applications in ClojureScript or some of the other compile-to-javascript frameworks). Of course, there're other frameworks that utilize javascript for scripting needs or for desktop development (http://www.tidesdk.org/) (https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/) (https://github.com/appjs/appjs) (http://www.appcelerator.com/) and of course Adobe Air, but all of them just basically open a webview, give you some html that looks a bit like native controls, and let you write html / css / javascript in there with limited access to filesystem or, god forbid, the graphics card.

What I understood this project is, is that it allows me to use javascript to drive my native UI elements, access my full system resources, etc. Basically full native development, only Javascript instead of C++. Maybe a bit like Qt QML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML) (and I'd like to see a comparison between these two). I'm really looking forward to this, though I have to admit that the website lacks details, and the video isn't particularly good. This looks a bit too much like demo scene hacking.
Its worth noting though that the grammar is a piece of piss. It works well as an international language because its easy to learn yet hard to master.

(for the record, I'm trying to learn Icelandic and that language has crazy rules)

If anything we just need to be cautious of judging people who don't have native-level English.
"Brazil Wants National 'Antisnoop' Email"

Translation: Brazil wants an email they can snoop without regards to unimportant things such as "due process" and "privacy"
Why wife/gf/bf isn't equivalent to an actual full-time co-founder http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9R2... (max levchin)
To be honest, as a native French speaker I find it sometimes very hard to understand the French spoken by people from African countries. The same is true for deep countryside French accents, who tend to pronunciation words with different phonemes. (Such as trilled R's)
I don't know about US English but I know how to speak "TV English" perfectly however when I came to the UK I had a hard time adjusting to the different accents around London for a couple of months.

Scottish, Irish or just about every accent out there sound like weird sounds the first time you hear them and you actually have to focus hard to figure out what the fk that person just said.

Written English may be the same everywhere but spoken English varies greatly from region to region.
It's funny, we thought they went to all that trouble for our benefit. We're a bunch of rubes.
America’s Economic Recovery Hinges on STEM Education
Regarding #1, wow. That's a pretty remarkable insight.

Everyone thinks of the karma/reputation feedback mechanism in terms of how it promotes civil discourse, but in this case it's fairly remarkable to think of how it could be biasing the conversation toward a negative tone. Maybe it's usually civil negativity, but it's negative nonetheless. I can see how people would tire of this eventually.

I wonder if there'd be a simple way of limiting the bias? Slashdot's modpoint classes comes to mind, but then that opens a whole host of other problems...
If that thought sounds awful, don't have kids. Seriously. And not because you'd find it awful to pay for their college fees or help take care of them while they are settling down.

But because that's the easy part.

The hard part is realizing that you're in it for life. It's not a 20-and-done commitment. It can be a life-long commitment, and beyond.

But if that's your answers, you mentally aren't prepared for parenthood. Not that everyone who has children are ready.
Depends of the definition of "technical" as well. If taken to mean anything that humans create, including replicating natural processes, then as other posters have said fire is the obvious choice. Now if you restrict technical to purely man-made devices it does get a bit more difficult.
Please stop posting sales pitches on HN that masquerade for the first 75% as a blog post giving unbiased advice before coming up with the line "and that's where my company comes in".

The article is clearly biased based on the product and this should be called out immediately.
Yes. That is their job. Because nations don't trust each other. Because, historically, they shouldn't. It would be naive to do otherwise.
How to decrease sign up confirmation email bounces by 50%
I don't think this is limited to girls. I have read in some parenting books about the number of boys being diagnosed with ADHD might be related to this feeling, that they try something and can't get it, then just get frustrated and move on.

We have tried to be particularly encouraging with our 18-month old son. From what we have read, often saying "you are so smart" as led to many children giving up when they face a tough task as they feel they must not be smart enough to figure it out. Instead, we say "you worked hard", "good work", "you put time into it", etc. Anything to encourage the act of working rather than how smart he must be.

Another book suggested having just 3-5 toys in a room, rather than the 50 we have now, so the amount of concentration is focused instead of moving from one to the next. Now if we can just get the 4 grandparents with just this 1 grandchild to stop buying him things! Probably going to hide everything when they are not here instead.
> Relatively free states slide morph into corrupt police states precisely when the people sipping coffee with their luxury computers refuse to notice it

That's... at least mildly pretentious. What social ills are the brave bands of roving latté-sippers going to save the country from next? Anyways, history has shown that despots don't have to care about what the intelligentsia thinks.
The parent comment wasn't prescriptive, it was descriptive. You can argue all you'd like that it isn't fair or optimal or good, but you're hard pressed to argue that it isn't true.
Popular websites built with Django
Really good idea. As a 33 year old, I still feel some of the anxiety when I remember being wrong in college or high school. Hopefully, more schools can adopt this idea.
Show HN: tourmanagement.com (Drupal-based SAAS for touring bands)
Over the past year I have improved my spoken English immensely, here's how:

- I took about 30 lessons of one-on-one tutoring through Skype. It really helps to have someone who is paid to hear your bad English, and to have the patience to point to you the mistakes that you are making. This costs about 20€ per hour, but it is worth it.

- Read out loud. There was a period of about a month where I did this at least one hour per day. I read books, articles, even RFCs. It does wonders.

- Made a good use of the "pronounce feature" that most dictionaries have nowadays.

- Saw youtube videos on pronunciation and common mistakes.

I also wrote a lot, about 2000 words per day (I wrote a AutoHotKey script to count number of times I hit space on any given day). Perhaps 2000 words is too much, and it tends to favor verbosity over succinctness. But you will get a LOT of practice.

It also helps to read/hear good writers/speakers. I don't like movies/tv so much, as they have a low speech to time ratio.
We started building a tool for touring bands about eighteen months ago. It is built specifically for managing every aspect of bands on the road. We use Drupal more as a framework then a plug-and-play architecture, and each band gets its own centrally managed Drupal instance with a separate database (comparable to the Aegir way). Users can be members of multiple bands.

"We" are a the combination of track-proven experienced web developers and a been-there-done-that tour manager.

BTW: We are looking for investors.
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Where the cliche is an echo of what was once an insightful idea, I like to think of them as the social artifact of progress.
"Introvert or extrovert": this is a huge deal when learning and living among foreign speakers. I went through this when I moved to Turkey and I called it an "Identity Crisis", the way other people perceive you is totally different than what you are used to.
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Yeah, but it's turtles all the way down, isn't it? She's just software, so in theory someone can metaprogram that as well. If you're writing a generator of virtual performers, are you really "playing in a band"?
I don't agree. Whether you're a solo founder or have 10 co-founders, you won't succeed if you're building something that no one wants. You can get customer validation regardless of whether you have co-founders or not.
I agree with all of this, but - and this doesn't take away from the key points - autoworkers could get entry-level positions with little to no skill. . .and no specialized education or training (formal or independent). The same is not true of entry-level coders. Some level of skill is necessary, attained through some level of training.
Unfortunately no. Many med/bio publications are subscription only. To do something like paperscape, you would need a massive corpus of papers, which would really cost a lot. Pubmed only has abstracts, not the citations from the paper.
Ruby Tips Part 1
> Most founders have an idea, decide it's something they would like to pursue, then spend many weeks/months working to validate it, build MVP, attract customers. You can't deny that WP Curve started and gained initial traction exceptionally faster than most.

I disagree. Most founders with an audience can generally get 10 paying customers fairly quickly. And, frankly, I think 10 days isn't at all fast, especially these days.
> Bill Watterson got successful by doing X != If I do X I will be successful.
> Even if you follow the advice in the same letter and spirit as he did.

You will notice that I didn't mention success once, nor did I talk about if I do what Bill Watterson did, I will be good. You are intentionally or unintentionally misreading the article and my comment.

The article or my comment isn't about "follow your dreams and you will be successful"(that will be incredibly stupid advice). The point is I don't have to care what you or anyone else thinks of what constitutes success. My monthly income is above average for an engineer in Bangalore. That is partly due to my hourly rates and partly because I put in long hours. If I had a kid, I won't put in long hours. Period. Will it affect the amount of money I make? Of course. Am I under the illusion that doing that will somehow make me more successful? Fuck no.

> Though I agree you increase your chances of being successful that way.

If only...
Beautiful visualization. One thing missing though is a color-scale for age. Difficult to tell what color represents older vs newer and what are the magnitudes of the differences in age.
I recall the FTFY meme from pre-reddit slashdot. (User 872 here)
I am stuying Go right now using LiteIDE. So far so good.
I think the argument is that the skill level and number of people needed for most development jobs will be lowered with platforms and tools that make it easy for a minimally trained user to do it. Someone still has to make the tools and platforms, but implementing them won't take as many people.

Think about how many wildly popular websites run with a handful of people. How long will it be before you don't even need more than a few people in a datacenter? Robots will eventually be able to change out dead drives on a RAID array and inspect the backup generator as well as a technician.

People saying things like "everyone should be a developer" are coding the same people they're encouraging out of a potential career path. Which is fine, but the contradiction gets annoying.
Yeah. Spanish does have regional phonetic differences, but they don't tend to be hard to understand. Vocabulary is much more likely to cause misunderstanding.
I agree with you that this is the direction in which we are heading, but not that professional developers will become obsolete.

I believe if we ever reach that point where programming is common-skill; the real developers will stay ahead due to demand. I honestly don't see corporates with millions/billions of revenue trusting newcomers with a few weeks of experience to handle core business automation; in the same way as you don't trust a clerk to sort out your legal issues.

Perhaps when the time comes; professional developers will become like the attorneys in the law system; where specialist skills demand even a higher rate and requires less time invested (which might mean the same salary as now but only working 'part time').

I don't have any issues with people wanting to learn to code; I even mentor some myself. It really comes down to hours (or rather years) invested in learning and fine-tuning your skills; which I see the majority of new developers not willing to invest in.

As such, I believe the demand for better developers will increase. Look to the tech companies with open positions looking for 10x/star developers - even though there are developers available, they just don't make the cut.
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What makes the web great is that anyone can author a page.

We pushed the problem of handling these authored pages to the browser, and as a result the web flourished as millions authored content.

Where will the content come from when the browser does not do HTML and CSS, and is instead a native client for OpenGL?

The only way I believe this will work is for the authoring tools to lower the barrier so far that anyone can create content for this.
Here are some preliminary performance benchmarks from my regular workstation (Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz, 8 GB RAM): http://pastebin.com/7buZVgdu

The sparkey usage is fairly optimized, but I just randomly put something together for the level-db, so consider the results extremely biased.
I'd say of all those three number 2 is the most common reason why people don't 'follow their dream', but I don't think it's the main reason.

The main reason, I think, is that it's just real hard to wander off the beaten path. I suspect the primary problem is those first steps and then keeping at it for a while. We are taught from very early on, especially if our parents were 'normal' middle-class people, to do the 'normal' thing.

But based on my interactions with people who 'do their own thing', it seems quite feasible, and often a good recipe for happiness, and not so hard to keep up once you've done it for a while.
One comment on the post goes after the analogy not being fully sound because unions helped to prop up wages.

Whatever you think about unions, I'll be sort of curious to see if some segment of developer jobs do unionize ever. I get the sense that the rugged individualism that seems to be far more prevalent in developer/engineer/hacker sort of circles would be less for it; what about h1b workers who seem to feature quote often in stories about not great companies overworking employees and threatening their jobs (and with that, their legal status in the States)

Yes, a tangential thought to the article but an important part as people continue to evangelize the great opportunities in the tech industry and Hacker School, Code Academy, WikiBooks help them to get up to speed
> The US government reports that it was listening in on the phone calls from one military commander to another and heard comments indicating regime involvement.

I just don't understand why they could not let the UN check what they call "evidence".
Building UMD modules with dependencies with Browserify
Love for labor lost
[citation needed] is shorthand for "Bold claim. I disagree & very much doubt you can back your claim up.". Which I think is ok. Problems arise if it is used for "I disagree & I like to look smart". That is why I would prefer people use the long form, not cryptic shorthand.
People overestimate the role of genetic advantages in individuals.

No, they don't. In fact, we're so aware of it that we have an entirely separate category for athletes that lack a Y chromosome.
For other folks who are annoyed the story is on 2 pages, here's the single page link:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/doers/2013/01/jeff_...
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Nice try, but emacs already has a command for that.
3. It's not a gimmick. Shakespeare is but one example of culture; he's not the start and finish of it.
No research in other languages than English? You crazy? Most research on Chinese art, history, literature is in Chinese. Same for French. I'd agree that some topics that are more detached from a given culture, like mathematics, are mostly English zone, but this is not the biggest part.
Let's not allow competitive sports other than between people with identical genomes and identical doping regimes. Then we can be confident that in most instances the winner tried hardest.
We already have lab standard rats with identical DNA, so it shouldn't be too hard to clone a race of identical competitive athletes.
besides, I feel that I'm wasting too much time. I know that is important, but still, it is just a tool. Not even a challenging one. It's just a boring tool to learn.
If this person is so critical, why would you not bring them into the fold and make them an employee or co-founder? Because you really are setting yourself up for disaster when they can just walk at anytime.
Test 'reveals Facebook, Twitter and Google snoop on email
Too bad .nl doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries; the norm here is more like 1/3rd of that.
Recovering from a burn out myself too.
Took it easy for a couple of months, went on some holidays, and now helping a startup out at the lisbon challenge.

Good luck ryan!
Don't know why you're getting down-voted, you're absolutely right.
How matrices that are obtained by singular value decomposition can be used?
I think you were looking for this... http://i.imgur.com/YwgbT16.gif
I don't think you get it. Btw, I am Brazilian.

First let's state the obvious: Brazilians spy on Brazilians. Clandestine telephone wiretaps are a regular thing in this country; the Brazilian secrete service (ABIN) and even private detectives do it a lot.

But, still, there are 3 implications in this story:

1) Every company in this country with secrets to hide (a.k.a every company) will now develop an allergic reaction to the words "cloud computing".

2) Every Brazilian IT company that has potential American competition now has the perfect argument for protectionism.

3) Expect a lot more laws regarding "internet regulation". Politicians here are eager for any excuse for doing it.
The File API wasn't designed with that in mind. It's built for a web browser. They wanted security for end-users. I'm not going to blame my phone for not being able to make phone calls through my TV.
bend, send, spend, friend.

Rough - 'ruff'

Cough - 'coff'

Bough - 'bow'

Though - 'tho'

Through - 'throo'

hiccough - 'hiccup'

Bought - 'bawt'
English doesn't really do the 'y' sound for j's except in clearly borrowed words. For 'native' words, it's generally 'dz', and only becomes 'h' or 'y' when adopting foreign words like jalapeno or fjord.

If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you start to lose the semantic link between words - it's no longer clear which words share roots.
Show HN: Countrack.me - a webapp to track your activities anonymously
You're misinterpreting what I said. I'm an American, and I live in London. It worries the crap out of me that the U.S. government can listen to all my calls, read my emails, for all I know track my anti-NSA HN posts as part "international" data collection. It worries me that they can do the same thing to my non-American friends, with even less oversight, and can have people extradited by compliant governments to face U.S. charges without traditional due process.

But that's not the argument I'm making. Spying on a foreign government is _not the same thing_ as a spying on civilians. I expect foreign governments to be spying on the US, and I expect the US to spy on foreign governments, even if I find it distasteful that they're spying on friendly nations. But that's not the same level of seriousness as unchecked spying on civilians. In a society where rule of law matters, unchecked government power spy on innocent civilians is an existential threat to democracy. That's a different thing than spying on heads of state.
> Very clever, the ol' switcheroo.

There's little cleverness in reminding you of the plank you've got in your eye when you're looking at the dust in your brother's, but thanks nonetheless.

> Here's one that's still floating around: "there's nothing in that horrible presentation that a modern browser can't do".

The presentation is bad, and aside from this value judgement the comment expresses confusion over the improvements of the project over existing browsers.

> And you're calling me a dick for calling out comments like that?

I don't know, were you calling people dicks? So your comment was not just advising, it was passive-aggressively insulting third parties?

> I realise that my original comment AND this comment aren't adding any value to the conversation either

Indeed, have you considered practicing what you preach and leading by example?

> I'm just saying we aren't doing much in creating an environment where people are confident in sharing their work without fear of hours of work being instantly dismissed

There's little evidence of such a thing here, there's a marketroid video with a fluffy and empty title.

Meanwhile a few links below on the front page (at this time) you've got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314730 which shows an actual project with a number of interested comments, none of them negative as far as I can see.

Even https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314310 which looks nothing special at first glance garners mostly positive comments (or more neutral ones talking about the space/ecosystem, wondering about it v alternatives, etc...) with a downvoted negative comment whose author readily agreed being wrong when his mistake was pointed out.

> I'm sure you wouldn't like it.

I don't mind marketing copy and email harvesting schemes getting slammed. Especially when advertised as a "show HN" with no show and little tell.