skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it is hard but not "incredibly" hard. Not all clients there are bottom feeders, even though the majority probably are. Even then, it still definitely beats being an employee on a fixed salary in most "developed" countries. Someone told me that the average programmer in Poland makes 800 EUR/month. That doesn't sound spectacular either ;-)
Looks like he "only" had to pay ~27,000 USD. http://www.20min.ch/schweiz/bern/story/Mit-260-auf-der-Autob...
You seem to have everything backwards, which makes me question whether you read the actual comment as opposed to just attempting to guess at things from the snippet :(.

What you said would make some sense if the client connected to someone in the middle who then connected to the server. Instead, the client connects to the server, but when data comes back it is forwarded to someone in the "middle" (really, off to the side) who then processes it and returns results to forward back to the server.

In essence, the device is in the middle of a connection from the developer to the service, as opposed to the developer being in the middle of a connection from the device to the service. In such a configuration you are not getting any of the benefits you are talking about, as if the device isn't online it won't be able to maintain the connection on behalf of the developer's server.

(Also, I must point out the normal situation with such messaging apps on iOS is that you get them from the service itself. In addition to being less common on Android, it is thereby interesting to point out to people who might not realize the app is implemented in this weird way--some people who even analyzed it assumed this was a side-channel for analytics--so they can make the right call for themselves.)
I don't see how it implies that he doesn't believe people make more than that; it just means he isn't interested in finer distinctions above that threshold.

One could say the same for the $20k minimum: there are certainly people who make $5k or $12k also, but he's grouped them together into essentially "make very little money", just like he's grouped $200k+ into essentially "make a lot of money".
If I need to install the JVM just to try your software, then it's going to remain untried - however many design patterns you've managed to cram into it.
I think I notice a selection bias here. Anyone north of 50k won't ever bother looking at this thread.
I've always thought it would be a perfect language for things like aerospace. NASA, for example, uses unsafe languages like C and compensates for that with extremely rigorous processes. Of course, this means that it takes forever to get anything done.

I can't help thinking that using a better tool like ATS would actually increase productivity without compensating safety. If anything, the types would provide an extra sanity check! Of course, just using ATS won't be enough--most of the existing checks and reviews will still be necessary, but I do think it would be some improvement.
There also seems to be some ideological motivation for claiming rockstars don't exist.

The existence of rockstars provides fodder for individualist ideologies. Many people are more collectivist, so therefore feel the need to dispute the existence of rockstars. This is a little bit evident here - you need a rockstar team, with diversity. It's far more evident in the last post on this same topic.

(Not quite a dupe, but it might as well be. https://medium.com/about-work/6aedba30ecfe )

Amusingly, it's also a very corporate philosophy. "No programmer is worth more than any other, therefore to advance you must enter management." Tends to be self selecting in such corporations, since everyone who isn't mediocre leaves.
The app also used the iMessage icon from Apple.
Didn't know that - shame really, under-age smoking should be combated by enforcing ID checking.
If it's true that anyone north of $50k won't bother looking at this thread, then 60% of the respondents so far are lying. ;-)
This really feels like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Feel ashamed when asking strangers for a cigarette? Then don't ask them. Or offer them money. Or do it anyway and just deal with it. Or just buy your own pack of cigarettes.
What is the UI library (for menu, toolbar, accordion..) being used here? I tried to look into source, couldn't figure out.
could I ask what kind of services/technologies you were offering?

With this kind of income you can make a very decent living in India.
One small nitpick to your article: in Poland, QWERTY is the standard computer keyboard layout. QWERTZ used to be one in the old typewriters, but I haven't seen a single comp user with it.
The way we think of junior/middle/senior developers is completely broken.

How many senior developers have you met, that we crap but were senior simply because the amount of years they have gained? And vice versa.

If entrepreneurs straight out of college can suddenly become the CTO of a start up and lead it success without any previous experience, what does that mean for the experience metric?

Experience is like market validation. If you have lasted years, you must be able to do something but it doesn't necessarily mean they are good. It just makes them a little more safe to justify, and I can't believe the amount of premium which is placed on that.
No, it isn't in any way similar to Bitcoin's blockchain consensus - that's is designed to have blockchain disagreements which are resolved eventually by some of the nodes rolling back their blockchain and moving to the consensus one. As I understand it Ripple doesn't do that - once nodes have agreed on a ledger version they won't roll it back, and even if they did the OpenCoin Inc-controlled nodes don't care what non-OpenCoin-approved nodes think when forming their consensus.

So the net result is that, since everyone - including the exchanges - trusts the OpenCoin-run nodes, the only safe thing to do is wait for OpenCoin's servers to come to a consensus amongst themselves and then accept their ledger updates in their entirety. There is no way for anyone outside of OpenCoin Inc to influence what gets included in the ledger except if you allow it.
We never run job ads for positions in our product team. In fact, we never have any open positions in that team. Instead, we have a very organic process of interns becoming employees.

Yes, it is slow. And we only retain one out of three - one drops out (of internship), one leaves for greener pastures shortly after graduation, and one sticks with the company for many years producing tons of value.

Any students reading this, find yourself a solid internship position as early as possible and you won't find yourself in Average Joe's shoes as Ile put it.
It's hard to get cheapskates to pay $.99 for an app, let alone donate -- at least not at a level to compensate for a company to make any money or even pay the bills. When clothing stores start operating as donationwear then maybe donationwaring the software industry could follow.

The problem is that many people fail to see software as an actual product that needs to be produced. Hopefully Ducati can lead the way with a donation-sponsored business model. Maybe that could illustrate the free-rider principle more clearly.
A computer has a finite address space (e.g. 2^32 bytes on x86, 2^48 on x86-64), and always has a fixed size data type large enough to address it all; an in-memory string cannot possibly be usefully larger than this so using this finite-size type as the length-prefix is perfect & optimal.

C-strings are useful in extremely constrained environments when the extra few bytes of the length prefix vs the trailing \0 byte is too much to pay, but are essentially just a security risk in any other situation.
> No programmer is worth more than any other

I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is:

- No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average).

- A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies".

Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is not Hanselman's point. It is an corporate anti-pattern.

"each person has different strengths and weaknesses and is growing at their own rate" is recognised implicitly in a healthy working environment. Whether management gets it or not.
Does iPad have an USB port you can plug any external keyboard into?
I built a tool for visual interpretation of test results against requirements. It was pretty cool and I'm sure large engineering companies would use it if they knew they needed it.

I learned that you should go niche, but find a niche with a problem that customers KNOW they have. Otherwise you have to educate them before even having the chance so closing a sale, which is too expensive.

I'm backing up and making simpler tools for the domain, this one could become an advanced feature for big enterprise.
"Bluetooth keyboards work on iPads too."

Which is a substantially smaller set than all the USB/Wireless/Bluetooth keyboards that will work on Surface.
That makes sense, although not accepting patches is something that can be totally ok.
You're mistaken about the laws of probability. The normal distribution arises from sums of the same distribution. This is most frequently found in sample averages, which is . More accurately, sample averages follow a student T distribution, which converges to a normal distribution as sample size increases to infinity.

In general, humans do not follow a bell curve for complex traits. For instance, it's common to see bimodal/multimodal distributions when there are major demographic differences in the population such as gender, race, economic class, etc. Standardized tests have bell-curves because they are "normed." Experimental questions are thrown out if they are not correlated very well with the result.

Also based on the Chebyshev's inequality,
+2 std dev has a minimum percentile of 75%.
+2.5 has a minimum percentile of 84%.
+3 has a minimum percentile of 89%.
+k has a minimum percentile of 1-(1/k^2)
That is great money for India.
Tips For Raising Venture Capital
In other words, Go is yet another "lowest common denominator"language,a spiritual successor to Java.

If you're not working with the lowest common denominator, Go is not for you.
Great, just what we need: another competing standard for pushing stuff between display devices.

It's bad enough that AirPlay is an Apple technology and so we'll never see it integrated deeply into Android or anywhere else, and so we have the Chromecast/GTV protocol.

I don't want yet another protocol. I want all my devices to be able to talk to each other. That's it.
There was a time (before C++11) when not even local static variable initialization was guaranteed to be thread safe. And there are a few other reasons why it is discouraged: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...

So it's basically defensive programming, but I agree with you that it's probably too defensive nowadays.
Most of those were people who just look like penises.
Air doesn't have a touch screen or Wacom. Those things cost money. Also you can use Surface while standing (check maps, watch videos in public transport etc.).
It says "example" with a pile of combining characters (77 to be precise): http://i.imgur.com/acyHBkR.png
It is pressure sensitive. It's a big win for artists as well. No need to buy expensive Wacom screens.
Facebook says Taliban's page 'doesn't contain credible threat of violence'
This facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/UmarMedia belongs to TTP (Tehreek e Taliban pakistan), internationally designated terrorist organization.
This is one of the dozens of pages run by these loosly affiliated terrorist groups. They use these fb pages to spread propaganda and publish videos of their successful terror operations. I have repeatedly reported these pages, which, even when you take one look at them is obvious that they are run by terror outfits. But facebook says they are safe for families etc etc.
Just today 40 people were killed in Pakistan by these people in a mosque bomb blast, earlier this week 40 were killed in a church bomb blast. A couple of weeks ago they killed a pakistani General, and duly uploaded the video on this page (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=224409671050680). Still facebook says it does not contain credible threat of violence (http://imgur.com/ILkxxJ6). my blood is boiling with rage.
What should i do?
Python adopted a styleguide and I don't think I've seen any modern Python using camel case since. If anyone was to use camel case, they would be presumed to be a beginner.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
Computer Anonymous - A new group for those alienated by existing ones.
You just need a Pro version... Then run an Android emulator on it :).
Thank you! I was referring to redistribution, but was unclear.
I think you've been misled by poor reporting, where everything needs to be a copy or an X-killer or a war.

The tech used to share Chrome tabs with Chrome cast is WebRTC, which Mozilla has been working on for a while. It's better known as a "Skype-killer", but it has other uses too.
"2nd world" (Eastern Europe) freelancer here - it really depends what things you work on, even on Elance, oDesk etc. It's not that hard to generate >20k, of course if you know what you're doing. oDesk clients brought me >40k this year, most jobs north of 5k (I do mobile apps). There's of course a lot of crap job postings there, but once you get a minimal reputation, you don't even look at those "make website for a peanut" contests. Of course rates are well below those that American developers usually get, but really not <20k year, at least when you work full-time.
Why I would not call startuper the entrepreneur
Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is a straight-up straw man.

It's an exaggeration (I probably should have been more clear), not a straw man. Obviously big corporations have different levels of engineers, but many of them claim engineers top out at a certain point. Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this. If programmers max out at being only 3x better than average (or whatever the multiplier is), to get beyond that level one needs to be a manager.

Interestingly, tech companies, trading desks, and other places where technology really matters frequently don't view things this way.
single cigarette dispensers could be smaller and wall mounted, wherever.
In Portugal the minimum wage is currently 485€ per month, before taxes.

With a degree one usually one starts at around 1000€ per month and grows from there.

You have to be already quite senior to even dream of the 2000€ barrier, in a few selected companies.

However with the current economical situation, many people are quite happy if they happen to just get something.
Slimmer, lighter, magnetic ports, quality materials, Wacom pressure-sensitive stylus.
$50k in India won't get you far in Mumbai, especially if you are married and have kids
First, is important to search the truth. I think we are discussing if 1 + 1 is equal to 2 or not. 10X engineers exist (I would say that 100X ones too). If you found even one it is enough to probe this fact.

You can see similar distributions with scientists or other professionals.
In theory, it is enforced by ID checking. In theory.
Well funded? Hell yeah, ride the bubble while it lasts. It is not you subsist on thin air.

Good product? Are you your own customer? Is it really "new" and "innovative" ? Learn as much as you can, then. You never know when a credible challenger appears. You better have all the experience to jump ship.

I say milk them for what they are worth but be careful not to get milked yourself.
You need both. There's many red flags which will only be apparent on a resume (candidate doesn't have work authorization for the country, large unexplained gaps in work history, rapid turn-over of employment), plus it's much easier to quickly process large number of resumes, etc.

But as you say online presence can often add colour to a candidates profile.
Perhaps this idea could be applied to a different commodity? One people are somewhat willing to travel for, this solves the density problem.

Also, I feel like we shouldn't be encouraging smoking. I feel like an app such as this would mostly be used by underage smokers…
So they are all self-employed. Makes much more sense than a salaried genius. Shouldn't we discuss 10x managers as well?
No matter whether you end up pro, it sounds like you'll appreciate everything that life has to offer and have a good story for your kids.

That said .7 seconds is a hell of a lot of time to shave off your 40 yard dash, especially if you're starting out in relatively decent shape. But I suppose the only way to know is to go for it, good luck!
It's not a documentary (unfortunately) but The Trial of Tony Blair is really rather good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Tony_Blair
I don't understand your ire at Mozilla. Without seeing Mozilla's implementation of tab-mirroring, you seem to have somehow come to the conclusion that it is "a little bit crappier than Google".

Personally, I'm glad Mozilla is keeping track of popular features from competing browsers and not falling prey to the "Not Invented Here" syndrome.

https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Not_In...
Not a huge amount smaller than machines selling packs of cigarettes, which already can exist pretty much anywhere (where laws permit).
850 EUR is average salary in Poland (before taxation). Programmers would usually get more, at least in big cities.
I was once in a situation where I was forced to bum smokes for several days while essentially living at an international airport (forced as in it was the only way I could smoke during that time). It was pretty scary, especially at first, but it led to some surprisingly amazing experiences. Learning how to bum a smoke (and really, the generalized skills that went into that) was one of the most beneficial things I've learned in life.

(Don't interpret this as me recommending smoking. Worst. Habit. Ever.)
> In general, humans do not follow a bell curve for complex traits. [...] Also based on the Chebyshev's inequality,...

Thank you, this was very helpful. After some quick searches and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality I now also know where the "off by square root of sample size" rule comes from.

I stand corrected and very happily so.
I mean the same thing that Unicode uses these terms for.

Code Unit. The minimal bit combination that can represent a unit of encoded text for processing or interchange. The Unicode Standard uses 8-bit code units in the UTF-8 encoding form, 16-bit code units in the UTF-16 encoding form, and 32-bit code units in the UTF-32 encoding form.

Code Point. (1) Any value in the Unicode codespace; that is, the range of integers from 0 to 10FFFF16. (See definition D10 in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.) Not all code points are assigned to encoded characters. See code point type. (2) A value, or position, for a character, in any coded character set.

From http://www.unicode.org/glossary/
When i look at the price for licensing mxGraph, i did not think that it will be free forever.
Or possible they will add some Pro-Function to draw.io.
Second that. The greatest thing about that movie is that it doesn't glorify being an indie game developer at all. Watching that movie is one of the main reasons I've held back from just giving up my FTE position and going off on my own. I feel like I'm just not young enough anymore, and you really have to have a certain kind of support from those around you.

It also shows how obsession plays a huge role in the potential for success. Not all who are obsessed are successful, but it is a large factor. That's not to say that obsession is good. Unfortunately, it often places emphasis on something that really does not matter in the end. But, for the few that have a crazy idea and try to bring it to fruition, hopefully it is something they look back on later in life as a good thing, whether it was a mistake and they learned from it, or whether they grew as a person because of it.

If people could obsess about doing something that helped others, that would be much better, but not everyone has that tendency, and maybe super meat boy really had a positive effect on a lot of people making the world a better place- I don't know.
Not only that, he seems to be conflating standard deviations with productivity multipliers (I'm not exactly sure how to translate his +2 to productivity, I could be misinterpreting), which is definitely wrong.
I don’t understand how the "infrared contact lens" works. Do they convert the infrared light to visible light? Is that possible? Do they use visible light and the "infrared" name is only marketing? I couldn’t find any information with Google, only lot of infomercials.
Gezond gebak brengt je hormonen in evenwicht
False analogy. For the average person, these things add more freedom (freedom to tinker) while removing the freedom to look at the source. For example, most scientists don't care about the latter when it comes to using Matlab.

A honest analogy would be a golden rocket.
So much hand-wavy text in there...

There's no inherent, fundamental reason in the universe other than momentum that says you've got to use an 8-bit encoding. You could serve to be a bit more honest about how arbitrary that call really is and where it comes from. In fact many higher level languages even outside the MSFT ecosystem are happily using UTF-16 everywhere natively without problems, they just do a small conversion step at a syscall to run on your beloved Unix. AFAIK the JVM is working this way for example. This "imagine a world" game can just as easily go the other way: "imagine a world in which everything is UTF-16 ...". I think it's disingenuous to say that it matters one way or the other, that your favorite is better and all others, even if they are a 1-to-1 mapping with your favorite, constitute a "design flaw". Because information theory does not care; it is just a different encoding for the same damn thing. In truth it makes little difference as long as you are consistent, and you are whining simply because not everybody picked the same thing as your favorite.

Your claim that UTF-16 is a "design flaw" has not been validated, just that you don't like encodings ever to change and UTF-16 isn't your favorite. It's very hard to consider that anything other than whining. I thought we software types are supposed to be big on abstractions and coming up with clever ways of managing complexity? It seems rather rigid to say you'll only ever deal with one text encoding.

Lastly even in 2013 this is a total lie:

> OSX and Linux default to using UTF-8 everywhere,

If that's true then how come on virtually every Unix-like system I've set up for the last ~15 years one of the first things I've had to do is edit ~/.profile to futz around with LC_CTYPE or whatever to ask for UTF-8? I am pretty sure every Unix-like system I have set up gave me Latin1 by default, even quite recently.

I think you are underestimating the extent to which UTF-8 is a crude hack designed to avoid rewriting ancient C programs that did very much the wrong approach to localization. There was a time before UTF-8 existed and became popular when it was a fairly common viewpoint that proper Unicode support involved making a clean break with the old char type. You are right to say that UTF-8 "won" in most places but the fact that the NT kernel or the JVM use 16-bit chars reflects that prior history. I think a more mature attitude would be to accept this, that it came from a time and a place and is a different way of working, rather than call it "wrong".