skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The law is the law. If a landlord doesn't like the law, they don't have to be a landlord.

As someone who used to work at a tax certiorari firm, I can tell you there's just as much fucking over between the landlords and city/state tax money. Landlords are making money for not doing a whole lot except owning land. New York landlords make a killing. I've seen their returns. There are landlords who leave large portions of or entire buildings vacant _on purpose_.

If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, we can talk about how land ownership and the tax structure is a massive wealth extraction from the lower classes.

Don't give me that bullshit argument.
From a public health perspective, unless fracking can be tied to water table contamination in a systemic way (as opposed to in the occasional accidental way) its going to be head and shoulders above Coal, both in the extraction, the processing, and the burning categories.
> The language doesn't force you to create abstractions on top of abstractions and it is not necessary.

The culture of it does. When all of the code around you is objects-as-design-pattern bad-abstraction slop, you're going to think that's the right way to do it. Which for a certain value of "right" it may be, but it still sucks. You can write "good" Java, but it's still going to be more expansive and harder to read than good C# (which aggressively trims back Java design pattern crap) or good Scala (which goes way, way further).

> that the JVM is turning into a platform

Agreed, and this will save it, but Java's not helping itself at all.
>no one has 20 years of relevant experience

I've been designing game APIs for 20+ years, actually. And that's what I'm doing now as a contractor.

I'm still working in C++ like I was in 1993 as well. I first learned C++ in 1989, so that's also 20+ years experience.

>all those years of experience could have, and often do, entrench very bad habits.

Working exclusively with languages like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript can entrench some pretty atrocious habits as well. I would put my "started with assembly language and moved eventually to high level scripting languages" habits up against a "started with JavaScript" programmer's habits any day.

>Finally, the data suggests homogeneity is valuable in early startups.

What data? I think compatibility between developers is important. But I'm working on a project right now where the median developer age is about 25 (I'm more than twice as old as some team members), and I'm making crazy fast progress on my part of the project, keeping everyone happy. Beyond happy, really; no one expected me to get as far as I have this quickly. And yet I'm putting in 30 hours a week or so.

I think being awesome is valuable, on any project, startup or otherwise, and that "fundamental values and principles" is a red flag indicating "OK working tons of overtime", which is clearly not necessary if you have the awesome.
I guess the author has not worked with programmers from other countries. There are bad programmers everywhere. I've had the opportunity to work with programmers from all over the world, and the worst have been from the USA. Yes, American (read white). For example, the programmer who had worked in NASA who did not understand the concept of SQL injection. Yet wrote a whole system full of such security holes. Or the programmer who used to work for a big name startup. Who thought that python had to be written as if it were Java. Maybe the guy who leads a software team for a billion dollar mega corp, but does not care about source control (no GIT there).

On the other hand, I've met very smart Indian programmers. Guys who write awesome stuff and get paid well (and also get bought out). And smart Russians, Italians, English, Japanese, etc. There are good and bad programmers from every country in the world. Pointing the finger at India doesn't really do anything for anybody. The reason this argument exists is due to how big corps fell for the off-shore dream. They went out and off shored their software to places that lacked properly prepared employees. It was done in India, but it was also done in other places of the world. You mostly hear about India, because there are a lot of Indians in tech (which is a good thing).

Rather than point fingers at other ethnic groups, you should try and walk in their shoes a bit. Not everyone is born in a place full of opportunity. A lot of people out there have to do whatever they have to do in order to acquire a better life.
Thanks!
We used Adobe After Effects.
I've always found this to be an amusing counter-narrative: "if you're so concerned about the lack of women in finance, business, and technology, why aren't you concerned about the lack of men in teaching or secretarial work?" How is this not a self-answering question?

It should also be noted that the percentage of male nurses, while still small (10%) has tripled in four decades, and male nurses earn more than female one: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/25/men-nur....
Yeah, but not everyone I want to share with is on a 1Password supported platform, etc.
FBI pranked by furious Bitcoin users since Silk Road shutdown
The US is on track to become a net exporter of natural gas. Is that what you are asking?
Ask every other country in the world. I'm sure they have reasons. And the Nobel prize isn't a popularity contest.
FYI, for those of us with Firefox's NoScript extension your site is completely broken. Nothing loads, it is just a blank page with a list of scripts you intend to run.

I wasn't curious enough about your service to whitelist your site, but I will leave a comment asking that you consider providing alternate content.

It is rare to have a site completely fail to load, even with all scripts blocked (though I accept I will have reduced functionality).
I think he didn't mean the actually word "man", but its translation "Mann" which isn't gender-neutral at all.
grugq makes plenty of mistakes, just like the rest of us. He's just pimping an image to suck up more 0day from independent developers to unethically onsell to various dot govs. Sad friggin' industry, full of vacuous husks of people.
How We Overturned the Retroactive Tax on Startup Founders
Me too ... I was a lousy student (in the early '80s) and then scored well on the Comp Sci GRE in 1990. I'm wondering whether they'll see the change I recognized in myself during that span.
All it needs is a spellchecker ;-)
We "were" in the same boat: our company decided to build UIs using C# and leaving the hardcore modules to C/C++, interfacing them via COM. Developing UI interfaces in C++ under Windows is a pain in the ass.

An example of this is our SpyStudio product[1], which was developed in C# using our Deviare technology[2] for instrumenting binary applications.

[1] http://www.nektra.com/products/spystudio-api-monitor/

[2] http://www.nektra.com/products/deviare-api-hook-windows/
So I've worked with a couple Indian outsourcing firms. The best we ever managed was to break even in terms of quality product per dollar. I visited there a couple times, and I can completely corroborate the poor working conditions. Grinding pollution, horrible traffic, crushing heat, often without any AC, frequent power outages, substandard equipment. The trouble is, regardless of the reason, the net quality tends to suffer. There are a few other factors that we would never have predicted:

* Working at a small firm is very low prestige, unlike here. You want to have a big name you can tell to your prospective father-in-law. There are of course big, reputable outsourcing firms there, but they tend to either be hiring mills with low quality, or expensive enough to negate any labor arbitrage advantages.

* The very best and the brightest (and there are MANY MANY of those) tend to go in-house at Google, etc. rather than do the outsourcing-for-hire shops. Or, frankly, they've moved here.

* As with any consulting, their interests and yours are not always in alignment.

* In western nations, there are many routes to success and prestige. Business, professions, even the arts. In India, for the time being, there is generally only one that matters, if you're not already upper class: technology. So that means everyone tries to do it whether they're well-suited or not. So there is a HUGE pool of labor, throngs of people show up in person for certain job openings, but a large percentage of them literally cannot do fizzbuzz, yet lots of those will get some kind of job or other.

* It is often really difficult to get a "no" or any kind of bad news in time to compensate for it.

I'm just scratching the surface. It's a huge, complicated, amazing country, and the potential remains enormous, but there are a TON of very real cultural problems facing a western firm looking to partner with an Indian firm.

EDIT: This was the in the context of a smallish startup. A bigger firm looking to make a permanent presence will have more resources and more leverage to compensate for some of this, and will also, if they have an international brand, attract much more capable people.
Prosecutorial discretion is used all the time because there are lots of anachronistic and over-broad laws on the books...

... and this isn't equivalent to a monarchy, how?

Among the more interesting questions in law are these: "Should every minor indiscretion be punished? If not, why not? If so, who decides? What side effects can be expected if it ever becomes possible to punish every instance of lawbreaking?"

We've hobbled our society with so many laws that their volume alone, never mind their scope, makes it impossible for any of us to call ourselves law-abiding citizens. What makes the question especially interesting and topical is that we're moving into an epoch of universal surveillance. The cops will see and know everything you do, and so will your neighbors, because they wouldn't have it any other way. Consequently we will have to rethink our prior habit of making as many laws as possible on the grounds that we're making them to control "those other people."

The time when we can dodge the Should every indiscretion be punished? question, or remain safely detached from it, is over. The archaic hotel laws, along with the arbitrary taxes that go with them, may be a good place for those of us who would like to steer society toward legislative minimalism to make our stand. (Yeah, yeah, I know, why don't I move to Somalia, etc., etc.) Good luck to AirBnB in what will probably be a very difficult fight against powerful incumbent interests.
> Scala transcends the static vs dynamic typing debate via it's duck typing.

Hardly anyone uses duck typing in Scala (you probably mean structural typing, by the way). There are plenty of articles explaining why structural typing is a bad idea, here is one:

http://goo.gl/0wcNFO
So...Indian programmer here. Well.
I was just about writing some similar anecdotes for an article and I came across this. So, let me share what I have seen related to this.

Firstly, right now in India, programming(Computer engineering) is one of the most widely adopted courses. This obviously means a lot of programmers and a lot of web shops, IT services and whatever. More the companies, more chances of you ending up finding a mediocre one.

Most of these companies and their employees consider it as a 9-5 regular job. It is a chore. They do not care about you or your product. As long as project managers meet the deadline and programmers get their salaries, no one cares. Not everyone can be a "hacker".

You outsource to India to save money. You wont outsource to India if a developer/company charges the same as its US counterpart. So you end up outsourcing to mediocre companies eventually.

I have interviewed at a really big Indian IT company and their interview process made me realize that they weren't serious about hiring talent. They just wanted more people, whom they'd eventually train to 'get shit done'. For more clarity, I was asked about movies and stuff in my technical interview which lasted 15 minutes and then I was offered a job. No kidding.

There are some brilliant Indian programmers too. You probably wont ever outsource to them because they are expensive.

In a country of a billion people, where computer engineering is one of the most dominant fields and education levels are mediocre, even if 20%(at most 50%? lets not get our hopes high) of each class produces absolutely brilliant engineers, that still means a huge number of crappy engineers.

So while there are brilliant, good, bad and horrendous programmers in India, the math totally inclines towards you finding bad programmers more often.
The note about inflated titles is the biggest real difference I see. If you hired a bunch of brand new US/EU recruits and stuck them in an office and just said "get it done" you'd probably end up with the same amount of work/issues.

Actually, now that I think about it, a friend of mine worked at Andersen Consulting, he was one of the few from CS, most were Business people who had majored in whatever Business Computing program their school offered. Abyssmal would be a good word for the quality of work done there (this was a decade ago, may have changed). It was hire new grads at 40k, bill them out at $300/hr. Other than the scale of money, I doubt it was much different than what you'd find in most Indian consulting firms.

I've worked with many different Indians, most were not incompetent. The biggest problem we seem to have is hiring someone decent, new recruits are easy to come by, but retention of quality isn't working so well. I expect once wages are more even on a global level things will change, but that's still a few years away.
PureVPN hack and resolution efforts
$15,000 Later, Verizon Still Doesn't Care About Customer Service
You say "it's not an ageism problem" but them go on to define an ageism problem. Your comment defines a stereotype of older people, claiming they cling to loyalty and have management styles incompatible with startup culture.

This simply isn't true. Some older developers have worked for Fortune 500 companies writing enterprise Java software for their entire careers. These developers often aren't right for a startup. But I've worked with teams of 100+ young (majority in their 20s) developers who can't think outside of Java + Apache + Tomcat + Waterfall world.

Age isn't a deciding factor for me when hiring someone. If a 65 year old developer approaches me with proven skills in multiple technologies (maybe node.js + scala + go), I really want to talk to this person.

You are hurting yourself with this attitude.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130116165633/http://www.psy.fsu...
Some of the things it does:

* extract text and metadata from images: https://infotomb.com/opihx

* lets you access it how you'd like by changing the file extension: https://infotomb.com/opihx.txt, https://infotomb.com/opihx.png

* make PDFs suck less: https://infotomb.com/vvs7t

* protects your privacy and anonymity: https://infotomb.com/about/anon.html
Can be confiscated? Not if the owner was paying attention. All that would be necessary is for an accomplice to have a copy of the wallet.dat file, in any form. In which case the coins could be moved out from under their noses.

As someone who thinks the feds abuse their forfeiture power on a regular basis, seeing them have a hard time makes me laugh.
The right way to think about links
some independant nurses i know make very good money.but maybe you are making 6 figures...
I think the idea is to encrypt with multiple cyphers, each endorsed by a different government (preferably mutually mistrustful governments). That way, in principle, the Chinese may have a backdoor to one layer and the US to another, but they'd need to work together to break your whole message.

I have no idea how useful this would be in practice.
This is an incredible generalization. I've very comfortably navigated codebases in the thousands of files of Python with only find and ack to guide me. I've done a lot of C# in Vim, too.

But I can't do the same in Java; at my last job we had thousands of .java files and I was stuck fumbling around with an IDE to do anything. The verbosity and repeated ceremony of the language makes it difficult to search for anything in an effective manner and the distractingly clumsy syntax (inner classes, as an example) made trying to Vim it failure-prone enough that I'd use an IDE just for the red squiggles. Those being in and of themselves concerning at times--I'd often find myself just trying to make the red squiggles shut up rather than concentrating on writing better code. I don't find myself doing that in Scala or C# or even C++.
Well good thing that your comment points out those shortcomings so specifically.
It is not just taxes (at least in USA,) It is also about building code, hotel licenses and different neighborhood's/apartment complexes rules someone could be breaking if renting their house/apartment.
Taboo Genetics
Kanban can not save you from the engineering death spiral
> Honestly: use something better for a while and come back and say that.

I've written code in about 20 different languages.

What language features / lack of features do you think make Java verbose?

I found Scala complex and ugly (and I'm not alone), much slower to compile than Java and Java has better tooling.
> Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones.

I don't think we are. I for one judge individuals as individuals. That doesn't mean we can't observe the wider group and make observations.

> Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are.

Of course.
This could be a Monty Python sketch, wonderful.
True. We do have a problem with murderers, though.
Using Twitter Recirculation to Maximize Content Marketing Effectiveness
I think it makes more sense if you think of it as "domain of the front-end engineer".

There's certainly an increasing number of developers who are focusing more on the front-end plus Node.js, often for connecting backend services and providing a RESTful API.
The assumption is that men are generally doing well under the current system, so nobody needs to encourage men to pursue careers dominated by women. I am sure there is a notion that nursing is a feminine career, but that is beside the point; the real issue is that nobody is trying to dispel that notion. The effort is focused on dispelling the notion that engineering and science are "manly" disciplines.

It also does not help that here in the USA we are trained to be automatically suspicious of men who pursue two common and traditionally female lines of work: elementary school education and childcare. A male kindergarten teacher is always at risk of being branded a pedophile by some paranoid parent, and must watch his every step in his personal life (what if he is into S&M? what if he is gay?).
Great thoughts, thanks! Better recommendations will come with time for sure. Currently recommendations are focused on what the community is doing but as the user base and data grows we'll be able to do some more interesting/useful things.
Cheers!
-Clayton (Dpadd guy)
In fairness to your mom, all of my primary school teachers were dumb as bricks and sucked at their jobs. And this was in one of NY's supposedly gifted schools.

Most were really shit-terrible at math especially. I feel like primary education is where the dumbest people with teaching certification end up.
Bitcoins Are Now Trading On Options Exchanges
I would say that's about right as someone who basically espouses this way of looking at class dynamics (though I'm not sure it's really a solely Marxist view, as I am still a fan of capitalism, etc.).

One nuance that might be missing from your comment is that folks who believe this still agree that individual men can be oppressed. And some groups of men can be oppressed too -- black males come to mind. But generally, when talking about oppression, they/we are talking about systemic oppression, and would generally agree that men as a whole are not systemically oppressed, although they theoretically could be if women ever became the dominant gender.
The head of one of the teaching unions in the UK, when pressed on why they weren't trying to recruit more men into teaching, replied that to do so would imply that the women presently doing the job weren't up to scratch.

For me, it's as simple as, if you want to be a tree surgeon, you are expected to act like a tree surgeon. If you want to be a pastry chef, you are expected to act like a pastry chef. And if you are a programmer, you are expected to act like a programmer. Gender doesn't really come into it.
Because they're more obese.
"I don't recycle because it's not an economically viable activity without subsidization"

But that's not the point, and I presume you know that as well. Sometimes I try to imagine how future generations may experience living in totally totally artificial environments where nothing can be taken for granted, not even the breathable air or the (living) space. If you can envision such perspective (and at least some reasons for its necessity), you may then deduce that there is a transitory path that must be prepared ahead.
Could be interpreted as a darwinian selection pressure such that there are smart and dumb noobs, but by the time they're old timers, only the smart ones remain.

(Insert Peter principle jokes, who goes into management jokes, etc)
I agree strongly with the statement the author calls out. Stop believing in yourself and your amazing abilities, and embrace your incompetence. Stop talking about what a great marksman you are, look down at your bullet-ridden feet at long last, and embrace tools that make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.

This weekend I found a collection of Javascript tests meant to evaluate one's abilities. I spent an hour trying to get the project to run, so I could take the tests, but it was all built on piles of Jello. A bunch of slightly-incompatible versions of libraries and frameworks and shit, so that 3 months after its release I couldn't use it. Stop the madness. Build shit to last and stop using things that make your next 5 seconds in emacs slightly easier at the expense of everyone else.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the American academy" but modern feminism has a lot to say about the negative effects of the patriarchy on men. One major example of this is the way men are pressured to work certain jobs rather than others, or to not seek help for physical or especially emotional problems.

Saying that men cannot be oppressed because they are the oppressors seems to come out mostly from MRA strawman talking points.
A few years ago, we saw the same problems with turnover and lack of experience and hesitancy to say no or admit it when they didn't understand the requirements. It was a small consulting company and our boss wanted to go with them for the cheap rates. I've worked with many great Indian programmers here, and I imagine most of the really good ones in India are much more gainfully employed than those in the small mediocre consulting company we hired. I think the outsourcing boom and bust a decade ago could be largely blamed on companies chasing after a gold rush of cheap talent, assuming there was a virtually endless supply thanks to the large population. In trying to get something for almost nothing, they forgot all sorts of other costs.
Interesting process, especially the emphasis on the 10th class marks - I think I know where you are coming from.

However, I'd disagree with you about the top colleges criterion: top colleges don't necessarily produce the best programmers. There can still be mediocre programmers that graduate out of top colleges, right?

Also, please don't discount someone because they have bad English skills. I know a few really good programmers (educated in good English-medium schools) who still can't express themselves in grammatically-perfect English but their knowledge of programming can blow you away.

That said, in the current job market, any opportunity is welcome. The onus is certainly upon the job-seeker to make sure they make the most of the opportunity you give them and one of those is definitely about how they present themselves to you.