skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>The guys who have already made it big (those in top management) have a great deal of financial security built up for themselves.

Not really, I agree for people at VP levels etc. But you could count these people in numbers of 10's.

Most people are neck deep in debt and lifestyle expenses. These are middle management layers. And I have no sympathy for them.

The most unfortunate ones will be guys who are not productive, who don't read or learn often and just don't have the appetite or the curiosity to work on difficult projects and build something of value. These are basically people who pick up programming because some one told them there is good money in it. And now the only way they can make it to the top is either by job hopping or doing all kinds of politics.

Either way with the growing start up community in Bangalore and what I have seen when it comes to meritocracy, its already becoming a trend that good people leave to either start up on their own, or help others.
> I don't like to see people judging who can or can't be a libertarian based on their own moral preconceptions.

I am judging him according to the same principles he said to defend, since he acted exactly like someone who didn't care about them, and was only interested in his personal monetary benefit - even if that meant torturing and murdering others.

Unless you postulate that "He was defending the Liberty of people to say one thing and do the other, regardless of any laws". Then I would have to agree with you.
Yeah, I've been on the other side of this, working in the trenches. Granted, I wasn't a developer but the situation wasn't any different. The problem is no one asks us how much time it will take.

As an (exaggerated) example, the conversation usually goes like this:

Project Manager: Guys, we just landed a huge project from Acme Inc. Guess what, you guys are gonna be paid a bonus this month!! YAY!

Developer: Great!

PM: There's a tiny caveat though: The bonus was promised only if we had delivered it yesterday.

D: FML.

PM: But don't worry, we still have a week to finish it!

D: WTF? But this will take at least three weeks!

PM: Ah, don't worry. I know you can do it in one week. In fact, I am so sure, I promised them you would! Isn't that great?

D: Well, what if I can't?

PM: Oh well, we won't get paid and it will certainly reflect in your appraisal and you won't get that promotion that you have been due for the last three years. But I'm sure you won't let that happen, amirite?

D: FML.
Just look for a compiler design book.

Compiling some form of bytecode into machine code, is part of any compiler design course worth its name.
Except that ageism is so prevalent, and the demand for younger employees so dominant, that's it's no longer really the case. New grads are getting stupidly large salaries and signing bonuses.
and much easier btw
Not so! Go explicitly exposes indirection, while every Java object is a pointer. The result is that control of what is in L1 with Java is impossible, while memory locality can be forced in Go.
Stencil is very well done, and easy to work with!
Added error message. Thanks!
I think I have a better scheme. Say you have a 10 bit keyspace or something, and then encrypt a very large number of times with random keys. You don't have to perform as much computation as your adversary. By the law of large numbers the probability to solve all of the puzzles in a much shorter then expected time is low. And it is much less parallellizable then just one encryption with a random key.
Drag from desktop browser to load up URLs in iOS Simulator
Pretty sweet.
Have been paying an Indian Programmer $35 an hour. Writes great C++ code, couldn't be more happy. We have been raising his salary every now and then (we started at $20 and we can raise it to $50 over time).

There's two sides of this: If you don't get paid a lot, you probably are demotivated and yes, you can choose to deliver below average quality. However, that way, it is very unlikely that you will every get paid more or get better projects. Hence: You're stuck at where you are.

If you however sacrifice yourself a little bit, deliver great code, put in the extra effort, you probably negotiate your way up.

At least, that's how I got from an unexpierenced webdeveloper to owning a business and having a great staff <3.
I think the parent means that Side Projector sounds like some weird kind of a projector... as an optical device that projects an image onto a surface. That was my first thought.
I think it's generally the same reasons that more women don't pursue male-dominated professions. I think this is typically that there's an established culture, and not fitting in with that culture makes you seem like an oddity or that you've got ulterior motives.

Is that man teaching because he needs a job, or because he enjoys teaching? Or does he just want to prey on the girls?

Is that woman developing video games because she's a good programmer, or is she just desperate for male attention?

The biggest difference is that fewer people see this as a problem when it's affecting men. Culturally men are expected to bear their problems instead of lament them.
I agree with the author on every point he has made. But I would like to add one more to his list, the good ones eventually become demotivated because nobody gives a shit about good code in these outsourcing shops. Add to it the bad working conditions in some places, I work on a remote desktop/vmware desktop, the servers being in USA, it is so slow, so slow that I get 4 hours of productive work out of 8 hours that is billed. And because the estimation will not change, I start taking shortcuts. Don't blame me, I do what I have do.

And writing good quality code will not give you good rating, will not give you promotions. These firms make profit when they have more headcount. A good experienced coder becomes a liability because he/she has to be paid more and therefore the firm makes less money off him/her. To make profit these firms need more fresh out of college kids, who can be paid peanuts to make more profit.

I love programming, so I keep reading and updating my skills at home. I build mobile apps, explore new tech at home in hope that someday I will get a call from a good firm somewhere or one of my side projects becomes a hit and I can quit. Till that happens I will just bite the bullet and continue to go to office.

EDIT: Grammar and spelling.
Do you think that your contractor status is defending you against ageism, to some degree?
Okay, I'm sold on HTML being where the content should be on page load. My next question is are there any frameworks that can assist with this stitching together of content? I'm afraid my ignorance is showing here, but I can't off the top of my head list any.

The web paradigm that I've grown up with is the single-threaded dynamic content generation one, most recently using MVC, but with any server-side logic. The concept of parallel rendering of content and a "stitching" together of HTML is new to me.

I'm also curious as to the best practices surrounding page linking when the behavior specifies something like no screen flash. It seems like all that content (like, the whole page) would have to be loaded with AJAX.. then you're right back where you started with loading content with JS. Maybe it's forgivable as long as the initial page load returns a complete set of content?

Perhaps there is a place where I can learn more about the logistics of progressive enhancement.

Thanks for being willing to answer my questions about this. It's something I've always wanted hashed out in my head from an opponent of these frameworks.
Nice website, concept etc. But how do you expect to deliver this? What codecs, what p2p technologies, how are you going deal with discovery, encryption etc? Where is your team?

Why should you get 1/2 million dollars?
It is definitely a saturated space. However, only a few competitors are agnostic to platforms (Splurgy, RaffleCopter, gleam.io, and a few others). Other competitors such as OfferPop, Woobox, Shortstack, and etc... are all Facebook centric which means you cannot embed your contests/giveaways on your website; This means you won't be able to funnel your existing website traffic into your social properties.

Also, MailChimp is not over engineering at all. It's a very key feature. These integrations are important for marketing teams. After people socially engage into these contests/giveaways, their emails are captured and then can be ported into MailChimp where you can run e-mail campaigns.
He started working on it 2001/2002, at that time, C++ implementations of the standard library were poor and inconsistent across compilers. There is a reason that pretty much every library from that era redid all the basic classes - Qt, MFC, etc. When I learnt C++ it didn't have std::string.
Interesting that there are ways to keep Chrome OS around. Most developers I know using one just go pure Ubuntu and don't care at all about keeping Chrome OS as a dual boot option or whatever.
Even more importantly, so do his colleagues in network/server ops. It's a cascading effect.
Ok, what language would you suggest as an alternative?

I've written code in lots of different languages and I haven't found a replacement yet (C# is closest, but I mostly do Android development, on Linux).
Ask HN: How do you hire a freelancer?
Recently I have been thinking about freelancing full time more and more. One of the worries is always "Am I going to have enough work to keep me going" and "How am I going to win clients?".

I was just wondering if there is anyone on Hacker News that works with freelancers a lot and how do you go about finding a freelancer for a certain project? I guess if you work with freelancers a lot you probably stick with people you have worked with before but how did you make the initial contact?

Also what do people think of sites like odesk and elance etc?

If I'm able to build up an understanding of what clients look for it will help to make me more appealing.
You're not alone. Scala has the features you're looking for, but it's also a mashup of Haskell and Lisp and C++ and a few other mismatched languages. As I said in another comment, Scala is for people who find Haskell too simple, and want to add mutability, inheritance and macros on top of it.

I think that what you're really looking for is Kotlin: http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/
I also found his talk fascinating, but the paper he referred to was a bit unapproachable for me. Any suggestions for resources that could help get me more comfortable with reading and understanding type calculi?
I was following one of their tutorials and it had you doing things like using rbenv and bundler, and none of that crap worked right. I don't remember the specific error messages, but it was all crap like "Can't load Gem <such and such>" or "can't load required file <blah>", etc, etc.

In that case, part of the problem was documentation (as far as I can tell in retrospect, I never really needed anything other than the Ruby 1.8.7 I already had installed), but just being exposed to rbenv and the mess of that world left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, it's not just Ruby. I have no use for the similar tools for any environment, that purport to let you keep multiple versions installed simultaneously. Whether it's for Python, Groovy, Ruby, whatever. I've come to the conclusion that it's just plain A Bad Idea to do that sort of thing.
Does this support "lower education levels equals greater facebook use"?
I have some of the same experience. If you outsource to a consultancy company, things are less likely to go well. In my current job we have an office in the area, and some of those programmers are excellent. It is harder to find good people though. You really need the fizzbuzz test there, but good people exists.

In a previous job I had some coworkers that had previously developed a system for a major European telecommunication company. The project was now mainly in the maintenance mode, and they (the telecommunication company) decided to move the maintenance to an Indian consultancy company, and my coworkers would only help with the transition. The result was that my coworkers got more work to do than they had before the transition, and this never ended. The new developers was simply unable to get anything working. Part of the problem was that there was high turnover and many inexperience developers, but not only.

In the end the project was moved to the telecommunication company's own employees in China. That actually worked really well.

This is only a few cases, but it is my experience that having an office in India often works well, but outsourcing to a consulting company is usually a bad idea.
The video is very nice. What tool did you use to create it?
Contracting is the way to go for the older crowd.

How else could I be making $125-$250/hour? No company is going to pay me $250k-$400k in salary, and if they did, they'd expect to own me 24/7.

This way I get to work part time, have lots of time with my kids, and when I do work overtime, I get paid for the extra hours. So I know they aren't asking it lightly.

At least right now I've had no trouble finding gigs. Work's been finding me, in fact. I have more options available than I can take. And between gigs, I can work on personal projects, one of which may turn into a real business someday. It's all good. :)
It kind of makes me think about skynet :-)
Not every page one visits is worth storing. The whole point is to filter out (and save) the good from the rest.

An aside: Mummify needs browser plugins for all the major browser to make saving as seamless as possible.
$10/hour isn't bad at all as far as living in India goes[1]. I worked as a salaried employee for about 3 years with a reputable software consultancy in India and made about $4/hour writing good quality ruby code. Let's say I lived a comfortable life with a decent apartment and a new car.

[1] It equates to about 80,000 INR per month. Compare to salaries ranging from 30,000 INR to 60,000 INR for a programmer with 3-5 years of experience.
Oh I've been doing that with techcrunch.com for almost a year.
> I don't find Java that verbose (especially with lambda functions in Java 8).

Honestly: use something better for a while and come back and say that. Java is verbose. There is a ton of ceremony around anything in it, from ill-considered defaults that require lots of specification (see Scala's remarkable ability to strip bullshit out of its equivalent to Java code) to the cultural design-pattern mess.

It's a lowest-common-denominator programming language, and it shows because it takes such pains to spell everything out every time. JDK8 lambdas sort-of help, but the language is still fat.

> I don't understand, do you mean nested method calls?

I think that's pretty straightforward and that these two go together.. You basically have to use an IDE (and while I am comfortable in an IDE this is a negative in the general case due to the complexity it implies) because you need go-to-definition all the time due to what is, frankly, class and method bloat. This method hands off to this manager class method which hands off to this class that exists just as a temporary stateful container and all of them add more boilerplate and force you to maintain more mental state and blurgh. I was guilty of it as a younger programmer, but I've aggressively tried to move away from that; some people don't seem to ever grow out of it.

> What language would you suggest as a Java alternative?

Scala. I'm a former Java web dev, current Android developer, and if I could shoot all my Java code between the eyes and replace it tomorrow with Scala I'd be a happy man. It's a language that aggressively attacks the idea of design patterns by making the language more expressive (whereas Java just codifies them).

My new projects are exclusively Scala, and I'm turning out better, more readable code in shorter time. The JVM is fine, but Java-the-language and Java-the-culture are toxic as hell. And while it's no doubt harder to hire Scala programmers, the floor on quality is going to be a lot higher than Java programmers when I need to hire them.
If someone outsources a job to another company, then surely it's that other company's job to keep their programmers motivated, right? If they can't do that, then that's a reason not to outsource to that company.

The article sounds a bit like: don't blame Indian programmers for being bad, it's the client's fault for outsourcing to them.

Personally I've worked with a few excellent Indian programmers. They worked on-site in Amsterdam. I later discovered that there was also a 20-man team in India working on the same project. I never saw anything productive come from them (the only time I even noticed them, was when someone checked their "My Documents" folder into SVN).

The ones working on-site were clearly the cream of the crop, and I wouldn't mind working with them again, especially the one I keep running into at various open source meetups; he's clearly dedicated to his work.
IMHO, if someone is aware of the quality of $200 per hour work, they would deliver the same quality. After all the prices might be different but the hours are same. In my experience most programmers don't even know how bad they are. And when they do become aware of that the quality improves.
Since Snowden leaks, NSA FOIA requests are up 1,000 percent
To understand conversations about gender bias in professions, you have to understand that the American academy (and by extension, America's educated class) operates from a Marxist ideology. This casts the world in light of class conflict. In the branch of this ideology which deals with sex relations (called "feminism"), men are the oppressor class and women are the oppressed. Thus, male overrepresentation in the suicide or prison population is not a problem (men cannot be oppressed, they are the over-class). But male overrepresentation in tech is a problem, or at least it has become a problem as tech work has gained in prestige.

Male underrepresentation in traditionally female fields is not considered a problem, again because males cannot be oppressed as a class. It is true that men have fared worse than women in the recession[1], and that men have fallen behind women in educational attainment, so that an influx of men into these fields might have strong, positive effects for society. But as long as the "patriarchy" remains, it will not be a concern.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
Ah, but not all drug dealers are libertarians. What I'm saying is that according to his actions, which contradicted his words, DPR was all of the former, and none of the later.
OK fair point. Probably the right way to do it (which would result in arguments...) would be to create a numerical metric of "goodness" based on a huge number of known macro and micro nutrients found in brats.

I was thinking in my numerical function that total caloric intake is going to be reduced by rendering out fat in the cooking process so it would be a net loss. I was inspired to google and pork is a reasonably good source of vitamin B-6 would have to research its heat stability which I'm not quite motivated enough to do. Also I'm unclear if my google source is talking about B-6 pre or post cooking. It may be there's too much pre cooking (probably not, but maybe)
Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones.

I've known some older engineers (older than me, heh) make crap decisions because they didn't like change.

Then I've seen younger engineers completely mess up good, maintainable code because they think that knowing one language makes them masters of software development.

I try not to hire any of those two persons.

BUT, I've also seen young programmers completely fail because they couldn't adapt to a newer (or older...) technology.

And I know some very much older programmers who are constantly reading up about new stuff, and loving it.

Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are.
Google Launches Fix To Stop Mugshot Sites From Ranking
This should really be "US now produces more oil and gas than Russia OR Saudi Arabia" as the US does not produce more than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.
But $20/hour code causes trouble and doesn't actually help.
Its more like negative $50.
It's closed for signup... that's annoying.
I have a cousin who was an elementary school teacher because he loved it. It's all he ever wanted to do. He has a bunch of kids of his own because he enjoys being a dad. He's that "really great with kids" guy.

In school, all he ever got was suspicion. All of the teachers and administrators and parents in schools treat male primary school teachers as if they're child molesters or think that men are totally unsuited to the job. There is _blatant_ sexism.

He lasted two years and now runs his own construction/carpentry business where he's a lot happier.
What fantasy world do you live in? You're saying its easy to make six figures on a freelancing site where most everyone is looking for the cheapest developer? Seriously?
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I worked for a company whose flagship product was a slapdash VB6 app that was first offshored to India, then brought back in-house in an attempt to fix the horrific mess. The Indian devs did a terrible job, but there is no reason to think that was their fault. I place the blame with the people who decided to execute so terribly. I seriously doubt they did their due diligence about who they were offshoring to, et cetera.

I understand why the author gets offended, because the whole "crappy Indian programmers" thing is really about self-superiority and xenophobia, not technical prowess. People see the crappy results and think it's because of India, since they're not willing to dig any further.

At this point in my career I've worked with talented folks from everywhere, including the subcontinent. But I won't lie, hearing that a project was offshored to India will make me wince, because offshoring is often the result of a broken business run by people who don't really know what they're doing. The crappy results are just a symptom of that.
The approach is nice, the problem being solved is real. Hopefully paying customers will flock in.

The question: is mummify.it itself going to go under some day?

So I'll wait for an open-source analog of this service, to run on my own tiny server. (Or carve some time to write it myself, of course.)
Open source projects created by Craigslist
A 'lot' of these jobs have contact with children and the news organisations have done enough damage to societies perception that a man wanting to work with children is probably a pedophile to wreck that career path.

'Something must be wrong with you'
Audio apps tend to need to have special UIs and widgets which aren't typical needs for most apps. You need special sliders, drawing tools, and color schemes for live performance that aren't baked into many widget toolkits. Even if they are, you're dealing on such microscopic levels of detail on these UIs that you really do want them to be the same pixel-for-pixel on any machine. And if you're selling a cross-platform audio plugin to musicians for a couple hundred dollars for the last 5 years, it's nice to totally remove OS-specific UI weirdness from the equation.

Here's an example UI showing my point (and the app Juce was spun out of) http://www.tracktion.com/
Oh, this post is gold. Albert asks:

>Why are women fighting for more women to do STEM while men are not fighting for more men to be therapists?

...and Freakonomics hears: "Why don't more men pursue female-dominated professions?" Not once, but twice. Alfred writes back to clarify his meaning, yet Dubner, again, simply lifts keywords out of his sentences and writes his own question to answer. Literally failing to think outside the bounds of political tropes.
That's one route, although I think there is a whole world of possibilities available to someone who can code and can work with their hands.
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