skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Editplus is my goto quick Notepad like app. http://Editplus.com

Evernote is a decent 'note taking' app. http://evernote.com
.
Microsoft Onenote is okay as a standalone app, but has pretty nice integration with Outlook and the rest of the MS Suite. Try it out if you are working at an organization that's running MS products.
Well, you could be sufficiently vague - "Your account has been terminated for domain squatting on domain http://i-squat-here.com would tell him why his account had been terminated, but wouldn't reveal any sensitive information.

And google's contactability for valid issues does still suck, with some exceptions.
HFS+ in Snow Leopard has transparent compression for read-only files. I think that probably counts for more than stripping binaries.
PHP has to look up variables by name at runtime, because it doesn't know which ones will really exist, much less their types. It doesn't know whether any array will be used as an ordered list or a lookup table, so it has to maintain a complex data structure for both. It has to allow any value to actually be a reference which shares state with any other value. These are very expensive features which preclude a lot of optimizations, yet they're rarely used because they're more often surprising than helpful. We ported an app server from PHP to Java and picked up a 6x speed improvement with hardly any tuning.

And 0 == "" isn't really confusing. You want confusing?

array(0 => false, 1 => true) == array(false => "0", 1.9 => " 0")

The real problem with PHP is there's no simple way to stop it from guessing what you might have wanted when it's utterly wrong.
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I wonder how accurate those statistics are. For example a dozen years ago I was called a programmer, now I am called a project manager, but I still work in software in the same group for the same employer - about as good longevity as you can get. It may be that seniority leads to job relabeling that misrepresents the true situation.

The real question is whether the people who "drop out" of the statistics still wanted to be "programmers" at 40.
I disagree.

I work for a large (65000+ employees) telco company, and our in-house problem/solution reporting database is totally broken. The search function is crap (it's based on predefined keywords, not really on free text). It has a voting system, but the votes are not used to classify the quality of the problems/answers. They are only used to track how active an engineer is browsing the database. You can randomly select problems and write nonsense commnents, the net effect is the same.

With a corporate Stack Overflow there would be no employee/boss conflict, since in my company all the users on a given domain are at the same hierarchy level.

When I discovered Stack Overflow I inmediately thought how good this would be to replace our corporate tool.
What Are The Rewards Of 'Free-To-Play' MMOs?
Currently the body of the response can be any object that has a "forEach" method. For example:

return [200, {}, { forEach : function(block) {
block("a");
sleep(1000);
block("b");
sleep(1000);
block("c");
}];

Would output "a", wait 1000ms, output "b", etc.

The Response helper object (part of the "Jack" implementation not "JSGI" specification) makes it even easier:

return response.finish(function(block) {
// etc
}

Still working on an async API though.

The Jack/JSGI site is currently at http://jackjs.org
I'm an affiliate marketer, should hit six figures in net income by the end of this year.
Beats doing a zero-revenue startup :)
I think some of the examples he gives at the end of the article are good in winning confidence, such as "we hate spam as much as you do" and "you can unsubscribe at any time". These things are hard to communicate through interface alone.

As for the Paypal thing, I hear what you're saying, but I think the microcopy should stay. It does no harm, fits just fine into the interface, and if it sways even one person who blanched when they saw the Paypal logo (next to the credit cards or otherwise), it was worth it.
What percentage of mechanical engineers still work as "engineers" a decade after graduation? The stats for CS majors are meaningless without a baseline for comparison.
Looks right to me.

But does this strike you as clearer than the original? I like that the original makes it very clear that we only return ACCEPT if we reach END; that after a successful shift we continue reading; that after a successful reduce we shift again; and that we only return ERROR if a reduce fails.

I think yours works the same, but for me at least it takes longer to parse. If I were actually debugging yours, I might even resort to looking at the compiled code with objdump and writing the labels in by hand. Presuming it's correct, I bet this would result in something that looked a lot like the original!
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I'm having a hard time reading the legend, with the the 10,000 job tiny circle is at the bottom of the 100,000 job large circle. Is it supposed to be the area or the diameter of these circles that indicate the relative number of jobs change?
I can definitely see how this force works against generalist programmers. I can definitely see how the market limits the shelf life of a generalist programmer.

So specialize in something where those years of experience accrue to your benefit. 10 years of image processing experience will make you an industry thought leader, as would 10 years of cryptography or 10 years of compiler backend design. We aren't running out of applications in these fields.
Need suggestion on contracting rate
While we work on ramping revenue I'm taking on some consulting work. I need to put in a proposal tomorrow. What I'm looking for is reference points for hourly contracting rates. Something like, "I did the following work and charged $x per hour".I'm not too concerned about the type of work done for that rate, as I can triangulate on the right rate for me given enough data points (from generous folks like yourself!)

thanks in advance
Well, I'm a developer who is interested in stuff more serious than iFart. I recently got an Android phone because I was turned off by all the negative stories I read about developing for iPhone. I can't be the only one in this boat.
None of what I wrote above exempts you from keeping up with the superficial trends of the industry. If things shift from J2EE to Python on the DLR with .NET libraries, you still need to keep up with that stuff. So yeah, if you're stuck with recruiters (and, don't be), be keyword compliant.

But the big scary force in this article is, "over 10 years, your C++ experience makes you progressively more expensive and less attractive to a Ruby shop". That's true, if all your 10 years were about was C++. C++ is a distinctly dumb thing to build a career around.
Bloch's Effective Java is the true must read here, 80% of this article simply re-iterates what was already published there (and in other places) already. The author just adds this "canEquals" idea, which sounds like it might become annoying and hard to maintain if you have more than a small handful of subclasses to deal with.
You'd hire her, I'm sure, but would you pay her 70% more than the kid out of college? Because in reality you probably won't get 70% more value out of the experienced candidate.
This reasoning doesn't take into account the fact that a lot of people are very bad at programming and get tired of doing something they're very bad at. We have a fair number of bad programmers in their twenties, few in their thirties, and probably none over 35. It isn't because they get better. The only middle-aged programmers we have are absolutely solid.
Sounds to me like you and the recruiter have totally different target audiences.

Just my two cents, but I think you might be doing yourself a disservice by dumbing your resume down to their level... Unless the type of job you're looking for is just a cookie-cutter "latest pet framework" position.
Heres the official Google blog post that explains everything a bit more http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tab...
Some people claim this evil too because a break is almost a goto.
Wow. Immediately after this text from the article: "The most successful products take tedious and difficult chores and make them easy—so easy that consumers can solve their problems in three steps or less."

...this ad appeared, showing off a list of seven (or more!) steps marching off toward a dim horizon:

http://c13.zedo.com/OzoDB/i/4/581696/V1/st_ecp1_300x250.gif
Except nobody claims that paper money will be some sort of magical hedge against the collapse of western civilization. Some folks do seem to think that way about gold...
Is it equivalent to say that I'd pay a fresh college grad who hasn't done anything but RoR 70% less? Because I'd totally do that.
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Because in reality you probably won't get 70% more value out of the experienced candidate.

I was a fresh graduate once. I remember my productivity less as "60% of that of a twenty-year veteran" and more as "It is a miracle that they allowed me into the room for a purpose other than to empty wastebaskets, to say nothing of permitting my code in shipping products".
> we have to surmise that either users don't care about said features, or said features have such flawed execution...

No this doesn't follow. It is a logical fallacy. Just because a product is successful doesn't mean that it has all the features people want. If the advantages of a product make up for it's shortcomings then people will buy it. By your logic you would have to argue that video wasn't a feature people cared about. Or better yet that Windows was the ideal desktop OS.

It really is sad how these Apple fanatics are so keen to point to a whopping 30% US smartphone market share (more like 10% worldwide) as proof that it is everything people want and yet when confronted with the unrivaled dominance of another product (e.g. Windows) they are more inclined to dismiss the users as people who don't know better.
Check out existing open-source projects that have done the same thing. There are bound to be many in whatever language you're using.
So yeah, if you're stuck with recruiters (and, don't be), be keyword compliant.

Most recruiters and big company HR departments are among the biggest destroyers of meaningful language there are. "Keyword compliance" is just another of the forces trying to dumb us down and turn us into automaton neurons in a big brain, exchanging and processing signals we don't have any inkling of.
very interesting, and worth reading all the way up to and including the comments. Nathan appears (in the comments) to counter the conclusions, but merely sketches out why, rather than give anything concrete.

Then again, it would seem odd that Knuth was not only wrong, but that nobody in 30 years of CS has spotted the error.

I'm going to continue to use primes I think, just in case.
My Criticisms of the Palm Pre
If you are not 3x as productive 15 years after graduation as you where when you just graduated you are probably doing it wrong. The only advantage to employing young people is their willingness to work insane hours, but that pales in comparison to experience.
No.

Suppose you pay a fresh college grad 50k. 70% more is 85k. But 70% less than 85k is 25.5k.

So you would definitely pay the experienced guy 70% more.
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I modded you up because you make some good points. That the iPhone delivered features that the competition probably hadn't even thought of is beyond dispute. I think the fully functional web browser is the iPhone's biggest contribution. It's the only reason I have a decent browser on my non-iPhone.

I want to make it clear that I think the iPhone is great even though I choose to use something else. The iPhone isn't for me. I've tried it and I want to like it, but I just don't. It's impossible for me to type on the screen. There are some minor usability annoyances. I've grown accustomed to a few things that the iPhone doesn't do. Not to mention, I've been an ATT customer in the past and I don't think they provide particularly good service.

That said, I still want to see the iPhone succeed because it means I, and every other consumer, get to reap the benefits of healthy competition. There's no doubt that the iPhone kicked just about everybody in the ass when in came out, but while Apple has been feeding us excuses for why we don't need the features they don't provide, the competition has been busy implementing some of their best ideas. I've purchased 2 smartphones since the iPhone was released and both have fully functional browsers, app stores, good SDK's and acceptable multimedia capabilities. They've both been capable of doing things that the iPhone can't do-- either due to design or policy-- while the most obvious disadvantage compared to the iPhone has been the number of applications available. My point is it's a more level playing field than it was a couple years ago.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that customers bought iPhones knowing that they did not have MMS, voice memos, etc. It's not like it's written in big print somewhere that it doesn't do these things. Most early adopters probably found out after they bought the phone. I think it's easy to assume that the iPhone has these features when you're upgrading from a 3 or 4 year old subsidized POS that has them.
Sorry. I'm coming up on 15 years, and I am not 3x more productive than the better young developers I've hired. I just don't think this sentiment is valid.
I think you missed the metaphor.
Xtreme typing challenge pits iPhone vs. Netbook
HyperVM boss hangs himself after exploit damages 100,000 websites
I got my first programming job in 2002, because I knew Pascal, If you where a consulting firm with 10k employees then you need to keep up with industry trends, but we are not. You can try and keep up with all the latest trends, but it pays better to focus on about 3 areas and know a lot about them.
IE six was launched at a time when the browser market was stagnant. Netscape was as good as dead, Firefox was not there yet, MS themselves did not launch IE7 for another five years. Compare that to the launch of IE 8, less than threee years later, and Firefox 2 and 3 less than two years after their predecessors.

The market is moving a lot faster, now. I am not sure whether this is stuff MS wants to support though.
I think there are some other questions that need to be asked here. I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this:

"Of the software-centric industries, what percentage of employees are actually writing software? What percentage of software developers do not work in these industries."

I don't know the answer to that, but for some reason I think it's well under 50%. It tends to (on HN anyway) get presented as the coders & management. But (IMO) that's too simplified to mean much.

Programming makes sense as a starting point. It's a relatively straightforward, transferable & acquirable skill set. On the other hand, things like account management, or sales may require the kind of skills you need experience to gain & are hard to develop intentionally.

Also, I think it's relatively easy to shift from coding to something else organically, but not the other way around. If you are a programmer that ends up making software for the agricultural industry , you may pick up all sorts of skills & knowledge that make you useful in other areas. If you enter that industry from another end (even if you are very close to the software), you are unlikely to become useful as a programmer. At least not without intending to.

You wouldn't be surprised to hear this story: CS degree at 22, worked as a developer of farm management software for 5 years >> a (software/technology) consultant in agribusiness for 5 years >> a manager/executive/account manager/marketing person etc. for irrigation supplies manufacturer >> something else.

You would be somewhat surprised to hear the reverse, someone with 10 years industry experience leveraging that to create software for that industry. It's not impossible, but it's worth remarking on. It probably means that either the person was a programming amateur that went pro or that they actively decided to retool themselves via a path of quite a lot of existence.
AT&T lock-in is only a problem in the US, remember. Here in Australia the iPhone is available from 4 different carriers (Telstra, Vodafone, Virgin and Optus) and the fifth carrier offers plans for unlocked phones as well.
If you are writing internal applications, then it doesn't matter what the wider internet uses. You say, "this is the browser you use to get your HR benefits" or whatever.

(And if you think HTML5 isn't relevant here, you're wrong. There are a surprisingly large number of "interesting" internal websites. I have written a video-sharing application that is used by the HR department to distribute multimedia information about benefits plans and whatnot.

It uses Flash, but if HTML5 existed when I wrote this app, I would have used its functionality instead. Much easier to debug.)
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better young developers I've hired that's not what I said. Are You ~3x as productive Now than when You started? It's not a question of typing speed or syntax, it's a question of what you can get done in a 1 month. And how much damage you will do in that same month.

One of the better examples of this is helping to debug someones program. Now I frequently hear, I was trying to do X, it almost works, but it's also doing Y, and I will say ok you made a mistake in this area. It's not just understanding code, but also understanding the typical mistakes we make. Tracing down an off by 1 error is something everyone learns, but they don't teach it in school.
For that matter, I don't think I had 60% of my current productivity as recently as 2-3 years ago. I can still see my first commit at the day job in the repository. That code is an offense against God. It took me two months to get working the first time and then another two years of squashing periodic bug reports. (Unit tests? What is a unit test? Is that something you do with Subperversion?)

My product's code, particularly the parts of it which were laid down earliest, is so bad in some points that I wouldn't pollute a repository with it if I were rewriting today. Oh, God, the print logic. I can quote one line out of that file by memory:

// Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
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Read the blog post all the way through: "Once you've found the result you want, we wanted you to be able to DO something with it. To find out what you can do, select a result and press the tab key or the right arrow on the keyboard."
Google lets you code for Googlephones on Googlephones
Exactly. I was hired on as a Principal Engineer at a Rails shop despite having literally about 3 hours of experience using Rails. But, I'd worked with the rest of the senior technical staff before and they knew that just didn't matter. Sure enough, a couple months later I was submitting patches to the framework.

The other thing about new technologies in general, and Rails in particular, is that 2 or 3 years of experience doesn't really mean much because the evolution is so fast. There's lots of Rails lore out there on the web which is completely out of date, and if you're not willing and able to dive into the code yourself and design your own experiments you're going to make completely incorrect decisions about how to design your app and write your code.
Usually 3-4 books a month. I try to read 2 kinds of books at a time: 1 business-ish book and 1 fiction. I read the business book during the day and it helps me keep learning and I read the fiction book at night before bed or any time I want to decompress. Going to the library is a nice daytime diversion too.
I know its a little bit not so new (April 2009), but I'd found amusing, regardless of the result.

I have performed a simpler test, typing the same sentence and walking with my samsung omnia and the results are pretty same. Apparently the main factor is that you have a lot more control on a handheld device vs a unstable surface like the eee. Of course, predictive software helps a lot in such case.
Does anyone still think it really matters which programming language a developer has experience in?

It didn't take long at all after working full time as a developer to realize that software development is much more comprehensive than simply knowing a language. Shouldn't we all be able to create software in any language after a short ramp up period to learn the new language?
I'm that "geezer". Coded in C and C++ for over a decade, and now I'm working in the magical world of Rails, where I get to watch 20-somethings rediscover the value of old ideas the hard way. (Given the average comment thread on Hacker News, and you'd be excused for wondering why anyone ever used compiled languages or static typing. Silly dinosaurs!)

That said, while I appreciate your sentiment, I know in my heart that the author is right. All of my friends from college have moved out of programming. Many have left the industry completely -- and we're not even that old! The bottom line is that there's little or no cost advantage to hiring an older coder, when I have t-shirts that are older than the most popular development environments.

Every once in a while, some young geek chimes into these conversations with the observation that one needs only "keep up with technology" to stay relevant in the industry. But even ignoring the fact that "keeping up" is usually easier said than done, the economics just don't work out. My friends who went to medical school are finishing their residencies and starting in private practice; my friends who went to law school are making partner. In most industries, you're just beginning your career when you're in your early 30s. In software, you're already old enough to be a conversation topic.
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Would Wordpad work? It does basic formatting as per your requirement and is bundled with the OS.
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I might be 3x better. I am not 3x more productive. I do much more than just code now, though.
You may be right in thinking that a cc would be used before a ssn would ever be but it is much easier to monitor cc transactions than usage of a ssn.
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It's today's TV generation used to seeing and hearing everything wildly applauded whether it deserves it or not. Every play ends with a standing ovation. Every homerun requires a 'curtain call'. Every song sung has throngs screaming to the point where you wonder if anyone is actually listening.

Serious students of the technology are listening, not applauding or "high fiving" themselves for doing so. It's childishness at best. Low-brow at worst and more appropriate at some hillbilly bar.
"C++ is a distinctly dumb thing to build a career around."

For that matter, so is Ruby, Rails, Python, and everything else that's popular today.

In ten years, everyone will be using Blub, and badmouthing those dumb ol' guys who were slogging around in Ruby. It's the one thing in life I can guarantee.