skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stack Overflow? I contribute sometimes, but once again, it comes down to time. If you have the time, I applaud your contributions. As for me, I'll settle for answering maybe one question a month.

According to this paper, 95% of the users on Stack Overflow are "low activity" users, but they provide 50% of the answers.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
Wow, I'm really divorced from the real world. The Penny Arcade ad, other than the edgy snark, reads like virtually every developer position I've ever read in the media/news business.

(yes, this is an indictment of the already troubled news industry)
It doesn't seem to actually say how much the job pays, I mean who know they're idea of not very much could be 200k a year, who knows.
I'm not sure how to understand this in the context of respecting human life. How does the team that created this posting think of people?
Marco's not forcing them to change it, either. They can post a shit job offer if they want, and Marco can ridicule it and call them immature losers, if he wants. The fact that a business is not literally enslaving someone doesn't mean nobody can criticize them!
The job posting looks an awful lot like the usual videogame programmer job: it's bound to attract some people just because of the nature of the job, so they don't bother adding good money or perks. In this case it's a little more blatant and there seems to be some boasting from the employer, but in the end it's the same.

And the saddest of all this is that the job will get covered. In fact, I'm sure that there will be a lot of applicants. Just like for videogame programming.

Yes, we need to fight this. It's good that there are people complaining publicly. By the way, I believe that a few details from the job posting would be illegal in my country, although probably not in the US.
I'm reminded of the movie MoneyBall. Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt are employed with what outsiders would consider horrible jobs, but each stick with it because they enjoy it.

As an outsider you may think Penny Arcade's offer is bad, but someone, somewhere would love nothing more to work with the people behind that legendary comic and expo, no matter how rough it is.

Edit - I would also like to make an analogy with MMO guilds, particularly World of Warcraft. There are players who spend 4+ hours a night with their guild hardcore raiding (especially after the release of a content patch). These hardcore guilds have very strict enlistments. Unless you're as hardcore as them you're not in. An outsider would think they're insane, but there is no shortage of people applying to these guilds because they enjoy the experience of hardcore raiding. Some of these guilds have a very family-like bond toward each other, so you have to consider community/culture fit.
I am working on improving lives of developers through my book: https://leanpub.com/nightowls

The idea is to produce a book programmers can give to whomever is making their lives miserable and teaching said person about keeping programmers happy and productive. I'm also adding practical advice for programmers themselves because I feel that we bring a lot of these problems on ourselves.

That said, if you're in the Bay Area I'd love to buy a drink and talk about the state of the industry. My book needs more material :)
A lot of companies out there are run by total morons or psychopaths, this doesn't surprise me at all. This sounds like a combination of both.

I was recently introduced to a job by a recruiter and they wanted me to do a "programming assignment" which would take at least 20 hours, before I could even talk to them and see who they were. I was like, "Cool story bro".

The reason why I bring that up is because I noticed the same pattern here; this job ad is screening for desperate people lacking a spine. I can't imagine any decent developer with a good job applying for this. Only someone desperately looking for work and having relatively low skills would willingly take this job, assuming he's not an idiot.
Robert Khoo, the business manger of Penny Arcade and the one who wrote this job ad subscribes to the "work is family" level of cultural fit. He looks at hiring as adding a new member to the family rather than just filling a position. This is why his job ads and hiring methods are so harsh. The three seasons of Penny Arcade's video show paint a good picture of what it's like to get hired and work at Penny Arcade: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/pa-the-series.
> Their unreasonable, immature expectations are a damaging message to send to their huge audience of young software developers.

Two things:

1. The intent of their hiring specification isn't to send a message to their audience, it's to hire someone to service their audience. I'm not sure why the two are assumed to be mutually exclusive? Don't want to apply? Then don't apply - let market forces weed them out.

2. In all of my years of applying for jobs and hiring people, not once has a candidate ever met exactly the profile nor eventually fulfilled every responsibility in a hiring specification. This sounds a bit overdramatic and too pedantic. Let it go.
I am pretty excited and yet shocked to see what Compute Engine has evolved into. The original Compute Engine was about scaling (as cluster) in scientific experiment and yet this news makes me think Compute Engine is becoming the new App Engine but with full control of the VM (plus the amazing autoscaling feature). I always like to control my own VM because I can do much more with a VM than a sandbox (to me an App Engine is just a sandbox loaded with X framework and X database). I have always wanted to work on Compute Engine :(

This is an interesting marketing stragery. People who wish to launch a VM can choose CE and people who just want a sandbox quickly they can use App Engine? Though I am really skeptical about the future of App Engine if the CE became cheaper. I am sure if that happens, Google will do everything it can to migrate things over to CE. This is probably many years down the road...

I still think CE is really good for computations.
This article is very exciting, it almost makes you wonder if the universe is set up to keep adding new possibilities to how much information can in theory be processed by biological systems... e.g. the brain. Anyway if this research is true it's incredible that nature has worked out such a clever hack.

I've not seen many other examples of biology using quantum states - given the article there must be quite a few I assume?
That's really weird. Feeling like a bad developer because you never write would be like feeling like a bad racecar driver because you never bike. Totally different activities.
Not sure -- to me it looks like at least the majority of commenters are quite strongly pro-regulation: e.g. look at all the discussions of AirBNB vs. zoning just a few weeks ago, or 23andme more recently. Sure, voter and commenter demographics could be different, but probably not that much.
I think the commentary lies more in the fact that it's even happening, and will likely only get worse if the trends continue. Black Friday is not a real holiday, but we [as in the U.S., mainly] have let marketers create it out of thin air, giving them our attention until they whip us into a feeding frenzy of consumption.

Obey. Consume.
Why would this salary be very low?

Sure, they say that money isn't important to them, but there's no reason to assume it wouldn't be slightly competitive.

Penny Arcade is in Seattle. If they want a chance of hiring anyone they would at least need to be in the ballpark of other job offers out there. Microsoft and Amazon pay pretty well, so I don't think this number will be as insulting as people are assuming it will be.
So, to be clear, you want Google to decide what decent conversation is?

Or maybe should the person who posted the video have some control over the discussion, and it should be up to them?

Do you want them to remove martinlutherking.org (a horrific troll website) from the results for "MLK" as well?
Personally, that job is not for me, but I don't see the harm in "shooting for the moon" in a job description if they think they can get a candidate that matches the criteria. Why wouldn't you try to get someone overqualified and then underpay them if you think you can? It's not PA's fault people will apply for the position or that they can sell themselves as a desirable destination for more reasons than balance and compensation.
I wish the person that left the job would show up here and tell us how it is like to work there and take care of all those items.
Ask HN: Have you experienced a coding dream?
Last night I had a dream where I was coding for a project that I've actually been working on (after I woke up I was actually able to implement the bits that I remembered, kind of cool!). As a child I would occasionally have dreams where I'd be on Internet forums that I frequented while awake. I'm curious if this phenomenon has affected anyone else.
> cowardly refuses

Whut?

In any case Jason Scott says they did grab it. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/405475303423619074
I really don't think it fits to try and push YouTube under the Google+ "ecosystem". It's it's own separate community, and many people really want their YouTube identity to be kept separate from their Google/real life one. It asks me if I want to use my real name pretty much every time I open the damn app.
The Tax Exempt, Non-profit Swindle
I guess the sad part is that they will still have plenty of people falling over themselves to get the job.
This is awesome, thanks for putting this together! Been looking for something like this for a while.
It's a reason to keep things as loosely coupled as possible. And when I say I've seen rsyslog crash many times, I'm talking about over the course of years and thousands of servers.
Did they sort out the "forcing you to use real names" thing yet? A lot of people have very good reasons for not wanting to expose their real identity to every community Google eats up.
Recruiting for a company that has fans (actual, fanatic fans) can be tricky. Sometimes you can play the candidate's enthusiasm against them. Sometimes they come in with unrealistic expectations and burn out in six months. Sometimes you do the sane thing and just hire somebody who has never heard of you.
Remember, November 29th is Buy Nothing Day.

https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd
I actually did intend "prosperity" in this case, though "posterity" would work as well.
The actual ad seems a lot less disturbing than Marco's write-up of it... the main thing I notice is it seems to avoid the typical grinning-HR-guy-speak and sounds more like they're being honest about things.

This clearly isn't the job for everybody (obviously not Marco), but there are plenty of people out there who are (as the ad puts it) "not terribly money-motivated" and would be willing to work hard to be in a cool environment with cool people. [Some of the best jobs I've had have been for absurdly low salaries, but I don't regret them for a nanosecond...]

Given who wrote the ad, I also wouldn't be surprised if they're exaggerating a wee bit and making it sound rather scarier than it really is. Having a small outfit with reasonable people in charge (and whatever faults they have, I don't think PA are really psychopathic-startup-CEOs in disguise) is one of the best insurances there is against a truly unreasonable work environment. Sugar-coated job ads are an insurance against nothing....

If anything, I'm more disturbed by Marco's rush to judgement...
Any idea what causes the spikes in the graph?
"Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better."

They're about as clear as they can be without actually stating a number. It's gonna be low.
Yes. Makes me smile when I hear the word "demo" being thrown around. I always thought the point of a demo was to come up with something impressive with very limited resources.
Remember 64k demos? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv7y3eKyVUo
> "Why wouldn't you try to get someone overqualified and then underpay them if you think you can?

Perhaps you have a basic sense of human decency and fairness? Just because someone is naive (or just plain dumb) doesn't make it ethical to take advantage of them.
I like the premise. But as a developer who recently walked out Friday night from doing any more work, another developer was there to pick up my work. We have to change developers (and employers) mindset in order to make a change in the industry. Aside, the developer was upset at me for walking out--not the employer.
> structs are raw data structures while classes are fully featured OOP entities. Don't put they in the same box.

That's not true. Structs and classes are identical except for the minor functional differences highlighted in the article.
More like rebalancing your portfolio as you notice one sector getting overvalued re: your expectations.
PA has been digging its own grave for a while now. Such a crime as I love a lot of the content. Who thinks that charging for access to the html5 player is a clever model?
Show HN: netttt: evolving neural nets to play tic tac toe
The irony (hypocrisy) is palpable: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/01/25.
And when a business is literally enslaving people, we should really be doing more than just snark about it on the internet.
Sorry, it was a play off the error message "cowardly refuses to write to a non-existent directory".

When I attempted to save it with:

http://web.archive.org/save/http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/vi...

I get this error message:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gdacfodmvei0iku/Screenshot%202013-...
I never said it was a good reason :/
Props to PA for the honesty though. There's plenty of jobs like this out in small businesses that only need/can afford one "IT guy" to run everything, and most will have pretty much this exact set of requirements (can't pay crazy dot-com salaries, has to be able to do a bit of everything, be on-call 24/7 if the shit really hits the fan), but how many of them would actually spell it out?
There are so many fucking developers out there who are totally unaware of their own value, and will take a salary significantly less than they're worth. This usually comes as a result of nervousness in interviews, lack of confidence, fear of going broke, and/or some other feeling of desperation.

As an employer, you want to find these folks. There's usually no downside to having these absurd job postings. Penny Arcade apparently went too far and is getting some bad publicity, but usually there are no repercussions. Can you really blame them for trying to do this - when it works?

As developers, you need to educate your fellow developers about how much they're worth, strategize ways to extract maximum value from companies you work for, and instill a sense of confidence in one another. If you've ever gone to engineering school, I know you knew tons of folks who couldn't believe what companies were willing to pay for them. Their misconceptions need to be abolished.

If you don't help your fellow developers understand their positions, then they'll end up taking jobs like this one at Penny Arcade for shit pay and it brings down the overall price of employees in general.

Company owners don't want you to know this. They benefit from these awesome hires.
PostgreSQL and MySQL both support compression of data, so even if you do not solve the duplicated key problem you still can reduce disk usage.

The only benchmarks where I have seen MongoDB winning have been those where MongoDB was configured with different consistency requirements than MySQL and PostgreSQL. My suspicion is the MongoDB is slowest but I have never seen any high quality benchmarks.
Totally understand the work life balance issue, particularly coupled with basically what's being pointed out as a sub par salary. But I really don't understand how that skill set is a premium. If you are a web developer I would expect all those skills to be part of your repertoire. I've seen worse, desired skill sets encompassing the impossible. The 20 years experience programming Java want ads, circa 2000.
>>> It's sticky being in the 'middle' - big enough where you need to use services rather than hand assembly, but small enough where you don't really have any purchasing power. The road to production has a big no man's land in the middle.

Second quote of the week in one week. ;-)

I make a couple of small electronic gadgets for my side business. My day job is also involved in electronic manufacturing, and I've had a good overview of what it involves.

Amusing anecdote: I was restocking a critical part, and noticed that one of the _alternate_ part numbers was on end-of-life status. I panicked and bought out my supplier's entire inventory of my preferred part number.

That turned out to be the world's remaining supply, and the part is now obsolete. I suppose at the end of the day, the lesson is that no matter how good you think your suppliers are about keeping you apprised of component lifetime issues, once in a while, you're going to get screwed.

For being in the "middle," it's not just purchasing power, but that there are a lot of shady vendors out there. Any start-up that is headed towards that wilderness had better have an experienced buyer along. In fact, if you're still working at a day job, any experience you can get in the trenches of supply chain management will probably benefit you.

It's also worth considering what your design chain looks like, because it is intertwined with your supply chain. For instance, if you're shopping your firmware work out, and your microchip goes obsolete, you'll need to have a plan for responding quickly. I've observed that sourcing issues can eat a measurable fraction of your engineering department's time and attention.

At this point, I've stuffed and soldered 1000+ boards.
Bulk Tagging in Rails and Postgres
Where do you meet founders?
Heya, I'm a software developer that just moved to the bay. I'd like to meet more founder-type people to shoot the shit with but also because it seems like working in a team would be the way to go. Would you have any advice?
I wonder how many more applicants the position will attract as a result of all this attention.
I'd be shocked if the NSA hadn't "invented" differential cryptanalysis long before Shamir.
So what we are saying here is that in the "did a bit of preliminary googling before writing something foolish" department, they did about as well as a HN commenter.

Seriously, the slight difference here makes your comparison less than flattering. This seems like some form of "damning with faint praise".
> (the DSM only lists symptoms, effects, not one cause is listed).

This is false. While causes are usually not the primary focus of the DSM given its intended purposes, a number of diagnosis do include causes (particularly, those that where the presence or absence of a particular cause is relevant to diagnosis.)

There are many very legitimate criticisms possible of the processes behind the DSM in general or any particular edition of the DSM in particular, but this is not one of them.

> Imagine a medical text that only lists symptoms, not causes

The DSM isn't a general manual of psychiatry, its -- first and foremost -- a diagnostic guide.

> According to the director of the NIMH and many others, psychology will be replaced by neuroscience, a field that will tie causes and effects.

Neuroscience doesn't differ from psychology in tieing causes and effects, it differs in modelling lower-level, intermediate causes and mechanisms -- which are fundamentally very important to psychology.

OTOH, its unlikely to replace psychology (rather than simply informing and refining it) for the same reason that chemistry is still around after various domains of physics did more to reveal the lower-level, intermediate processes underlying the higher-level effects studied within chemistry.
"harsh" and "family" do not mix.
>>If the only one is that there is a 5% income tax, the enterprise loses 5% of its freedom to allocate its capital.

Sorry, this is an extremely naive point of view. I'd even call it juvenile.

The mature way to look at it is this: the enterprise is paying 5% of its income as tax in order to have the freedom of using roads, having access to security (police, firefighters, etc.) and use all the infrastructure established by government.

>>A "free enterprise" must mean what the words "free" and "enterprise" mean in the English language. Anything else is a barrier to rational thinking.

In the very English language you speak of, context defines a lot of the meaning. And the context here is a discussion of economic terms. You can reject that all you want. The fact remains that "free enterprise" means what it means, not what you want it to mean.

I'm going to have to refrain from responding to the rest of your post, as it simply reads like a bunch of anti-intellectual nonsense.
Yeah, but unicorn ads usually have a “please, please, please” hopeful tone. This one specifies that you literally have to do the job of 4 people and are expected to be the technical epi-center.

Also, my first impression, like Marco’s, was “Is this a joke?” Especially this line: It’s rarely we call on it, but if something breaks in the middle of the night, you are expected to be on call to address that issue 24/7.
Bullshit.

Anyone who has been in the industry for more than 2 months knows that the "work is family" thing is a nonsensical feel good catchphrase thrown around by manipulative managers.

Your boss will not feel bad for you if you have a personal emergency which requires your absence and costs the company money (parent dying, spouse or children having medical problems, etc.).

Your company will not hesitate one second to fire you if the output you produce is deemed less valuable than the input you need to function.

Seriously, this is why Penny Arcade can get away with shit like that - because there are people out there who blindly believe that "work is family" and eat up the whole "it's not for everyone, others don't want to do it because they're not hardcore enough, but you're hardcore enough spiel". Statistically speaking, any argument that rests on the premise that you are better than 99% of the population is bullshit.

If you really subscribe to the whole "work is family" thing, go ahead. Then in 6, 12, 18 or 36 months, when you inevitably get fucked over, you'll complain about how you wish you had been warned ahead.

Sure, I love making work pleasant and grabbing beers with my boss and co-workers as much as the next guy- but at the end of the day, work is work, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise has ulterior motives.
Depending on the size/type of project: Github Enerprise (larger / long term software projects) or Trello (smaller projects, prototypes and primarily non-software projects).
I meant "slant" compared to the OP where Ars just calls TQP a patent troll straight up.
Entering credit cards into a '90s site was a scary thing. I saw what a number of sites did. Plaintext files with hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers. Just sitting there. Waiting for some random script kiddie to come along, crack a few Unix passwords, and ruin a few lives.