skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know why CRUD apps are called that? Because skilled developers know that once you have built a CRUD app a half dozen times, the work is simple and straightforward with no challenge. This work is called crud work because it is not very desirable by people who look for challenges.

On the other hand, it is easy to build these CRUD apps 10 times faster than a developer who has not learned all the ins and outs of such work. CRUD apps happen to be highly useful in most companies, i.e. there is a lot of market demand. Some people like this kind of work just like some people like to work on an assembly line. And it may even be worthwhile to pay someone a higher salary to churn out apps like this.

But that does not make someone a 10x engineer. It just means that they happen to be working in a 10x environment right now. Next year they may be struggling to keep up with iOS developers who are all on their 3rd iOS app.

My takeaway is that if a company really needs and wants 10x engineers, they should advertise the narrow details of the job that needs to be done and avoid listing irrelevant stuff like education and all the technologies involved. The ad should say something like Ruby on Rails for over 3 years with at least 10 apps built using MySQL backends.

But if you need someone who is creative, can adapt to change and new technology, has experience with certain generic technologies like async servers, then please say that in so many words. And pay them more than average.

Because the majority of developers are average developers and they share some characteristics. They have been working with more than one kind of technology. They are good at learning new things. They know how to adapt to new tools and new business requirements. They have used some stuff in the past, but because they have no desire to become 10x well-paid developers using that exact same set of technology, you should not be judging them by matching up lists of acronyms and names.
That's only a matter of opinion. Regardless, their history appears to reveal facts of IP roadbumps in trying to do anything in the automated thermostat world.
I work for a large bank, and whilst my desktop is completely locked down, our development is done on remote (but still internal) boxes where we're essentially given free reign.

each team is essentially autonomous, and they pick the tools they wish to use.

yes, there is lots of paperwork, e.g. getting anything deployed requires multiple people from across the firm to agree, but it's mostly automated and doesn't take more a few hours of background time, and it's understandable: the amount of money the firm would lose if something went drastically wrong is eye boggling.

the problems are challenging and interesting, I get to experiment with extremely high end equipment that isn't available for general purchase, and the hours are good (as is the pay).

(though I admit there are parts of the organisation that don't have this freedom: you have to be careful when interviewing)
Present Shock: How Technology Killed the Future
You know you can't get in jail for twitter jokes in Russia, whatever they are. In fact you can do almost whatever you want here. I'm so tired of that negative image of Russia in the Western media...
This article's for you. http://go.c800colon5.com/blog/2014/01/09/a-grumpy-guy-compla...
> But Obama was "new to DC"

When he was elected to the Senate, he was new to DC. When he was elected to the Presidency as a sitting US Senator, not so much.
I have to admit I laughed at this:

"Only two options have so far been identified as the rock’s source: 1) The rover either “flipped” the object as it maneuvered or, 2) it landed there, right in front of the rover, after a nearby meteorite impact event."

So, you know, our leading theories are that either the rover did it somehow, or, approximately 8-10 orders of magnitude less likely, we just witnessed a meteor strike. Really, nothing in between those two?
Companies that really hire the top 5% of candidates, never advertise open positions. At most, their careers page says that they accept applications at any time if you think that you fill the bill.

Most of their hires will come from reaching out to people and referrals.
My brain really wants this to happen, but my wallet doesn't. That would be really effective! If they really could get the costs right maybe it could happen - of course, the math just might not work out.
Open Data: the General Social Survey 40 years of data about American society
Honestly the managers moved heaven and hell to get me into this position because I specialize in a specific piece of software that they are using.

I can't just ditch them. I love the team and I will see this product through until production, then I'm asking for 40k/year on top of my current pay or I'm leaving.
We could call these local hubs "shops"
I hear you. Be humane to your people. It goes a long way.

But different people want different things. Maybe cleaning your house is not the high point of your day. Maybe one of your co-workers doesn't like having to walk their SO's dog every day.

You can actually buy friends for very little money. It just takes a little thoughtfulness. (Of course, you can ruin all that in a hurry by expecting them to work 18 hour days...)
Do you mean the regular meetup.com mailing list for NYC.rb or something else?
I upvoted your comment under the assumption that it was someone else being sarcastic.

You're serious. Wow.
A gene test for determining susceptibility to AMS was being worked on in 2011: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870336290...
Awesome talks
There are a whole host of allowed monitor uses in cars, not the least that entire occupations are exempt from the law. From what I've read, the officer did not attempt to gather any information along those lines once they were challenged, they just decided to show her who's boss.
The dirty secret of all science. People only study things that someone will pay for. And often the questions that you or I would like to see answered never attract funding. Recently someone discovered that booth babes do not work as a marketing tool by spending their own company's money on some experiments. Unfortunately this kind of thing is rare in the public eye.

Some people think that Google has done such studies but they are part of its secret sauce.
Wow, no mention of Ember.js (we switched from Ember to Backbone last fall).
You may, however, appreciate your millions more if they come to you at 50, even if you aren't wealthy for as many years. I think there's a quantity vs quality argument that could be made there.

I'm not saying that's necessarily the case, but perspective can be gained with age and experience and that can colour your view of the world and how much you appreciate what you really do have.
Yes, this should be the focus of it. The blog post does go over school rankings by geographic diversity.
I wonder if he will build it near the rare earth metal mine near Mtn Pass NV. Of course most of the raw material will be Lithium I suppose.
Here's the Honeywell version. It looks kind of crummy, but it's only $150.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Wi-Fi-Programmable-Touc...
Interview with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist behind the first Snowden reports.
At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait
What I'm saying is that I believe the cop was within his rights to issue a citation.

Not if he didn't even try to discern whether it was being used for navigation. You ask whether the citation was unwarranted, but I think that betrays an authoritarian attitude. Was the citation warranted? The judge says no.
I already know it'll be there on my doorstep tomorrow

But what if it was on your doorstep at 5PM when you get home, and it didn't cost you a dime extra?

It's also pretty clear why Amazon would love this; they could give you Prime 2-day delivery times with Super-Saver 2-week postage rates.
This is effectively a CDN for real physical products. Push the product to the edge nodes for shorter delivery time.
It was mentioned in a section about frameworks: http://jstherightway.org/#frameworks
" too many places that skimp on salary, vacation days, insurance in favor of "cheap" perks like a twice a month in office masseuse."

This. Even though it can be aruged that it is probably harder for startups to match big co. salaries, 401K etc but they should at least be honest about it and not just throw these "perks" out there. I mean things like dry cleaning, dog walking, massages are more like "nice to haves" than "really great to have". Would I rather have a 7% 401K match ? You bet.

At the end of the day, Cash is king. Give me that and I will shut up as an employee. Don't shortchange me on things that matter like a decent salary, 401K, health benefits etc. Now being a founder/co-founder, totally different story.
Surely I'm not the only one that kept checking to see that the date on this article wasn't April 1st.
They got a patent for this? "People in this city order this book more often than other cities. Okay, let's make a deal with our shipper there to stock some onsite."

Totally obvious.
What does workplace mobility mean?
After working with complicated statistics in that GOD-DAMNED SPSS PROGRAM during graduate school, I have a four-part theory about why this happens (and it applies to many, many areas as well):

The better the tools are, the more people use them.
The more people use them, the higher the ratio of junk.
The higher the ratio of junk, the more people feel the need to set themselves apart.
The more people feel the need to set themselves apart, the prettier they will make something, regardless of how useful, functional or interesting the actual content happens to be.

I call it the 3D-Movie Theory of Attrition.
Ask HN: CSS The Right Way?
To piggy back on the recent post, 'Javascript: The Right Way?' [1], I ask the same question regarding CSS.

I find it very difficult to learn to do well. Any suggestions on how to go about doing so. Books, tutorials, great examples in Github, frameworks recommendations welcome.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7074307
TRANSCRIPT: President Obama's Speech on NSA Surveillance Changes
Why do they need a patent for this?
This is a patent for turning UPS and Fedex distribution centers into warehouses. They're preloading the distribution system so that the only latency is the last tens of miles, rather than hundreds or thousands. It could be same day assuming you got your order in before 4am or whenever the trucks roll. Or even later if they have a more courrier oriented partner.
1) Fully-specced new laptop every 2 years. Our CTO just specced a nearly-$3,000 Linux laptop from System76. My assistant and I have Macbook Pros.

So thats a Clevo chassis (p157SM?) with the full 32GB loadout, multiple SSD, 15.6" 95% gamut screen, 780M, top of the line i7 haswell.

Has he/she figured out the switchable graphics part yet? I've got a Sager with the 8970M and have horrible problems with getting the dedicated GPU be treated correctly.

On another note regarding the price: What on earth merits that setup if you get new boxes every 2 years?

My Sager was $1500 with the GPU, wifi card, screen, and (16gb) ram upgrade. There is NO way this thing will be deprecated in 2 years.
Earthquake. Oops, crap, no, um ... Mars-quake.
This wifi enabled plug is $50: http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F7C027/

These wifi light bulbs are 3 for $199: http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA779VC/A/philips-hue-conn...

I mean, I just don't get why people are so angry that someone would possibly want to spend some extra money to have a cool thermostat. If it was a cool video card for $249 that just lets them play games, no one would blink an eye. But because it's for a house, but for a part of the house that is supposed to be utilitarian, it's a sin.
I've always heard it joked that "unstable is two letters from usable, and stable is one letter from stale". (I personally run unstable on laptops/desktops and stable on servers, and appreciate both.)
Here is a quote from a NYTimes article from 2011 that sheds light on the targets of the military industrial complex at the end of 2010[1]. The industries various components don't always align to the governments side, more towards the interest of profits and profit interests:

'The e-mails include what appears to be an exchange on Nov. 9, 2010, between Aaron Barr, HBGary Federal’s chief executive, and John W. Woods, a Hunton & Williams partner who focuses on corporate investigations. Mr. Barr recounted biographical tidbits about the family of a one-time employee of a union-backed group that had challenged the chamber’s opposition to Obama administration initiatives like health care legislation.

“They go to a Jewish church in DC,” Mr. Barr apparently wrote. “They have 2 kids, son and daughter.”'

So we are told to believe that this sensitive national security data that is our collective communications will be safe in the same hands that not only had the tools they were given access to leaked, but who also had their correspondences plotting to attack dissidents leaked.

This is so fucked up on so many levels.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/politics/12hackers.html...
Oh I've got a number of actual physical VAXen, (its sort of a Y2K story). Considering setting one the herd up and/or donating it to the Hacker Dojo. The CHM has the "important" vaxes already in the collection, mine are mostly the QBUS vaxen and the desktop ones (VLC, /35, /40, /90, /105, etc)
You should probably work on the embeddable charts, instead of taking a screenshot, saving-optimizing, uploading, CDN'ing, linking to the image.
Yeah ... we're up to about 8% or so right?
I'm moderately successful on oDesk doing continuous delivery/AWS/systems/networking work at $100/hr. There are many lowballers out there in the space, primarily from abroad. The trick is to offer value. So far in 2014 I've worked with two US businesses who preferred native english speakers/US contractors. I've billed around 15 hours and have about a 20% hit rate with online interviews over email and actually worked on about 10% of the jobs I've applied for.

Some tips:

Set up a complete profile. Put as much detail about yourself as you can muster. Clients will keyword search for their positions, you need to come up.

Take the oDesk tests. Qualify yourself in your field.

Learn to pattern match your ideal clients. For me this is US based and paying with OPM (Other People's Money).

Make the case confidently that you are THE person for the job. Some won't have the budget, that's fine, you don't want to waste your time with them anyways.

Always give 5 star feedback for all your clients on completion of the job. Ask them to leave feedback for you. Try to get as many 5 star reviews as you can. Clients filter on this.

Over-communicate. Share docs on Google Drive. Create diagrams. Email, ask how they want to be contacted. This is your chance to shine. The lowballers can't afford to put this much effort into the job. Make them realize you were the correct choice.

For reference, here's my oDesk profile. If anyone is looking for help in the above areas, hit me up.

https://www.odesk.com/users/~013cf50a8dcdd17e42
C'mon it is not the Republicans. At the time that executive order was issued Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

There is no bad team and good team (i.e. your team) but a rotten sport. Your thinking has fallen victim to their divide and conquer strategy.
apparently this stuff happens all the time...

"Quite a few of these hijackings were my properties so I wanted to leave a few thoughts. This is not unusual activity, especially in the affiliate space, it simply got press this time. This has been happening for quite some time, albeit at a smaller scale. I will even go as far as to say it is the same group of affiliates. RoomsToBook is affiliated with RoomWhiz(z) which was an offending affiliate less than 2 months ago.

Read more: http://blog.sweetiq.com/2014/01/expedia-affiliate-hacked-goo...
Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation information available to individuals not authorized to view the information.

Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually.

When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway -- it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask questions later. Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career. Failing to take action to suppress their unauthorized distribution can also invite nasty lawsuits.

So this doesn't seem to be about "the man" stepping in and quashing student creativity and initiative (as much as some may prefer that narrative). If anything it seems that Yale did the right thing, in this case.
Ask HN: why Google doesn't see HN as a link farm?
Honest question. We know Google [1] (Bing and other s.e.) is fighting an endless war against link farms. AFAIK HN doesn't use rel="nofollow" [2] (EDIT: not entirely true, see comments below) so its link juice may flow to any website that is submitted. However, HN and its linked sites don't seem to be negatively affected nor penalized. What makes HN different from what Google consider a link farm?

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569
The most interesting part of that is the WHO of spread spectrum... Hedy Lamarr (movie star) and George Antheil (composer). Very fascinating that two major Hollywood players were able to innovate in hard science/math. A different era.

I think the piano keys stuff was because the idea was semi-based around a player's piano (if I recall the legend from my DSP prof). The roll moves around and different bumps make the notes sound - a similar concept (visually at least) to coding a communications signal and having it jump all over frequency. 88 notes -> 88 frequencies. I wouldn't be surprised if the experimental equipment was a modified version of a player's piano. Very cool stuff, though I may be recollecting the story wrong. Wikipedia agrees about the movie star + composer bit at least.
Before the North American conversion to a digital only TV broadcasts, the audio for all analog channel 6 television stations in the United States could be picked up on 87.7 FM

Some channel 6 stations have expressed interest in/have implemented also broadcasting the sound for their broadcasts back on radio again after moving solely to digital broadcasts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/87.7_FM
Five Thousand Words about Eclipse
You point out the excellent reasons for politicians not taking any action -- who wants to be the guy that changed the rules so the next 9-11 could happen? But my point is more along the lines of happy-talk: red meat to throw at some energetic segment of the population to get them to donate and come out and vote.

We see this same pattern on many issues, take for instance welfare for Republicans. They'll talk up their objections, including making all sorts of nuanced arguments, but at the end of the day nobody is going to vote to throw grandma off a cliff.

I'd be ten bucks we same some of this same crap with security. Somebody will make impassioned, reasoned speeches -- probably explaining things just as you have done, and making a case for something that sounds great but is more of a marketing blurb than anything else. Maybe it'll be "peace through reasonable security" or something. (Be assured that it will be heavily poll-tested.)

But in the end, it'll just be more whitewashing. My curiosity is just how banal and pandering the politicians will get. From a rhetorical and philosophical viewpoint alone, it's always interesting to watch these verbal and policy gymnastics. What'll be the catchphrase? Will the tech community come out and support a politician even when it's blatantly obvious he or she is just beating a pinata and isn't serious about real change? I suspect so.
It's basically a game of chicken where VC's try to get in as late as possible but the investment terms get less and less attractive to both parties as they wait.
I was just wondering, could one have a contract like this (I haven't done freelancer work yet, but might look in future): "Up to 3 months of development time, I will take a fixed rate. If the development goes beyond that, I will charge hourly."?
The only "tricky" part of the learning is that you need to put a CPU in that is powerful enough to run a program.
I second the network point, but not quite in the same way. I often find meetups and conferences can be hit-and-miss (though a developer conference may be more useful!), but I agree that connecting with people is good.

In the thread on consulting a few days ago a great point came up: if you can translate your skills into value to a business, you might end up having conversations with people they didn't know they wanted to have. An example: you can go to a tech meetup and pitch yourself as a full-stack Rails developer, and try to get work from people who know they need Rails developers -- or you can go to a finance meetup and pitch yourself as a solutions builder, and end up getting 10x the revenue from a project that's turning a spreadsheet pipeline into a CRUD app.

My take on networking, and what's been working for me, is to reach out through people you already know. They might not be hiring your skillset, but they might need a solution to a problem. Almost all of the work I've been doing lately has come through intros, and several of those started off as fairly cold relationships. For example, I applied to a startup incubator, whose founder decided I was smart but too early in my idea, so hooked me up with another founder who needed some heavy lifting done on the Android side. Other projects have come through more direct referrals, but almost all have been for startups who are flexible on parameters (including time, remote, etc) and who don't even have websites, let alone job ads.
This reminded me of Game Dev Tycoon [1] although premise seems to be a bit different.
They essentially packaged a some version of Chromium to execute their game script...

[1] http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/
VAXen to play with? What type of hardware you running on? I vaguely remember VMS and DCL from the late 80's and early 90's, we had terminals everywhere on the floor and in the fab.
That is awesome! Unusual name for the site though. I'll point folks at this as a way to get to play with VMS on my "House of VAX" page :-)
Afaik, HN uses rel=nofollow on all links below a certain score.
The person that wrote is a "Free Software ombudsman" ... Pretty serious stuff we got going in software now. :)
The sum of all the positive integers is not -1/12
Build a business card interpretation service
also the voluminous and continuous breaches of privacy.
It's a tough thing. If you vote for someone with no ties to Washington, you are "voting for someone with no experience." If you vote for someone entrenched in DC, you are "voting for a career politician." It's a lose/lose proposition haha
How to motivate a young musician
> What I'm saying is that I believe the cop was within his rights to issue a citation.

Cops don't have "rights" to issue citations. They have power to issue citation as an aspect of their job, and an obligation to use that power within its legal bounds, which include, in the case of issuing citations, generally that there be probable cause to believe that the person has violated the law identified on the citation.
There are all manner of things a department can do to make a tenured, non-productive faculty member's life harder. The sudden loss of lab space is a particularly common one.

Also, keep in mind that a good many tenured professors are still in "soft money" positions, and have to bring in grant support for parts of their salary.
Here's a description of some of the issues involved: http://www.marco.org/2011/12/17/nest-incompatibility-without...