skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I've read anecdotal stories about companies like google paying huge sums to hold onto engineers, like 6 and 7 figures. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and is this a result of recruitment pressure by startups.. Who obviously don't have the same agreements in place?

If so that would seem to support what the plaintiffs are saying.
Old Money's corruption of SV saddens me greatly because it pollutes the culture that helped many things grow. For example, instead of open data, we seek to lock up the most inane and useless data out of fear it might be used in a way we never approved of.

Basically, the existential question of Old Money is one of taking as much as possible, whereas the hacker ethos operated on more of a giving spirit.
Google Maps available offline on iOS / Android
Not consolidating, but expressing.

No matter how you interpret it, Bill Gates is an American citizen, and people will associate what he does with America on some level, as they would do with anyone.

Everything matters.
You're absolutely right. I'm demanding a 500k bonus from my boss tomorrow or I'm GONE!
The point that I think your comment is missing is that if the vast majority of employers are colluding to drive down prices your feet will invariably lead you to a less profitable place overall.

Also this response seems to indicate that an individual's actions will hold any meaning against the concerted and united effort of employers. Unless a multitude of others act in concert we, the developers, will be at a disadvantage.
Ritchie's riposte seems apropos here: "If you want [Vim], you know where to find it."
No, you're wrong. The article definitely caused price movements.
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That's also the beauty of software development—I don't need to have a fancy degree or work ridiculous hours as an associate/intern to get a job in it.
Eye tracking/blink detection OpenCV iOS
These analyses seem to overlook the impact of MADL and multi-aircraft sensor fusion. The fire on remote capability, meaning you have a fix on a target that you haven't even detected yourself, plays out huge in stuff I've seen, and it seems believable.
That's Alan Kay of Smalltalk/PARC fame. His OOPSLA talk is the other classic, worth it for his opening jokes about Dijkstra.

The fact that so much of our modern computing environment stems from the work of a molecular biologist trying to teach children to program is lost on many. He's truly a visionary, sometimes wrong, but always at least interesting.

EDIT: Haven't been able to find a proper clip of it, but the really relevant part to this is that back in the 70s at PARC they used to teach Smalltalk to kids, and the apps they'd produce were seriously non-trivial. Things like electronics schematics editors (you can see part of this in passing during the OOPSLA video) were implemented by children. This still blows my mind.
I think it would be pretty difficult being a successful programmer if you struggle with mental focus and attention to detail. Are you sure it's the right field for you?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/macworld-2012-the-islan...

Your still posted article continues to include a passage where you call the PR person in question the "saddest booth babe in the world" So Gruber wasn't wrong, you did exactly what he claimed and you are now lying about your mistake.

It's so obvious that you were forced to add a ridiculous disclaimer where you continue to avoid any responsibility and instead assert that your original claim was "impressionistic". I posit that there's a different word for what you're doing: bullshit.

This is your modus operandi: You construct a compelling narrative first and then fits the facts to said narrative, truth be damned. Your original story is often based around very real problems in the tech community, so when you inevitably get called out for your falsities, you then attempt to shift all attention to the problem and blame those who have dared to point out your inaccuracies. Nowhere do you ever address your own terribly sad methods, instead, you continue to build a career based on being "controversial", never bothering to realize that your scorched earth approach harms the groups you write about and the tech community as a whole.
Specifically you'd want to find other SV companies who weren't party to these negotiations (Netflix? Twitter? I didn't see a comprehensive list), since they'd be a pretty close to exact benchmark...
Shown HN: The Dalí Staring App. My pro-bono client project.
Do you want to know what marxism is like in america? Try academic research science. Pay lines for postdocs are effectively set by a centalized agency - NIH guidelines. There's limited market and a captive, oversupplied labor pool, zero ownership of the means of production ("it all goes for the collective effort"). Advancement is not meritocratic, but rather a combination of being in the right place when a position opens up, and who you know ("political connections"). As a result you have absurdities like me: a PhD four years out of grad school (10 years off my bachelor's) that can run circles around bosses both intellectually and technically, experience in multidisciplinary research up the wazoo - making $40k/year. Meanwhile, the head of the institute built a $37 million vanity building, excuse me, lab facility, and does media gigs showing off his tesla roadster to David Frost - largely extracted off of state funds by skimming off of grants ("overhead") and also state-provided "R&D and investment vehicles" - SBIRs, etc.

Well, at least I'm not an H-1B. I remember a postdoc on an H-1B who lived in a one bedroom underneath me and my roommate's from grad school, who was paying twice I was in rent and also trying to support a wife and two kids on an equivalent salary in this relatively expensive city (San Diego).

Enjoy your marxism.

I have left the system - I'm starting up my own biomedical/science research institute run off of actually humane principles - and so I'm, in the interim, unemployed. Luckily, I seem have some skill in the "free market" and so I'm financing this short break in employment off of investments I made (bitcoin, a handful of stocks) and am entering in 'hustle' mode - picking up whatever jobs I can to tide me over (you don't get unemployment benefits if you quit, even though you've paid into it). I'm much happier. When I do work, I know that what I'm doing is making a difference -if minor- in people's lives, not working to advance the agenda of a faceless bureaucracy doling out grants mostly administered by scientists who couldn't hack it in research and so went to work for the bureaucracy (dunning-kruger effect).
Samsung Profit Growth Slows Sharply
Ask HN: Are there any good voice controlled mouse actions for OSx
Im looking for something that will respond to commands like:
- Scroll down
- Go back
- Click "submit"
It doesn't surprise me that he predicts the downfall of bitcoin. A more apt description is that he HOPES for the downfall of bitcoin and all other crytocurrencies as it means that banks will lose a ton of business and control of the money.
I am a current Princeton Ph.D. student in CS. Let me say that if one sees an article saying "Princeton study finds..." they are more likely to pay attention to it. Thus, unfortunately, we must also bare the brunt of bad press like this.

On the OTHER hand, this was a non-peer reviewed thought experiment by some MAE students outside their area. It would be akin to me turning in an assignment for a class and the media ran with it saying "Princeton study..."

Unfortunately, readers are going to read this rebuttal as an attack on Princeton, which it really isn't; if anything it's only funny because of how strong Princeton really is.
I don't see a big difference really. Just as some engineers found their own companies and some are employees of other people's companies, there are thousands of lawyers employed in corporate legal departments who are simply employees, because they don't want the stress or responsibility of running their own firms.
The price of anything is a function of its supply versus its demand.

A non open (or not truly open in this case) kills demand. Without demand for a finite supply (high quality engineers) the supply's worth can never fully be realized.
Ironic that you can't use Facebook to recall your history on Facebook, yet Facebook keeps all your data (I assume) forever for analysis.

(I closed my Facebook account a few years ago, so all I know about this is what you said.)
Somebody already complained, that the wage possibilities of software engineers are limited.

I would take it further: In all industry, the trend goes one way: The wages of working people (including white-collar, I hope, that is the right word) have to go down, and the earnings from investments (pure money makes money business) have to climb.

There are only very few exceptions: One are lawyers, as mentioned in an other thread, and the other are people that work in the investment business (investment bankers, traders, ...). The reason for the second exception is obvious: their work is needed to make even more money from the money and every trick is played, to have the smartest, best guys getting the job done ... and get it done better and better.

Problem is: The whole thing breaks our society. Middle classes are already melting massively in many countries. The possessions of the worlds are concentrating in the hands of very few people more and more. Those people make our laws! The other people become poorer, even in the situation that the overall worlds possessions expand massively. The countries are already so much in dept, that many of them can not pay even the interest. Even the US is so much in dept, that there seems to be no possibility to get ever rid of it.

Nobody seems to realize, that while we are talking, investment companies are roaming the world for land, for houses, for companies to buy them, exploit them and throw it away when not needed (and not useful) any more. The wealth of the world gets accumulated in the hand of investment companies and the super-rich.

By rising the value of pure money investments, the value of human labor (to a more and more extend even high-paid and high-value labor) is degrading.
I tried Uber in Tokyo – a photo journal
Any chance of getting this added to MELPA? :)
The lesson from the Space Shuttle is that contractors lose big time from an unflyable abortion with a low operational tempo. If Morton Thiokol had sacrificed short-term profits to rethink the boosters, they'd have sold them 10 times faster and still be selling them today
Dogs are often a big help in preventing burglary..
Heh, I'm trying to learn Dutch at the moment (using Babbel.com)... I would _love_ to be as good at Dutch as you are at English! Really excellent writing style - keep up the great work.
That's great - but proxying the entire yahoo news page at the very least appears seedy (and you'll probably end up with google turning the screws on you). I understand if it's experimental but you can't just reflect everything.
Good god, talk about opportunity costs.
I definitely buy that software developers have a huge veil of ignorance[1].

We accept lower salaries today because we assume that one day we might be in the ownership class. But this is somewhat reasonable, at least vs other forms of labor. (A line cook will never end up as a millionaire, but a developer might by either founding a startup or getting options on the right one.)

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
An individual freelancer might make that. A consultant with an established firm will be billed at close to lawyer rates, if not more. The consultant isn't being paid that however, as the firm will keep a fair cut for overhead.
Nope. We'd fix things and they'd come back.
Ariana Grande Prom Invite (Please help)
AIDS kills 5,000 per day.

Hunger kills 80,000 per day.

One of these we already know how to cure.
> If you've got 50 percent or less of the software capabilities in a system with 8 million lines of code, and it's supposed to be deployed in 18 months you're in deep shit.

Well, at least it's not also tasked with managing health insurance accounts.
The wage-theft stuff lowers the curve for everyone, not just the top tier. It lowers the entire wage curve.
This is a work around. Yahoo does not allow showing their news in an iframe, which we currently implement. Again, this is just experimental. We could use another news source which allows iframe. And there won't be a need for the proxy approach.

We think this actually is helpful to the content owner, in our opinion, as it allows more access to their content.
Yes, because the purchase hasn't closed yet, so those revenues aren't included. Also, there was near-record profit to go along with the revenue, so margins aren't down too badly.
Ask HN: What do you use for online backup?
I was just reading this post about how this guy got robbed and almost lost all his data (http://levels.io/100-to-0-things/) so I'm wondering what everyone uses for online backup.
That's actually a perfect use-case for this render-serverside-update-clientside paradigm.
> Can someone shed some light on what microsoft has been selling that everyone wants? I'm really curious now.

Operating systemwise? An unbelievably vast software ecosystem and a highly performant, user friendly, highly hardware tolerant, flexible OS. There are things I like to do that are either impossible or such a giant PIA on my rMBP that I just don't do them. Coming from Windows-land, the software ecosystem on Macs, especially the kind of hobbyist software I like to monkey around with, feels like a barren wasteland comparatively.

Don't get me wrong, I love my rMBP, and I get my work done on it well enough, it's the best portable virtualization hardware I've ever owned and the second Apple laptop I've owned. But I've also realized that I spend 95% of my time on it either SSH'd into something else, in a browser or using software that's also available on Windows (and often works better, like Office of Chrome). I can do those things with hardware that's 1/5th the cost and have it be almost exactly as performant for those use-cases.

For my next laptop, if I can find a high quality portable Windows laptop with good virtualization characteristics I'd be 50/50 on not buying another Apple product because of the things I have to set aside due to the spare software ecosystem. There's also enough day-to-day irritants and workarounds with the hardware and especially OS X (and especially the stinking pile of garbage that is Finder) that I find I spend most of my time trying to avoid the OS. For portability and form factor, a Surface Pro 2 is definitely something I'm considering as a next portable.

It seems these days, Apples get used in software development and server admin functions or among liberal arts students. And for the typical users (not the HN crowd) justifying an expensive price tag for marginally better portability for something that gets used mostly as a glorified web browsing terminal and Word/Excel computer is not a smart purchase decision for most consumers.
It looks like pg chimed in after all.
It will make them money, and they'll get the next contract. Sounds like it succeeded, as demented and depressing as that sounds.
Exactly, but it's worse.

There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myths such as "anybody can code" such that people think any homeless person off the street is a coder.

You don't get doctors and lawyers talking down their own skills or saying it's easy.
Relevant post made in the last hour by Tony Hsieh in his Reddit IAmA:

Q: Mr. Hsieh, Are there any plans for Zappos.com to accept bitcoin?

A: we've been looking into the possibility but probably not anytime soon!

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vzd35/i_am_tony_hsieh...
Hour-long talk on Julia focusing on the type system and multiple dispatch
http://superfluous.io/glossary/read/007_isomorphic_javascrip...
I think XS2OWL implements XML Schemas in OWL. And OWL, like XML Schema, can be serialized into XML.

But I think the difference between XML Schema and OWL is more like the difference between high school algebra and calculus. You can probably explain both in terms of the other, and although calculus is probably more useful to explain a wider range of applications (via more complex maths that themselves are best explained with calculus), algebra will often do the trick. And, as any high school student can tell you, all you need is algebra because no one uses calculus in real life.
I used to use this movie to test out prospective girlfriends. If they found humor in it, they were worth a second look. If it was WTF face all the way, there was never going to be any compatibility.
It can be tricky and getting murkier quick: what if Google comes back with an argument that that data scientist would not have been able to produce those $2-3 mil without the resources and the infrastructure made available by Google?
Would that employee be as productive anywhere else?
If the answer is yes, then that employee deserves a larger share of the pie. If the answer is unclear or no, then the employee will receive whatever the market will bear.

This is why traders and IT devs on Wall Street get better compensated: it is way easier to see the exact impact and it is very likely that those guys would be able to easily replicate it in any other firm.
A lot of things, like nonlinear control systems, can only be verified by Monte Carlo methods. Subsystem failure tolerance is difficult to handle by any existing theorem prover.

The JSF software organization uses static analyzers heavily. They are using theorem provers.
Not in SV here, I see them...occasionally. Maybe in a week of coffee shop stops I'll see 2 or 3.
Isn't "going all in" how you get these things in the first place? They had to base everything on it. If they could get by with improved f15 and f16 types programs then they wouldn't get the JSF.

They are "pot committed" and can't kill the project. They made it kill proof...
I cackled! Thank you for pointing that out.

Alas, I must confess that I have written Visual Basic (VBscript) code in Emacs.

A while back I was screwing around with a project which attempted to generate, via the Windows speech synthesis API, output vaguely resembling SHODAN from the System Shock games (example: [1]). The most I can say for it is that I didn't entirely fail; despite having access to a quite good female voice (NeoSpeech "Kate"), and despite SAPI 5 offering what I found a surprising degree of flexibility, there's only so much you can do with it; I got closer than I expected, but not close enough to think it worth releasing. [a]

In any case, VBScript is the handiest way I could find to screw around with SAPI, and it turns out there is a Visual Basic mode for Emacs [2]; I found it to be remarkably not bad. Nothing could make working with Visual Basic other than painful, but Emacs comes as close as anything else I've ever used.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZMD_eCpEo

[2] http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/visual-basic-mode.el

[a] I've just unearthed it, and it hasn't yet succumbed to bit rot; maybe I'll throw it up on my Github account just for the hell of it.
You’re Already a Minimalist
Look at a typical software developer salary in SF vs a typical software developer salary in Chicago, adjust for cost of living, the difference between SF salary and adjusted Chicago salary is the depression

For example, demand in SF is much higher than Chicago
so SF salary should be >> Chicago * cost of living adjustment. My guess is it's lower
Setting aside all morality for a moment, what an interesting service to offer to criminals - bring me a stolen laptop and I'll pull out the personal data from it, and sell that data for you online.

This actually probably exists. Which makes the, "thieves aren't that smart" argument kind of useless.
This is really great. Keep up the good work!
Google Play Store Ratings Drop
Candy Jam invites devs to make games using industry's litigious vocabulary
We have a similar setup. 15 day trial with cc as per of registration. We sent a few emails in thos 15 days. 1st is the welcome. If they haven't logged in more than once we send another email on day 7 to be sure see the value and if they need help and about their trial. On day 14 we send a reminder about their trial. Day 15 we charge. We will gladly refund the charge up before their 2nd due date.
Need to include a one sentence description towards the top.
Am I the only one who interpreted him as saying he ought to be able to assume that his phone calls/emails are private? He clarifies:

"So there is a basic sense that whoever is providing that technology has to make sure it's secure."

I think he's just saying it's the job of the mail service to provide security, not something the end user should need to worry about.
The article's title isn't supported by its content. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is in fact the result of natural selection with the aid of random mutations. The difference between this and conventional natural selection is that the random mutations are already present in the bacterial population exposed to the antibiotic. This speeds up the process of natural selection, it doesn't contradict it.

There is no such thing as "post-Darwinian evolution". It's link-bait, not a coherent argument.
From your "100 things" post:

> 4 hard drives spread around with all my data encrypted

Did these turn out to be useful?
Google’s “People Ops” department kept overall compensation essentially equitable by making sure that lower-paid employees who performed well got higher salary increases than higher-paid employees who also performed well.

Serious question, is this generally considered a bad thing? Every company I've worked for has had salary bands that work like this. They don't make it a secret. Generally you know which band you're in and the range of that band. I've recently been told in a company meeting at my current workplace that they are mainly working to bring people to the middle of their bands. So if you're above the middle, expect a low raise.

On the other side, I can't help but feel underpaid since I've been told by people who know that the work I've done personally has allowed us to bring in more than 100 times my salary in recurring revenue.
The same way you know IBM small server business would be worth more than an app?

Common sense no longer applies here.
You still have to assume that an ordinary email is a clear-text communication, no matter who you are sending it to, unless you are using PGP or S/MIME.
I see very little jackassery in this thread. Certainly nothing worth the amount of attention it's garnered.

I do, however, see a lot of useless, time-wasting, off topic tone arguments.
That's pretty uncharitable to LightTable which is doing a number of things differently. Inline evaluation, and great support for ClojureScript with a connected repl to name a few.
> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things.

The question you pose here isn't whether or not something is "good science", it's about who gets to decide what constitutes "good science" and "bad science".

Science has been able to handle itself quite well over the centuries since it has come into existence. Publishing something, in your name, as these authors have done, is an implicit declaration of what you phrased as "I'm willing to stake my reputation on the idea this trend is real and will continue".

The spirit of free inquiry, on which science is based, demands that we hold nothing sacred and immune from questions. Good science, almost by definition, requires "bad science".

Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.
Why are these things (Kiva included) frequently non-profit? Wouldn't for-profit make much more sense both because a) I understand the business model is sound and b) a for-profit venture would reinforce to all the constituents the basic economic principles?