skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> "Skilled software developer ( and yes you can be newly graduated ) will get us nothing"

Maybe that's the problem. I'm a freelancer but anytime I've thought about applying for a full-time software developer position I get put off by words like 'skilled', 'senior', and a list of technologies the person needs to know that no single developer in the world knows.

I've been coding for about 8 years, professionally for 5 and I consider myself a good programmer. But I don't know if I fit your definition of skilled or someone else's definition of senior as those are both too subjective. It puts me off applying mainly because I don't want to embarrass myself.

Edit: I think a good way to hire would be a short coding test a person can take online BEFORE applying. If they pass they know they are skilled enough to apply for the position, if not they don't get laughed out of the room.
Would Amazon giftcards work?
I don't really agree. While you can certainly explain the basic syntax of a language in a few hours (assuming a developer who is at least familiar with a diversity of other languages,) it take a lot of time for most developers to become skilled at writing efficient, idiomatic code on a new platform.
Sold. Where do I learn Cobol? Is it web-scale?
Well, ice-axe and crampon competency is the bare minimum necessary to even step on a snow mountain. Granted that Denali is a hard climb, but still, if that has been your only climbing experience you are woefully unprepared to attempt Everest.
For the people woefully ignorant of wearable history and pathetically incapable of doing their own search...

Read about Steve Mann and MIT Media Lab. Wikipedia article is a good start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer
No employee is going to be productive on a new codebase for weeks or months, regardless of the languages they knew coming in. And they're still going to be a drain on resources while coming up to speed with the code base, even if they know the language.

The sooner you realize this, the sooner you'll understand what your real hiring requirements are.
High Tech Employee Lawsuit
The article says its a thousand times more likely to get a string of 76 heads somewhere in 500 flips than the last 76 flips. This doesn't make sense to me - seems like the odds improvement must be less than 500-76, not 1000. Is the math wrong? (I'm on my phone so I can't check.)
Oh, that's really hideous code...
You should get in touch with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas. They have people teaching and learning CUDA/OpenCL in large batches; and like any good academic program they want to ensure their students are employed (and employable!). If you like, email me and I'll set up an introduction.
FollowGen: Twitter Shut Me Down
The world was different when those languages were designed; type theory was not as mature as it is today. IMO if you're designing a new language today and not giving it a real type system, yes, that's intellectually lazy.

As for using them... eh. My subjective view is that scala is much better than all those languages, outside certain small domains. But that's not exactly objective fact. I will say that if you don't know scala then you're being intellectually lazy - even compared to ocaml, it's different enough to be worth knowing, and it's a language you'll learn something from, whether you ultimately find yourself using it or not.
I looked at it and understood it in a few seconds. What about it do you find complex? It looks like a well organized api to be honest.
As I am a cheapskate when it comes to this, I would use a service that lets me find furniture people want to get rid off and that I can get for free. Maybe the service could also add a cheap van for transportation and monetize this way. It's a win win, people usually don't like throwing their furniture and sometimes have to pay taxes for that too.
"Style your very own User Interface with Strapfork's easy-to-use Visual Editor."

Definitely interested in exploring. Is there a demo/video to check out ?
A designer worth their pencil might need longer than worth 50$ to get to an initial mix of good look.

If it's somehow wysiwyg it might also speed up things a bit.
It's also because there are no chargebacks when trading gift cards.
Its ALWAYS weeks or months before somebody is really productive. They're already learning the build/CI/bug reporting environment anyway. A new syntax/debugging/deployment scheme. The language syntax is really pretty small potatoes.
That would still require a large amount of trust in those companies and that they are not breached or subpoenaed, though.

It would not be far-fetched at the moment to imagine that Google has been explicitly barred from implementing a feature in GMail that would prevent them from being able to provide the contents of a person's mailbox to the NSA or FBI if requested.
I am with you brother, I like SBT. Plain and simple.
They didn't need to depend on a smartphone. One of Steve Mann's many wearables used radio to base station. He may of later had cellular.
>Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation.

Where reality means a serious failure in tech leadership.

>I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere.

Having been one of these people that "try to do the rewrites" himself, I left because paying off technical debt wasn't prioritized. It's not just about having a modern stack, it's about being able to hire maintenance programmers and not being forced into trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.
I think most software companies will find it hard to get someone up to speed on their existing codebase. If a candidate is relatively green in regards to some programming language, most of the time a candidate can learn a language pretty quickly. The undocumented mess of a codebase typically takes longer to digest. Also, understanding the dev process in use takes some time as well getting comfortable with.
where do you even find people so unreputable? This seems beyond unreasonable to the point of it being illegal.
That's probably another point.. It's not on our education system, Most mid-class kids go to paid schools, I went to a good one but didn't learn English there, I did a paid, years long, English course and played a lot of MMOs so it was 'easy', I believe in India and other outsourcing hotspots English is much more tied in basic education...

The cost for this is really high and now I see that most of my friends who didn't learn from an early age are probably not learning it anymore(time and money issues) and, if they do, their English will still not be very good
Compared to Java? No question. Compared to Scala with its implicits and associated patterns? I've yet to see a case I couldn't handle in Scala.
For newly added posts you have to go to the "new" page and upvote from there. If you're passing around a link to the direct post to get upvotes you're assumed to be part of a voting ring and your votes are ignored with respect to being promoted to the home page.
The "standard modulo" is actually a remainder operator, and is a js-specific thing. Most languages implement the "true mathematical modulo", aka modulo.

One reason this is useful is if you want an array to wrap around. With modulo, you just index on `index % length` and all is well. But with remainder, this will only do what you want for `index >= 0`, because it can give negative outputs, given negative inputs.
You have some IP; that's your magic. Its always there. The less IP, the easier to compete with you. Catch-22.
Should Everybody Learn to Code?
I am surprised anyone can take them seriously as a company after their Superbowl commercials.
> The goal is to be a) more efficient and b) minimize the risk of developing RSI.

Also 3 keeping one hand free, Douglas Englebart used a chording keyset during the mother of all demo, when using the mouse
sweeeeeeeeeettt
Most of these keyboards based on the ErgoDox (and the ErgoDox itself) make the mistake of considering that the thumb is a finger positioned like the others. And the keys you're supposed to hit with your thumbs are just placed in a crazy way (totally non-ergonomic IMHO).

To me one of the rare person who really "got it" is "Jesse" (he's both here, on GeekHack and on Deskthority) with its "butterfly" keyboard.

That's one of the only split (and ergonomic) keyboard that takes into account the fact that the thumb's opposition-apposition makes it unlike any other finger.

Look at his "butterfy" keyboard here and how smartly the keys you're to hit with the thumbs are positionned:

http://blog.fsck.com/2013/12/better-and-better-keyboards.htm...
Might want to change "Objective C" to "Objective C (because Apple told us we couldn't)"
/snarly_remark
Main problem is that no one is allowed to put stuff in a USPS mailbox except the USPS. So our condo complex does have this setup for mail packages that are too big to fit in our locked mailbox, but UPS/FedEx can't use it.
I think efbee was responding to "I think what they did was right but also they deserve a 35 year sentence" as the two irreconcilable statements. Misgendering is an important point as well, but it's not what makes the statements contradictory.
"The biggest issue with Scala’s perception is the deeply varying quality of frameworks and tools that significantly affect one’s perception of the Scala language itself"

I've seen the same thing said about Common Lisp.
I feel like this question is quite paradoxical: the only reasonable way we have of deciding whether a coin is fair is by flipping it repeatedly.

So has anyone ever flipped heads 76 times in a row on a fair coin? No. Because we would judge that coin to be unfair.

In reality, an individual's the flipping method is likely to be more deterministic than random and show bias - it's not the coin that is fair or not, but the method of flipping it.
I really like the idea of doing two things at once without multitasking, as our brains don't handle multitasking that well. A very "two birds with one stone" concept.
Did you guys see the movie Ender's Game? He was typing on a touch screen by doing little swipes with his fingers. I would imagine that it functioned like this DataHand one, but virtually.

Found something on GitHub: https://github.com/henrahmagix/enders-keyboard
I assume that there are a lot of black presidents e.g. in Africa, I don't think a lot of them got that award.
"a million-to-one chance succeeds nine times out of ten" - Terry Pratchett
I've been really impressed with how easy it was to set up and instantly identify bottlenecks within our infrastructure. Sure, other plugins have offered similar statistics (and some with a nice UI too) but to provide all of this insight out-of-the-box and in a single tool is an amazing addition to Elasticsearch, and in my opinion will help boost even more widespread adoption.

If anyone is interested, I wrote about my initial reactions to Marvel here: http://chrissimpson.co.uk/elasticsearch-marvel-monitor-and-m...
With the number of free "theme" sites around, I think $50 is a bit steep. However, the idea is awesome and I'd love to try it out.
9 Ways To Jazz Up Your Finished Blog Post
Hitler was TIME magazine man of year, and for a decent while in America Fascism was mildly popular (circa 1930's). Its strange looking back on a that time (Post Holocaust and WW2). American Newspapers applauded the works of fascists claiming, "They got the trains to run on time."
There was the same problem with ActionScript back in the day. So many people had played with it in Flash, and were going for jobs developing RIAs. They had no idea about software development, but knew how to say goToAndPlay(1) and add a click handler.

We are seeing the exact same thing with JS. The more advanced frameworks tend to weed out those that are just playing around, from those who are serious software engineers.
There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it.

Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning.

I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it really matter that much? Obviously the extreme SJW flamewar reaction you usually see on misgendering is excessive, but after being politely informed that's not how she identifies, how are you harmed by going along with it?

Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something?
This is fantastic. It is annoying to come across papers that are incredibly hard to read, but convey very little.
> Di Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights.

It sometimes is. Time and again, people have checked the pair's featured pictures and found sources in a few minutes.
Yes, I generally stick to composition. "High level" classes end up using a bunch helper classes to perform specialized tasks. I find that I do not often find the need for an abstract base class or mixins, but I will use them if it makes sense.
Now all an attacker has to do is wait for me to go on a cruise, or camping trip, or basically take any action which means I'm out of communication for a week or more.
It really, really does not take "weeks or months" for a skilled programmer to pick up a new programming language. If you're using intrusive and opinionated frameworks where you have to learn a ton of conventions, that increases ramp-up time. If you're crossing paradigms, e.g. from Java to Haskell or from Python to C, that increases ramp-up time. But if you're just picking up a new programming language, say a switch from Python to Ruby? You can be productive in a week. I've done it before, more than once.

The difficulty isn't in finding people with specific experience, the difficulty is finding people with a solid enough understanding of essential concepts to be able to do good work regardless of the environment they're working in.
Just out of curiosity how does this work from a business perspective? If you're re-selling furniture from another company do you have to secure the ok with them first?
Any place where I could sign up to get a digest will be great. Good job on the website.
scrape the free section of craigslist for keywords of furniture you're looking to acquire.
I would say the the catch phrase in your argument is "best friend". If the person you were describing wasn't your best friend, you might automatically focus more on the physical aspects, since you wouldn't know the intimate details of their mind.

That said, I am not advocating deliberate misuse of pronouns; I am just saying the topic may not be as simple as it seems.
The security questions in its current implementation are useless anyhow. Because all those pieces of information are exploitable by your social life these days.
"What's the name of your first math teacher" — Take a look into the years schoolbook, which are online.

These security questions are made for us old farts, for days when there was no Internet like today and there were none of this information available online.
NY will classify Bitcoin as money and your little card swapping business will go the same road as Charlie Shrem's.

French bank today issued press release saying that intermediation of Bitcoin transactions requires "payment processor" license. Even if you are not touching fiat at all. http://acpr.banque-france.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/acp/Commu...
> That's because you don't just want someone who can write code in XYZ, but someone who can write amazing code, and interact well with the others in the company, and be sensitive to business needs, and communicate well.

This is really an issue of price points. If companies went around offering contracts for double-current-salary, full benefits, and guaranteed employment for 5 years, positions would be filled fairly quickly.

If the required price point is higher than a company can afford, maybe key goals, plans, and roles need to be reevaluated. As I say to my coworkers all the time, software project estimates are not very accurate, so if business will die without 10% returns on their software development investments (or being within 10% of schedule estimates), everyone's already in trouble.

> The three that come to mind right away are Ruby, Python, and JavaScript

That's highly dependent on the problem domain. Again, perhaps those are in demand because companies' expectations aren't keeping up with market prices.
If a company doesn't have enough runway to have a new hire be unproductive for a few weeks, I'm not sure if that company can afford to have employees yet.
Dude cmon seriously, you find ceylon closer to haskell than Scala? I must have read about another ceylon then.
Distributed algorithms, in general. :)

Don't get me wrong, if what you are doing is already a distributed algorithm, then it doesn't hurt. But turning all algorithms into distributed algorithms just seems crazy. Unless, I suppose, you don't care about such things as speed and memory consumption.
Easy if you have a loaded coin.

enum Side
{
Heads,
Tails
}

void Main()
{
Func<Side> generator = () => { return Side.Heads; };

int heads = 0;

while (heads < 76)
{
if (generator() == Side.Heads)
++heads;
else
heads = 0;
}

Console.WriteLine("Got {0} heads in row.", heads);
}
MySQL performance optimization: Don’t guess, measure
And what sort of smart devices did you connect?
Don't outsource development before taking these steps
IP doesn't have to be magical, not in the sense the parent was referring to. Well-documented modular libraries that perform a specific task well are thoroughly un-magical, and also incredibly valuable IP.
We need a numbers based study that shows patent trolls retard innovation and consequently weaken national security. Regulators, senators, and Presidents (in the US) prioritize that stuff.

How can I, as a small start up, produce a new mobile phone? Every concept from the hardware to the software is layered in patents. What other things are small companies not bothering to produce because of the patent minefield? At every turn and corner you may be stepping on another patent troll waiting to take a percentage of your earnings as well as drain your bank account on legal fees.
I agree that any decent programmer can pick up a new language pretty quickly.

However, I think that it's not really about the language, it's more about the libraries. Knowing all the utility functions that exist and how to use them is based on experience, you don't pick that up overnight.

tl;dr: bright inexperienced people pick up the language quickly and then rewrite library functions that already exist.
The answer to the question is "all of them," because it is the wrong question to ask.

When you hire for experience instead of aptitude, it's like trying to photograph Sasquatch with a macro lens.

I see company after company leaving postings open for months instead of just hiring someone and giving him some books to read for two weeks. I thought that was the point of brainteaser interviews--to find out how smart the interviewee is, aside from specific experience.

It is very clear to me that the system for hiring skilled labor in software is flawed at its foundations. There is plenty of supply out there. If you cannot fill your demand, it is for one of two reasons: your requirements are too narrow, or your offered amount is too low.

Is hiring someone fresh out of the diploma stamper and investing in a tiny bit of training really that horrible from a management perpective?
I was using these(http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Microsoft-Takes-Small-Share...) numbers for reference. More specifically the second table.
Bootstrapping to 1,000 Paying Customers in 4 Months
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USPS is doing a lot of last-mile fulfillment for the private couriers, so that maybe be one way around it.
What if this whole story was a lie? What if it was the hacker's final attempt to steal the @n twitter name.
> Or perhaps the people investing in the Icelandic banks were not investing? Was this some sort of special investment where you get a better rate than the regional banks without any sort of risk?

Yes, in fact, that's pretty much it. The infamous Icesave accounts were savings accounts, not investments in the way you'd normally think of them. They were savings accounts that paid higher interest rates than just about anyone else in town (about 6% in the UK), but they still had the equivalent of FDIC protections (for the American readers out there).

The problem is that the Icelandic equivalent to the FDIC had nowhere near enough money to actually pay back all the guaranteed deposits that were lost, so they said, "We'll pay the Icelanders back first and then....hey look! A squirrel!"

The UK and the Netherlands stepped in to cover the losses of their own citizens, but they also took Iceland to the European Court for failing to honor the required guarantees. The importance was somewhat lessened as the assets of the failed Landsbanki bank that had offered these accounts could cover quite a lot of the debt owed to the UK and the Dutch, but yeah, Iceland did sort of screw them. Not that they had much choice, but there you go.
True, but you're going to need that designer to work on that initial mix whether it's with this software or something they're much more experienced with (probably Adobe CS) - unless the UI for this is radically better than the mockup tools that pro designers use, the marginal utility of outputting LESS variables probably won't add value, and might make things more complicated by introducing an additional tool into the pipeline.
I think I've seen a lot of the @earthpics photos on the Earthporn sub-reddit. A bot that scrapes that and cross posts the top photos to a twitter account might work.
I actually wouldn't mind a 'bookmarklet' type app that lets you change bootstrap's less variables and updates your own actual pages in real time. Similar to what FontFriend or SubtlePatterns have. It'd be useful for coming up with an initial theme before tweaking it later.
I can learn a new language well enough to be productive faster than I can become comfortable with a new codebase or with all the tooling built around it. I think this is true of many developers.
Slightly OT, but someone registered a Twitter account with my primary e-mail address. I received a "Confirm your e-mail account" email with a link "Not My Account". That link brings me to a page that says "Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!".

There doesn't appear to be any way to contact Twitter about this.

Shortly after, I received a second email "Welcome to Twitter, <username>"

Going to:
https://support.twitter.com/forms/impersonation

..and selecting "Someone is using my email address without my permission." tells me to submit a general support ticket. That's fine except none of the general categories has anything to do with this problem and choosing "My issue is not in the list" simply redirects me immediately to the root support page. I submitted a ticket with a different topic and have not heard back from them in a week and expect I never will.
1/9998 = 0.0001 0002 0004 0008 0016 0032 0064 0128 0256..
Speed up your CORS API
Good luck with your doom-repeating experiment, I guess.
The original machine that influenced C's model of computers was the PDP-11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11). It had a mov instruction instead of load/store. It had no dedicated IO instructions. It could be treated as a sort of generic random access machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_machine) and that is what C did and still does. So there was a reality that C simply modeled, and it was copied (with all sorts of modifications) many times.
The Nobel Committee will consider any nominee, but it may also consider other entities that it seem fit. So in a way, you don't have to be nominated.