skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It honestly feels like the goalposts keep moving

That's a really great quote and I'm happy to see the honesty. This gets to the heart of the matter.

You're stuck playing "keep up with the Jones'", which by very definition you can not win.

You need to define your own goalposts, then they won't move, and you can actually get there.

What makes you happy? How do you want to spend your limited time on this earth? What do you want to contribute to the world?

Make those things your "goalposts", not money, and you'll be much, much happier and better off.
Oh god, please no. I like using that to force Chrome not to remember form values in single-page web apps. :(
I have a lot of experience hiring programmers, and to me the salary range for programmers appears to be much larger than this article states.

Specifically this: "Here are some things you can point out to your employer to help make your case that you are worth 2x or 3x what they are paying other programmers, but you'll be lucky to be paid 25% more. If you are 10x as productive as other programmers, you'll probably be paid no more than 2x their salary."

seems incorrect when compared against my data.

Obviously if you look at total compensation there is more than a 10X difference between groups of programmers in many cases, but even just considering salary I have seen a pretty large dynamic range. For example, many large software companies (that I compete with when hiring engineers) pay their experienced engineers 3-4X+ salary compared to someone they might hire straight out of university.

The best methods of measuring productivity or value of an engineer are certainly worth debating, but the idea that the range of salary is something like 2X doesn't hold up for me.
> I just moved out of the US.

This is purely tangential and me venting about recruiting spam in Japan.

I live in Japan and still get a bunch (~3-5 messages a week) of low-quality recruiter spam. I have the following guesses as to why it's so low quality:

1. Recruiting companies, from what I've observed, tend to draw from a big pool of English teachers looking for steady non-teaching work. That is, they are not technical or versed in the field they are recruiting in.

2. A lot of times the companies or recruiters aren't exactly sure what they're looking for.

3. Sometimes in addition to not being technical and not knowing what they're looking for, English is not their first language (whether they're Japanese, Chinese, or Indian).

I always try to engage them in some way in case I need them in the future (since Japan is the land of networking), but it never goes well.

They refuse to tell me the company they're recruiting for, responsibilities, salary range, benefits, or even basic things like whether it's a contracted (契約者) or permanent (正社員) position or, god forbid, a dispatch (派遣) position.

Whenever I ask for details, they insist that we meet in person so they can "get a feel for me and my needs." And usually meeting them would entail traveling an hour across Tokyo, or in one case, all the way to Osaka.

So essentially, it seems like they have nothing and they want to add me to the Rolodex.

Disclosure: I found my current job through a very good, very communicative recruiter who was up-front with me and worked with me to secure the terms I wanted.
Apple Explains How Secure iMessage Is
I lost so many "good computers" that all I have now are pet hard drivers. Yet, I pet those.

What's the name of a server that you are completely prepared to replace in 30 minutes notice (they are for personal use, some downtime is acceptable), but pet anyway?
The post-war expansion was terribly inefficient. And a lot of what was defined as an increase in quality of life two generations ago (pave everything!) turns out to look like a decrease in quality of life to our generation (suburban sprawl).

If you analyze the ongoing costs of maintaining our urban environment, vs paving everything in the first place, you see that it's easy to pave more than you can afford to maintain. That's us, and it's not just pavement, it's a whole lot of things.

I like this blog / podcast for talking about how we can avoid making decisions like the ones that got us here: http://www.strongtowns.org/
Thank you for pointing that out. I think that area might have been a blind-spot for me. (immediately below the ads)
I think if you list cell phones and the internet before you list housing, your sense of scale is completely off.

Even if somebody's spending $200/mo on telephone and internet connectivity, that still pales in comparison to the cost of rent in pretty much any part of the country. A fairly small studio apartment in the area where I live is approaching $2000/mo, minimum - to pay less than that I'd probably have to move 30+ miles away, which then increases my commuting costs dramatically and might force me to drive instead of take public transit. (And no, I'm not living in some posh downtown area with high demand, I'm living next to the low-income workers and big families, in an apartment complex built in the 70s or 80s.)

Then let's look at health and dental costs, which combined together probably are double/triple what you pay combined for reasonable cell phone/internet service. (Personally, I pay $30/mo for cell phone voice and data. Internet is expensive because yay, monopolies - very little choice there.) Going without phone/internet connectivity in this modern society is utterly ridiculous as a working professional; you simply can't get away with it unless you decide you're gonna cut yourself off from the world and live in a cabin somewhere.

To answer your specific question, let's say he spends $200/mo on internet+cell phone.
If he cuts those out entirely, that's $2400/yr, or barely a month's rent in many localities.

Don't be ridiculous. Stop focusing on tiny things when the real problems are right in front of you: Housing costs, health costs, transit costs...
Hey, I'm an old(er) guy and I think 110K is a lot of money.
The problem is the rich are getting richer, and the middle class is shrinking. Actual inflation-adjusted pay for most people hasn't risen in 30 years, while for the top of the top it's skyrocketed. Meanwhile, everything is more expensive, and unemployment is high thanks to the apparent political impossibility of introducing stimulus spending in a time of lowered demand and zero interest rate (cutting interest rates is the usually the easiest way to stimulate the economy, but you can't do that when you're at zero already). The money moved into finance, distorted everything thanks to deregulation, and screwed up the country, and the world to a certain extent. Europe in the meantime is addicted to debilitating austerity measures; the populations haven't exploded yet only because most of them have excellent social safety nets.

Things really were better in the 60's and 70's from the point of view of how everyone was doing, what they could afford and with how much effort spent to afford it.

Also, if you're a tech guy living in a tech area, cost of living is probably higher than average. And the US has expensive health care, thanks to, until recently, stubbornly refused all attempts to socialize it.
This.

Getting 30 job offers a month probably would be as great as the author thinks. But how many of those 30 recruiter emails will lead to job offers? Probably zero.

My beef with recruiters is that they repeatedly pitch me jobs that I know their client won't ever hire me for. They're not only wasting my time, they're wasting their client's time, too.
I think the main problem is that somehow 10 or 20 items on a page got to be standard and that is just annoying. 200 items on a page seems like a good number to me. Scrolling is often easier, but I want it to stop.

OTOH, there are many, many ways to mess up pagination UI as well. Not showing how many pages there are is one that often annoys me, because one time I will go through a bunch of pages of stuff is if I am quickly visually scanning to find something I saw before but couldn't track down with search or bookmarks all that quickly for some reason. If I know what I am looking for is on one of 15 pages then there is a good chance I can find it quickly, but with 50 pages it might be more effective to keep trying my luck at search (or just give up).
Google's Wave used (and reused) a fixed number of DOM elements that were filled by fly-weights containing the data to be shown on that page. While the scroll bar showed the appropriate position in the thread, there was a limited amount of data for the items above and below the visible set, and an even more limited number of DOM elements that could be filled with data.
> points to an invisible hand

Or that the average US citizen (the market for those news corps) doesn't give jack shit about it (not that this is a good thing). Netizens and UK citizens don't factor into the equation for these companies.
He made it clear he's not complaining about his situation and is asking about others', in general - or more precisely, 'My situation is fairly okay, but why isn't it great on my income? Why do other people have it so much worse when it seems like they should be okay?'
Mikeal wrote a response here: https://gist.github.com/mikeal/9242748.

So much drama though, I can barely piece together what's going on.
Ace Player is unfortunately a GPL violation, so we're not sooo in love with it...
We are not mathematicians. Those terms are not really part of our industry.
parsing text files is literally the only thing Perl is the best tool for. Of course, every single person who needs to update it would have a 20 hour RTFM session before they could do so. (fairly conservative; this is 3 hours per day for 7 days from a standing start to maintaining Perl.) Perl has a ton of context, and that context is really hard to learn (just try writing a Perl parser/interpreter), and it applies best to text files and configuration scripts from 1987-1997.

I am not saying it's not an appropriate tool for anything else. But as a tool to be learnt, it wouldn't be the 'best' tool for a new person to learn from scratch.

Except for parsing text files :)
Seattle, mid-to-late thirties = near-constantly increasing rents and increasing health expenses.

If he's actually in proper Seattle and not the surrounding area, the nearest affordable housing might be dozens of miles away from where he works, increasing his transit costs considerably.

Health insurance keeps getting more expensive, and if his plan isn't great he might be shelling out thousands of dollars a year to hit his deductibles, especially if he's not in great health.

'Sounds like a budgeting problem' is missing the point, which is that the set of unavoidable expenses - things you have to pay - keeps getting bigger and bigger, but incomes for a big chunk of the US don't grow quite as fast as that.
> The biggest general problem is that people thought of shipping the site the same way they thought of shipping an aircraft carrier -- you write the code, hand it over, and you're done.

So, the same problem every vendor encounters when doing a software project. I cannot tell you how many "lay people" can't simply grok this.
Well, I can't really know my grandparents' state of mind. But my grandfather drove trucks locally, and my grandmother worked in a supermarket. Try to imagine affording a single family house and two cars with jobs like that today. They always seemed like they enjoyed their jobs. My grandfather kept working long after retirement age. I never heard them complain about their jobs or give any indication they didn't like them.

If 99% of people are worse off than I am, that seems like an extremely serious problem to me. Hence my question.
He replied... twice? How is that something that requires you to attack him? This is HN, and someone like yourself is well aware that sort of comment you tacked on the end of a good comment isn't welcome here, and the ad hominem above isn't either.

I'm just trying to work out what I'm missing here, seemed rather out of the blue :/
And getting a recruiter replying to your job application is a somewhat different than getting a recruiter email without job application because there is zero effort prior to receiving the email.
He's not asking for pity or for you to explain why he feels pressured; he was asking about whether things are this way for everyone, and why things are this way. Your post completely ignores this and takes the opportunity to condescend to him.
Finding people actually interested in changing jobs is challenging. I'd say it's probably one of the hardest parts of recruiting.

All the engineers at https://www.MightySpring.com (we're building an app that matches companies with job seekers) spent this week doing traditional agency recruiting to get a better sense of the problem. Recruiting really is a numbers game. Finding the right balance between personalization and efficiency - knowing that most emails get deleted immediately, unread, is hard. We don't envy the recruiters who do this all the time.
What do you do? What technical skills do you have? Where do you have your resume posted online?

SEO your resume (honestly, no making up stuff you can't really do), and you can get lots of hits too.
Still no need for cursing, or for ad hominem remarks. HN is at its best when this does not occur.
I for one don't tolerate rudeness or insensitivity in either my personal or business life (on either my part or that of others). I guess that's just me.

Despite our sparring in this thread, I don't think we're miles apart on this issue. As I've gotten older (I'm in my early 40s), I've become less and less tolerant of rudeness, drama, and insensitivity.

But what spurred me to post was not the original rude reply, but the witch hunt that has arisen around it. This macks of a temper tantrum by a hypersensitive person who has whipped the online mob (who simply want to see a good fight) into a frenzy.

If I would have received that kind of response, I likely would have responded with a few choice words of my own. Then again, I wouldn't have made the request in the first place without at least engaging the person in some other, more social manner.

I see the response as just as offensive as the original rejection. What could have been an interesting anecdote and useful starting point for a discussion on civility was quickly turned into a vendetta when anonymity was thrown out the window.
> though it's amusing that you recommend buying something as the cure to buying too much.

You mean the book?

I borrowed it from my local library, you should too :)
They're not particularly strong arguments unless you are already convinced of the conclusions. "Natural law" (constraints) can be demonstrated to be necessary for societal functioning, but they don't extend to "natural rights". That is, a societal necessity to prohibit unsanctioned killing of its members does not in any way imply a right to life. And the idea that the natural state of humanity is the lone savage is entirely unfounded (and contrary to all evidence dating back as far as we can manage it); it's merely a convenient way to begin an argument that ends up "proving" its own unfounded premises.
Perl has reader macros and a meta-object protocol upon the object system is built with. Ruby and Python don't have either AFAIK. That is an example of what the OP is saying with Perl is an extensible language.
My favourite part is in the comments, where the #1 recruiter on recruiter spam[1] responds to the article:

> I think the bottom line is that recruiters tend to be very intelligent and multi-talented, and frankly, sometimes candidates get jealous.

No shit.

[1]: http://www.recruiterspam.com/stats
I hate infinite scrolling with a burning passion. You're reading the article and scroll down 2 pixels too far and WOP you're loading something again. Qz.com is one of the worst offenders here.
Yes, I love his attitude. I actually was going to quote this one [1] in my reply

[1] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
Android Designed To Be Open, Not Safe, Says Android Head | Redmond Pie
That's interesting. So whenever I scrolled a lot down, and wanted to scroll to the beginning, the related data was re-fetched? Or it was stored in the data model, but just not displayed in the DOM?
Interesting, I hadn't seen that before. I guess I really need to go back and relearn C++ ...
Neighbor: "So its not safe to use my US credit card but its safe in Europe?"

Me: "In the US they don't scramble up the numbers on your card so anyone can see them when you use it at a store. In Europe they do scramble up the numbers."

Neighbor: "So its not safe to use my US credit card but its safe in Europe?"

Me: "Depends on how you scramble the numbers."

Neighbor: "What do you mean?"

Me: "Itlay ependsay onyay owhay ooyay amblescray ethey etterslay"

Neighbor: "OOOOHHHHHHH. I think I get it."
What's wrong with the names is that they don't communicate very well to the 95%+ of programmers who aren't in the FP/Haskell world. That's most of the people who are going to try to use it on C++.

I mean, some concepts are clearly not able to be explained to the layman; you need some background. But do people really need to learn abstract algebra to be able to get their heads around this stuff? Are there no better terms that communicate to more people?

And, given that that's the problem, clearly dog breeds are not the answer either.
It may not necessarily consist of everyday words, but it probably relates very obviously and clearly to the C++ functionality.

Such as?

"Monoid" is a very detached term. It doesn't obviously relate to the C++ construct or concept the way that terms like "typedef", "template", "stream" and so on do for other constructs/concepts.

Well of course! Monoid is far more general than those other concepts. It's also a far better name, being unambiguous. Those other names are reused all over the place in different contexts and their meanings subtly shift between their uses. Monoid is not so overloaded; once you learn it, you know what it means every time you encounter it.
"debilitating austerity measures"

http://www.leftfootforward.org/images/2011/05/Government-spe... (United Kingdom)

http://multiplier-effect.org/files/2012/10/Eurozone-Governme... (Continental Europe)

Yup, that's some real bone-cutting austerity right there... </sarcasm>
I hadn't thought I was doing that, but thank you for saying it. I'll re-read and I give it some more thought.
"If you move from Seattle to, say, Houston or Dallas, you'll probably see your effective rent shrink by 35 – 50%."

Right. If you don't own a car already, you would almost definitely have to, and your job options in the $110k range will put you on an oil rig if you have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, if you can even reach that.

My ex father in law made about $110k at 60 working as a geological consultant for oil companies.

Basically: job opportunities are not the same.

Disclaimer: I am a Texas native. I speak with a lot of knowledge about many municipalities where most of the people I have known in my entire life have lived. Even the rich ones are poor.

Your argument that medical and dental costs would be lower if we didn't restrict entry based on licensing is alarming at the very least. Had I read that first I probably wouldn't have responded, but I've already typed, so, bleh.
'Move somewhere else' is totally missing the point.

If everyone moves to those particular low-rent places, that increases the demand there, and rents will go up until housing supply increases to meet demand (or, like SF, it never increases and prices just keep going up). This is ignoring the problem of finding work in low-rent areas (though telecommuting at least makes that less difficult.)

To me, 'the problem is where you live' is utterly condescending. Would it be reasonable to tell a minimum wage worker, who works 80+ hours a week, that his problem is where he lives and he should just move? How is that person supposed to afford to move when they can barely pay rent every month? Do you really think THAT is the problem, that some people happen to live/work in a certain location, and it would be better if they just moved to where all the other low-income families live?

For a concrete example: I used to work in the Seattle area for a few years. I 'solved' the rent costs problem by living way to the east, in the Issaquah mountains.

Unfortunately this meant a 30-60 minute car commute each way, along with a big increase in car maintenance/fuel expenses. And because I was in the mountains, every winter the occasional ice storm would knock out power/heat for 1-2 weeks, or the mountain roads would be so iced over that I couldn't get to work. Days I'm not working are days I'm not getting paid; if I'm lucky I don't get fired.

Yeah, solves everything, doesn't it?
This is great, and I'd love using it. What's the (if any) connection with WebRTC? And PPSPP is a pretty unfortunate choice of acronym... A Google search only unearths something about emulating a PlayStation Portable.
Lawrence Lessig Settles Fair Use Lawsuit Over Phoenix Music Snippets
They didn't show the part where you have to re-set your activity on the phone app, every time single time you change it. That will get tedious and a not so determined user might forget.
What you are missing is that he replied fairly promptly to the first three replies here, including mine in spite of me commenting in advance that there would be more discussion if he did not do that. This is likely part of why it was not generating discussion. (Please note that people are now spending more time talking to me about my presumed "attack" than talking about his article. So I stand by my observation.)

I was trying to be helpful, which is likely a mistake, for a lot of reasons.
"If you have to ask..."
It's worse than that. At least with the book you get to turn the page. This is more like having a book, and knowing there's other pages, but you can never get to the bottom of the page you're on.
> Are you suggesting that he stop spending a single cent on discretionary things and just live on rice and beans?

Of course not, don't be ridiculous. Stop being so black-and-white (as my friends always say to Engineer me)

I'm suggesting he take a close look at how much he's spending on what, and if those things are actually making him happy. He needs Cut out or reduce spending on things that are not actually improving his happiness, and he'll have a lot more money than he thought.

At no point am I saying spend so little money you're in misery.
I forked and created a bookmarklet: https://gist.github.com/osuushi/9261629 (well, actually a script that builds a bookmarklet).
Despite of what developers like to think, success is not linked to technical competence. Achieving the former allows you to address the latter.
Obligatory: Call your reps and tell them you do not like this and ask what they are going to do to fix it: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Democracy only works if you do.
When writing tests, the key to remember is to write what you wish you had. Othe than that, are you on Express.js? Also, have you ever tried QUnit?
One has to enforce classism.
Omni is so much more interesting, open minded, and intellectual than most of today's geekdom... it's sad.
The Physical Limit of Trick Shots in Billiards
Why not ask a group of people who would know? Ie, people in the freight industry.
Learn Node.js Completely and with Confidence
I get 10-15 recruiter mails every month. Much worse, IMO, than being recruited, is the fucking useless recruiters who spam me about recruiting for me (which happens once you list CEO on LinkedIn, or get any press).

And the shitty contract-dev houses, mainly in India.

I'd categorically never use a recruiter who contacted me like this, nor a contract-dev house.
why is sinon failing to execute in browserify? It's supposed to be stand-alone. Is it being included correctly?