skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like.

This question has been answered many times before. People are re-solving the exact same problems with a new framework, platform, or language every two to five years, sometimes less. The "solved problems" never seem to stay solved.

Alan Kay had a good point when he said the last 25 years (now 35 years) have been more about pop culture than actual engineering[1].

[1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
Prisoners in the USA are, in fact, put into solitary for some pretty arbitrary reasons, including the types of books they read. You might find this article by Shane Bauer, one of the hostages held by Iran, interesting:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confine...
I don't know the answer to this and of course the following was easily dismissed with a tinfoil hat comment, but when China decided recently to unban porn there were people suggesting it was to make bypassing the great firewall less 'necessary' for the average user.
The five most common excuses for not upgrading Windows XP
Dev here. We do have a new Android app out (but focused on search rather than browsing privacy): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.disconnect....
That is an amazing story, and a lesson to all of us. Thanks for sharing it!
Just to save everyone else the time I spent reading wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui), there is no question that Zacarius:

(1) knew about the plans for 9/11, although he wasn't selected to participate in that attack

(2) was planning a separate attack via plane on the white house, but was arrested first

(3) was taking flying classes to prepare for that attack

This is tangental to the quite valid original article, but claiming that Zacarus was "framed" is an enormous distortion of the facts.
Sure, that's true. But he'll actually DO THE WORK rather than simply HOPING others will do it for him. AirBnB founders went around doing non-scalable things. The founders of the aforementioned company did not. So in a way the ancient, decrepit person was right. Maybe not exactly, but sorta.
I'm not sure how you'd define cool shit, but we have actual data for scientific breakthroughs by age: see http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-breakt....

|The authors examined the high points of the careers of both great inventors and Nobel-Prize winning scientists, and they found that the late 30s were the sweet spot for strokes of genius

The gist is that this number (38ish) has been slowly creeping up over the past century; it is generally higher in those fields which require a synthesis of huge amounts of knowledge (experimentalists) and earlier among theorists. Notice that essentially no one has done anything groundbreaking in their 50s (yet).
Are there any studies on whether advanced meditation skills can somehow reduce the effects of solitary?
Looking at their book, many of their sections for more advanced algorithms refer to the implementations with only a high-level overview of the algorithm. Their source code (by nature) is completely rigorous and nuanced. But what I imagine most people are looking for in a resource like this is something in between.
I had an off campus college bookstore for over ten years.

The paragraph...

The textbook publishing industry is "not opposed" to open-source textbooks and is even partnering with some providers, said David Anderson, executive director of higher education at the Association of American Publishers. But he said traditional textbooks can cost up to a few million dollars to produce, and he is skeptical that such an effort can be re-created on a large scale for a product distributed for free.

made me laugh because it sounds like the argument Encyclopedia Britannica used against Wikipedia.

I am sure there will be attempts to legislate this "problem" to the publishing industries liking.
The source is around 60kLOC and 2MB, so it's somewhere between the big ones like V8 and the smaller JS interpreters I know of:

http://code.google.com/p/tiny-js/ (~2kLOC)

http://code.google.com/p/quad-wheel/
How I Became “The Crowdsourceress”
I don't buy any of that. Look, there's a known thing here. It's called "the youth culture" brought to you by cigarette advertisers in the 1960s. It's now being continued and expanded on by the present class of online media companies. Well outlined in "Generation Like" on PBS frontline, it's clear that this is a continuation of a completely anti-demographically supportable belief system.

There's no empirical evidence for it. Yeah, there's a couple of half-hearted graphs of Einstein-level breakthroughs. But is that really the model here? Some guy builds a master work, a once-every-100-years theory; it's a bit much to expect him to top himself.

If we look at other fields, like painting, composing, writing, the results are more mixed. Software reminds me more of composing, really. Composers last forever.

Folks, it takes a long time to get good at this. 30 years before the mast and I'm still gaining speed.
Beyond the Quantified Self – Made In The Future by IDEO
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1uv5n0/duktape_...
In my case DO succeeded more through the product than the marketing. I signed up after reading several 'who's the best hosting service' discussions and the consensus was DO was the best for small developer stuff, Linode and AWS being sometimes better for larger stuff. I've never seen an ad for DO. It's all been user recommendation.
Emma was never elected, never had to make a payroll, etc. She was a young woman who won a poetry contest.

So using a short poem as a way to justify the complete overhaul of American immigration policy seems a little odd.
it may be collective burnout as well. Can you shuffle their responsibilities? Try to get them out of the office sometimes instead of keeping them there?
Ask HN: Where can I find API for Healthcare Insurance packages?
Seems like Healthcare.gov unpublished their API. Search around for awhile, cannot find API (in XML or JSON) for insurance packages.

Any idea?
Ah, counter ethics with legality? It's legal in some jurisdictions to confiscate the property of a person and sell it before that person has seen the inside of a court. There was an article recently on HN about that, but Jello Biafra spoke of the problem as far back as the 1980s. Using your litmus test, this activity must be ethical because it's legal.

I do not think it's ethical to scare the other party by threatening actions that you have zero intention of carrying out.
61 and climbing, but that number doesn't tell you much by itself. If you spend your career in SV as a reasonably in-demand developer and have no major life catastrophes, you might easily retire 5-10 years earlier with good money management. Partly depends on what kind of lifestyle you want in retirement, and where you plan to spend that retirement.
>Educators at all levels are still figuring out how to best use technology in the classroom. For example, Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance announced recently that the district would aim to place a tablet or laptop in the hand of every student within five years.

I'm not entirely sold on the idea that every student having a tablet or laptop is the most effective use of education money. I tend to lean more towards having classroom sets of laptops or tablets and a active learning/ combined media class room setup.
I guess that removing the contaminant traces is very difficult or impossible (unless you have a very hi-tech facility), adding a few contaminants looks easier. Anyway, mixing gold from different source should give a new contaminant composition that makes it very difficult to trace.
In Australia textbooks typically cost $100-150 a title so I'm guessing that is on par with America. I've also been able to source these international editions at a fraction of the price by purchasing online. However, tech books from the likes of O'Reilly can easily cost 2-3 times as much here, putting them in the same league as textbooks.

I found it amusing when we had a representative from a publisher speak at the first lecture for a subject. He had a slide saying "buy locally" and was encouraging students to buy his ebook which was twice the price of the international edition I had already purchased but marginally cheaper than his print edition.

The end result is that students are not buying textbooks anymore and those that do are importing them from overseas. The independent co-operative bookshop at my university went out of business last year as a result. The university opened their own bookshop with ridiculously high prices as well, but minimal staffing from what I could tell. I don't think they can sustain the high prices in the long term without the whole thing falling in a heap.
The reference to "sued" leads the conversation astray. Substitute "prosecuted" for "sued" to see the full spectrum of ignorance here. Conspiring with a competitor to fix costs may be deemed a "contract in restraint of trade" under the Sherman Act. The CEO of a company should know this at some fundamental level, under the category of "things that could send me to jail". Yes, most anti-trust violations are settled with fines and only companies are fined, but violations are a felony and can result in individual fines of up to $1 million (written back when this was a lot of money) and, more significantly for Eric Schmidt, in jail terms of up to 10 years.
Facebook releases Hack programming language for HHVM
It's only an arm race if a lot of people uses it and it becomes a problem to business owners.
Have you looked at the current salary and benefits of these staffers? They are quite well compensated.
it is really a good lesson to learn.
It's being downvoted because it represents intellectually dishonest argument (missing the obvious problem with monopolies/cartels) while using "free-market" (the term with positive connotations for most people) to justify it.
It doesn't help that this argument is main talking point of neo-liberal propaganda which make a lot of people's blood boil so it's difficult to resist emotional downvote.
A competent person would understand why the solution did or didn't work the previous times, and thus why it would or wouldn't this time.

What you're saying is that some people don't learn from their experiences. You should focus on finding out if they have. That's worth way more than hoping that this young kid will.
Sure there is - people here on HN were openly talking about colluding with their friends in other companies to do it.

It's not to say that all engineers were doing it (which I think is a salient point), but in all these arguments, the engineers are painted as naifs who had done nothing as a group to merit this. To be clear, I don't agree with the ethics the companies displayed, I just think it's unfair that the collusion between some engineers gets glossed over amongst all the outrage.
Super Normal
Oh, I remember seeing this last time I looked at this. I generally don't like seeing sudo/su in a script like this at all -- and especially not something that goes an messes with LSB-locations like /usr/lib.

FWIW, the actual software is download by the script, eg: http://haxe.org/file/haxe-3.1.1-linux64.tar.gz

For something that is aimed at developers, one would think this stuff installed under /usr/local or /opt (benefit of /usr/local is that most(?) distributions set up PATH,MANPATH, various link/library paths etc to include /usr/local. Benefit of /opt is keeping the package well "out of the way".

World writeable directories without a sticky-bit is generally just wrong -- under /usr/lib it's pretty terrible.
The best algorithm may change depending on your constraints and the input. You could argue that quicksort is best based on its O(n lg n) average running time. It is usually taught early on in CS programs as an example of a fast sorting algorithm. However, for small values of n you're actually better off using a sorting algorithm with worse asymptotic performance that is better suited to your hardware. Good cache coherency can make a big difference and asymptotic running times can hide some pretty big constants. Quicksort also performs badly on sorted or nearly sorted lists. In these cases you end up hitting quicksort's worst case performance of O(n^2).

You might have other constraints on your sorting algorithm. What if you wanted to sort twice and have ties in the second sort broken by the results of the first sort? You'd need to pick a stable sorting algorithm for your second sort. Someone else already mentioned in place sorting. If you have lots of items to sort but they are all relatively short you might find that a radix sort is fastest. You might not even really need to sort your items. If you just need to always be able to get the smallest or largest you could store your values in a heap.

To sum up, the best sorting algorithm will depend on your hardware, your data, and how you're planning to use it.
Oh please. This article is just ridiculous. I find it hard to sympathize with any of the characters or to find any semblance of truth in anything that was presented.

Someone gave the same argument to me regarding Y Combinator - They only invest in 22-28 year olds... Which is statistically probably accurate, but here's a question that people don't think about: What do you think the average age of someone who applies to YC is?

The "discrimination" arguments toward older developers made me laugh. The sad thing about this article is that it seems personal - these specific guys that are mentioned were likely just not able to pitch their idea effectively, but blame it on the young kids "seducing" VCs with their "baby faces" and "fresh college degrees."

What, do they think that VC's just go, "Oh you sort of LOOK like Mark Zuckerberg. Take my money."

Just because someone says they "Love your idea" and that it is "Better than others they've seen" doesn't mean anything unless they write a check. My past startups pitched VCs who said this all the time (I was in my early 20s btw) - I used to think we were being discriminated for being young!

Btw, who do you think has a better chance of landing a deal with a large company - a 23 year old fresh out of college or a 50 year old with 20 years of business experience? Do you think that VC's are oblivious to that fact?

"He figured it was only a matter of time before nCrypted Cloud made them both very, very rich. The only thing they were up against was 50 years of accumulated bias."

LOL @ that statement. I've heard the same kind of statement countless times from startup founders of ALL ages.
In my opinion I think it's just the free time to be able to put in the number of hours of deliberate practice. When you are younger you have far more time and flexibility to learn and experiment. In addition that time is spent on things that are seen to be new/better/modern and also come with a certain distain for doing things the way your predecessors did it. This mix gives the young person the flexibility of cutting corners and inventing/reinventing and by all appearance look 'smarter'.

I am now 30 with a wife 2 kids - I simply cannot put in the same number of hours of simply playing and practicing I did when I was 15-25. As much as I try to put in the hours, I need to face the fact I need to focus my time on them now. I also need to continue to earn a good living to give them everything I want for them (education, freedom). This means I am going to keep my 150k job doing things which may not be so innovative but I get to leave work at 5pm.

Whether that is a incorrect assumption I don't know, but from my perspective it feels true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandas
Agreed. What do we do with violent schizophrenics, the Michael Owen Perrys, the Charles Bronsons?

The groups arguing for reform respond that solitary is rarely used for violent criminals, and more often used for other rule infractions:
http://www.justicefellowship.org/solitary-confinement
https://afsc.org/resource/solitary-confinement-facts

I'm not sure that answers the question though. In absence of solitary, what measures are appropriate to curtail violence, or to enforce prison rules?

Maybe there's a middle solution, where more oversight can be used to prevent its overuse? But it doesn't seem like there are many alternatives to control the behavior of someone who is already confined.
Does Google give bonuses? Because I'd like to think they could afford to give a million to each of those people if that actually happened. If not cash, stock or something else. It's a hell of an accomplishment.

Bonus programs could cover rare events of massive success so employees don't feel so taken advantage of. Certainly if this team could regularly produce $100 million in revenue, they wouldn't be paid $90k.
This has been available for a while, curious why it's making HN now?
Linus Pauling said I was talking nonsense
Why isn't it ending?
NASA Published The 'Clearest Panorama' Of The Milky Way Ever Created
The bankers' entire business of lending is predicated on their understanding of risk and proper extension of credit dependent on that risk. To extend credit as they did to people who were obviously not credit-worthy is to abandon the main responsibility of their profession and for what? Short term personal gains via "performance bonuses" based on volume?

The bankers deserve blame and jail time for endangering the entire economy with their short-sighted greed.
Reflections on Confrontation with an Extraterrestrial Civilization
At the same time, you can neither trust the personal account of a woman in extraordinary circumstances, nor those of the most violent, probably psychopathic, criminals.

Fortunately (or perhaps, unfortunately), there are plenty of other sorts of people who've spent serious time in solitary who can corroborate the horror.

And even assuming everyone in prison is guilty of some offense, just because someone committed a crime doesn't justify inflicting psychological trauma on them.
This is spot on, and as an experienced dev I can tell you the other side. It's not just the culture problem, it's what can you possibly offer me to come work with you in your early stage startup?

I demand a very high premium for the work I do for others, and if I were going to start my own business, I wouldn't hire inexperienced people to do it with. I know the people I need to know to get financing/sales/engineering/etc. and they all have proven successful track records. At best you could bring passion and new ideas, at worst your college culture would creep in.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy working in environments with younger developers. Mentoring new developers is one of the most rewarding things I do. But my employers have me do it because hiring young folks is a cost of doing business.

That said, I don't think anybody is worried about ageism creeping into 3 person ramen startups. The issue is 2 fold A) if your startup becomes successful enough to need my expertise, and you don't hire me because you don't see the value of experience, that is bad for both of us. B) There currently seems to be severe bias in SV investors against older founders and/or startups that employ early stage experienced folks. Paul Graham has this bias and is proud of it. That is the ageism that gets me upset.

Finally, I will say, writing good software is a craft. Like all crafts, learning from experienced craftsmen is central to getting good at it. If writing good software is something that is important to you (it needn't be, and might even be detrimental) you need to go meet and work with older developers.
There is obviously nothing in your home about which you fear your neighbours finding out. Not everyone is in that category.

Or, an even more likely occurrence: Police get dispatched to domestic disputes quite frequently, where there's lots of hateful argument going on. The content of these arguments is often something that you don't want your neighbours or colleagues finding out, for a host of reasons.
Sports is perhaps the most critical issue in cable pricing. A large percentage of cable subscription costs are due to the exorbitant cost of licensing sports networks like ESPN, who, in turn, pay a fortune to license leagues and teams.

Basically, a lot of non-sports fans have to pay a fortune for sports, whether they watch sports or not. Sports fans have to pay more and more for sports, as local teams (and regional sports networks) demand billions for their broadcasting rights. On the whole, live sports is probably the one category keeping cable in business. But it's getting so expensive as to threaten the whole model.

Shameless plug, but I wrote about this topic recently for Slate. My prediction is that certain providers (cable or otherwise) will try to unbundle sports from non-sports in order to offer extremely low-priced service to non-sports fans. Meanwhile, cable networks and providers will cater more and more of their business to sports fans.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/03/local...

Some other good write-ups on this topic:

https://medium.com/off-the-field/1d7043ed024b

http://priceonomics.com/the-couch-potato-subsidy/
I'm been running the same XP install since 1/11/2004 as my primary machine. It has run on several mother board/cpus and been cloned across HD's numerous times too. It's going to be very difficult to give it up. I have a Vista and a Win8 boxes hooked up to the kvm here at the desk but the XP box is like an old friend.
Agreed. I really like the engineering behind V8, but the interface is such a pain to work with. I actually switched my game from C++ to the JVM so I could use Rhino.
I'm 17. I chose not to do my senior year and instead got a job at a software company. From my experience, the number of people looking for young programmers far exceeds the number of programmers period (in major cities).

The best way I've found is to create a niche for yourself in software. Wether that's ops, node web development, ruby development, ios, etc. Create projects in that niche and post them to GitHub.com.

Then look for companies in your city hiring. Most major cities have tech job boards/mailing lists. Email the recruiter (or found if their email is listed) and let them know you're looking for work.

If it's a new company, even better, since they're likely trying to scale their system, offer to come in and see if you could help them get their API off the ground.

Most important note as your age is build casual business relationships with the tech scene, and you will get job offers regardless.

Don't work for free, don't take unpaid internships, you shouldn't have to do that, and it's not worth it.
Has U.S. Demand For The Tesla Model S Electric Car Stabilized?
MergePay Pulse lets businesses worldwide track and manage their finances
Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
Can you really expect VC's not to be assholes? I think maybe the article is a little quick to play the age card in regards to the example give. Just because someone acts like an asshole and acts disinterested doesn't mean they're not interested. And, there are other ways to start a business. If someone doesn't like older people, people with kids and families, fuck 'em. Find something else.
Best small box to run XBMC?
Side note: I think I may have met you at CodeDay Seattle. Small world.
Do you guys know about SpoonRocket? It's only in the East Bay, but seems conceptually similar.
You mean, how Netflix innovated and showed everyone how it should be done? Or do you mean, when Apple buys their way into a collusive agreement with a monopoly provider giving them preferential access?
Not really. The point isn't that those sites are evil, it's that tracking is evil.
in the ear