skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdotal: I'm a part-time CTO (long story) of a startup. I'm 30 myself. We hired 6 engineers in total up until now: three interns in their twenties, who're very smart and motivated but also inexperienced; two programmers with a few years of professional experience who can get to real decent (well written, unit tested, etc) code on the first go; and 1 guy of over 40.

When hiring, I was very skeptical of the guy over 40. His CV showed that he had spent most of his time building boring information systems for government agencies. This did not feel cool and startuppy at all. Also, he's gray-haired and he looks a bit dorky. We really liked him in person though, and he seemed to know what he was talking about, so we hired him anyway.

Only a few weeks later, I was already certain that he was the best hire we made up until now. Hypothetically, when forced, I would fire any two other team members to be able to keep him on the team (and he's on only half weeks). He's experienced, very much down to business, he cuts through the crap and through technical fads, and currently ensures that we're building the most lean and simple backend that I've ever seen. In a programming language that he's never seen before, and with a database engine that he's never used before.

For me, the general takeaway was that the wisdom to "not only hire copies of yourself" is very true indeed. More specifically, "older" guys (for tech industry standards) often have a lot more fundamental skills to bring to the table than perfect command of this year's technologie du jour.

Hire older people!
Tor is certainly far more decentralized, but you seem to harbor a common misconception that Tor doesn't reuqire trust. The exit node of your circuit (the last hop before the "real" internet) handles your directly. At best, the destination of your packets is unencrypted, giving the exit node a narrow but pertinent view into your communications. At worst, the entire packet is unencrypted, and the exit node can manipulate it in whatever way it wishes, undetectably. This is why you must, must, must layer other encryption on top of Tor, ie, HTTPS. As they say at the Tor Project, "plaintext over Tor is still plaintext," except that you've attracted a lot attention to send it.
What services are you talking about? The history Android permission, or something else? Certainly I don't think there's any such API for Chrome.
The cheapest Android phone I found costs 50 euro. You can easily find feature phone for 15-20 euro.
It's also got a really expressive and transparent Objective-C interface, if you happen to be writing iOS/OS X apps.

There's a nice overview here: http://blog.bignerdranch.com/3784-javascriptcore-and-ios-7/
> I actually switched my game from C++ to the JVM so I could use Rhino.

Would you mind elaborating a bit what makes v8 tedious to work with?
tl;dr: immature companies have immature staffing policies.

It's not even remarkable, and may have nothing to do with ageism, although that will be the effective result if it concerns large parts of an industry. Just like the sexism and racism of tech, it's mostly about hiring policies mirroring the identity of the companies and the people who founded them.

It doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed as a serious issue, because it hampers the industry and is detrimental to society, but in the long run, those companies will adapt or die.
Part of why Android development is so frustrating for me is the tools we have to use. If I'm not bashing my head trying to understand fragments and layouts, I'm battling with Eclipse -- constantly closing/refreshing project -- and that incredibly slow emulator.
Great, let's support companies who like to run financial software on ancient, insecure and decrepit platforms who don't want to invest in pulling their software into the 21st century.

Microsoft has offered an embedded version of Windows since 7, and say what you will about Windows but it's backwards compatibility is second to none. If they can't or won't move to a more modern, secure OS (after 10+ years) then I would argue that they shouldn't be trusted to make ATM's
Considering Postgres is the first relational database to support jsonb, portability (which is the main benefit of drivers) doesn't really apply. Any decent driver or framework should let you write native psql commands, so you should be able to start using this as soon as it's released.
One particular Cause Of Hair Reduction: Scalp Blood circulation
You are not really aware of the documentation are you?

ActionBar is not a community shim anymore, a compatibility library down to gingerbread is provided and supported by Google: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/ap...

As RyanZAG explained, your multiple layout files should only re-organize fragments.

Yes Android dev is hard, with multiple versions, sizes, formats and bugs. But there is documentation, tools and example to adress them. Deal with it.

If you are willing to try again, as so many things have changed since Eclair, you can have a look at this exemple where you will see how you can use new API and a fallback when they are not available: http://code.google.com/p/android-protips-location/source/bro...
Thanks for filling out the technical side :) Here's Ted showing ZigZag, just because;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc
I have enough knowledge of this material to write two books on this subject. I'd love to write it, I maybe have three chapters written already. With some effort we could even include some demo's of these systems (see my hn profile for my email).
Can anyone with some familiarity with PostgreSQL's release schedule comment on how soon this will be in an official release?
> but language designers' opinions have far more validity

Here's the case we're talking about the work of a language designer. By the way, not all people capable of creating a programming language have created one yet. Marc-André Cournoyer, who wrote the book that Jeremy Ashkenas learnt language design from to write CoffeeScript, has not created a language himself.
Cisco's security supremo on the Internet of Everything
Full text search is expected to benefit considerably from work in Postgres 9.4: https://www.postgresql.eu/events/sessions/pgconfeu2013/sessi...

These advances within the GIN inverted index infrastructure will also greatly benefit jsonb, since it has two GIN operator classes (this is more or less the compelling way to query jsonb).
Here are the presentations planned for the event:

1. Mag, new image communication service. (Shota Mizukami)

2. Real coding framework for WP (Jeff Madsen)

3. A step-by-step look at building an app with Meteor (Sacha Greif)

4. Awesome window manager (Sean Colquhoun)
Genentech (http://www.gene.com/) is also on "do not cold call" list. How this company is related to google's business profile?
This will go into 9.4 (or maybe they'll call it 10.0) which will be released September-ish barring no bigger issues.
Fire the team manager. Promote a new one within the team.
Ask HN: How do you cope with your browser tab overload?
Hello HN,

We're a small startup in the process of building a Chrome browser extension to address tab-overload.

We realise there's been many attempts to solve this (OneTab et. al), but to us, they feel like they're just sweeping the problem under the rug. We're trying to work back to the root of the problem, so we have a question:

Do you find that your browser tabs continue to accumulate and multiply? If so, why do you think that is (i.e. do they stay open as a todo list?); and how do you deal with it right now?

Any insight you're able to share about this problem would be enormously helpful. We know it's a whopper, but we're determined to solve it and we need your help.

Thanks so much :)

P.S. We put together a more formal survey over here ( http://bit.ly/1lfTNMK ). If you'd like to beta test, or even play with some wireframes (brutally honest feedback is very welcome), just drop your answers and details into the form.
The page hit count on http://distrowatch.com/ is sometimes used as a popularity proxy. What do you reckon?
Android Studio is way better in every conceivable way the old Eclipse-based ADT and I haven't had speed problems with the Android emulator since they released the x86 images. Have you actually developed for Android in the last year?
Being able to use Jsonb through a framework and fully utilize it (through it) are not the same things. I will be definitely use it soon, but unless it's fully supported in frameworks (...) it won't be widely accepted.
Australia’s first Bitcoin ATM days away
one?
"""
MozDef is based on open source technologies including:
Nginx (http(s) based log input)
Rabbit-MQ (message queue)
UWSGI (supervisory control of python-based workers)
bottle.py (simple pyhon interface for web request handling)
Elastic Search (scalable indexing and searching of JSON documents)
Meteor (responsive framework for Node.js enabling real-time data sharing)
Mongo DB (scalable data store, tightly integrated to Meteor)
..
"""

OTOH, maybe it's not public facing :)
Slightly off topic, but I like what they have done with the site design. Would look more homogenic across platforms when viewed in the browser. Of course there is more space on desktops to display more stuff which should be utilised. This, imo, is a good balance.
Kevin Murphy's treatment of Kernel Methods in "Machine Learning - A Probabilistic Perspective" offers a take on SVMs that I don't often find in most discussions. He makes the case that SVMs are generally rather unusual from a Bayesian point of view. Apropos to other sparse vector machines, Murphy opines:

"Note that SVMs are very unnatural from a probabilistic point of view. First, they encode sparsity in the loss function rather than the prior. Second, they encode kernels by using an algorithmic trick, rather then being an explicit part of the model. Finally, SVMs do not result in probabilistic outputs, which causes various difficulties, especially in the multi-class classification setting.

"It is possible to obtain sparse, probabilistic, multi-class kernel-based classifiers, which work as well or better than SVMs, using techniques such as L1VM or RVM... However, we include a discussion of SVMs, despite their non-probabilistic nature, for two main reasons. First, they are very popular and widely used, so all students of machine learning should know about them. Second, they have some computational advantages over probabilistic methods in the structured output case... [specifically, SSVMs]

...

"The conclusion is as follows: if speed matters, use an RVM, but if well-calibrated probabilistic output matters (e.g., for active learning or control problems), use a GP. The only circumstances under which using an SVM seems sensible is the structured output case, where likelihood-based methods can be slow. (We attribute the enormous popularity of SVMs not to their superiority, but to ignorance of the alternatives, and also to the lack of high quality software implementing the alternatives.)"

----

the tl;dr is that SVMs are an important tool for their historical impact and popularity, but the modern data scientist has a range of cookie-cutter algorithms to choose from that could possibly be much more useful.
They cause more product genocides per year than all startups combined.
This "news" is from 2010.
Capstone: advanced modern disassembly framework
Capstone is a lightweight multi-platform, multi-architecture disassembly framework with advanced features.

http://capstone-engine.org
> In their forties, you might expect him to make something like 350k and have a good title like CTO or lead developer.

What? There are quite obviously not as many CTO or "lead developer" positions as there are junior engineering positions. So why are you assuming that everyone that old must have such a great job?
Very interesting discussion.

One gem: "So the way I hope that it will work for the Web protocols and the WWW standards which I hope will be able to evolve from their kludgy current state towards that beautiful golden dream is that in any case where you lay down a standard, you also allow there to a second and you show a path whereby is a third one comes up that is better you can move in that direction on the heels of the first, keeping it honest and you have a hook in it to be able to hook it all together later on." (Tim Berners-Lee)
I can't speak for the original poster, but I have three issues with the postgres offering:

1) it has suboptimal support for handling compound words (like finding the "wurst" in "bratwurst"). If the body you're searching is in a language that uses compounds (like german), then you have to use ispell dictionaries which have rudimentary support for compounds and which aren't maintained any more in many cases because ispell has been more or less replaced by hunspell which has far superior compound support which in turn is not supported by postgres.

2) If you use a dictionary for FTS (which you have to if you need to support compounds), the dictionary has to be loaded once per connection. Loading a 20MB dictionary takes about 0.5 seconds, so if you use Postgres FTS, you practically have to use persistent connections or some kind of proxy (like pgbouncer). Not a huge issue, but more infrastructure to keep in mind.

3) It's really hard to do google-suggest like query suggestions. In the end I had to resort to a bad hack in my case.

Nothing unsolvable, but not-quite-elastic search either.
Look through GitHub for repos you might find compelling and go to hackathons/Startup Weekend events where you can join people in person. Programming is tough to get used to, so pick a problem you are really passionate about and tackle it - your interest in the problem will carry you through the tough parts.

If you have an idea for a project and need feedback or teammates, you can post it on DoerHub.com (it has a lot of university student-led projects with subject matter experts in different areas and people are open to helping/mentoring you when they see you are passionate about learning their craft).
Album art is an image file which goes in the folder for the album. Then I sort my files into Genre\Album folder structure. I play it with Winamp. I also put it all in Winamp's Music Library.

I store my music as flac files when available. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between that and a good quality mp3 file. It is mostly to give me options in the future.
Slightly off-topic, does anyone know if there is progress being made on the proposed HTTP API for PostgreSQL?(http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/HTTP_API)
It's not a book I recommend this article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html about Ted Nelson and Xanadu. Entertaining reading.

The Curse of Xanadu
By Gary Wolf

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.
Yes, Android is gobbling up marketshare, but the growth is at the low end. The cheap plastic boxes made for people for whom design is not a deciding factor.

When given a choice, most designers will work for companies and customers that appreciate good design and are willing to pay more for excellence in experience, even at the expense of raw specs. Apple has built its success on aiming for that market.

You see this in all products, from phones to cars to houses, so why should Android be any different?

The best designers will work on premium products, and Android just isn't. Google doesn't care much for design, and neither do the Android hardware manufacturers (with the possible exception of HTC, and you can see how popular that is in the Android market...), so that creates an ecosystem in which design, visual, industrial and UX, is secondary.

Just like good developers don't like to work somewhere where good code is not considered important, designers don't want to work in a market where their talent isn't valued.
Those "almost costless revenue streams" that HBO has abroad will be insta-killed if Netflix manages to enter those markets.

We here in Germany (and much of Europe) are stuck in a world where Television and DVD/Bluray are the only viable legal options for series and shows. This is of course absolutely not what the consumers want, but a consequence of the byzantine licensing structure that exists over here.

There are two ways in which this can flip almost instantly:

1. The EU decides to end the bullshit and bans regionally limited licensing deals, thus making the market much more accessible for all those VoD companies that keep trying to break through.

2. Netflix or some other major player muscles their way in.

If one of those two happens, then the bottom will fall out of the foreign revenues of HBO.
> product team not talking to the customer care team

I couldn't agree more. Dare I say it, we've got an "open" floor plan for our customer care and product teams. It helps immensely when you can place a customer on hold and ask a product guy a question without emailing, chatting for calling.
It's stupid to put that request in writing.
Seems like there is room for a PostgreSQL-only ORM that specifically makes all these nice features available. Anyone heard of such a thing?
I'd say the combination of being small, easily embeddable and having a liberal license make it attractive.
Bonjour, Entrepreneurs – Only you can prevent French-Bashing
I'd suggest opening bugs on drivers (that's the most important one) right now since the feature is officially in the development version. If it doesn't already work that is.

That's how it was done for 9.3's expanded diagnostics[0], and as a result both Python's psygopg2[1] and Ruby's ruby-pg[2] (and maybe others) added extended diagnostics support before 9.3 was even released[3], and working from day 1.

[0] http://www.depesz.com/2013/03/07/waiting-for-9-3-provide-dat...

[1] http://psycopg.lighthouseapp.com/projects/62710/tickets/149

[2] https://bitbucket.org/ged/ruby-pg/issue/161/add-support-for-...

[3] http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1481/
Ourscreen lets you be in charge of your local cinema
Putting as much logic as possible into the server component is definitely the way to go.

I did something similar, I would send the version as well as the md5sum of the executable.

Aside from being able to tell the 32 and 64-bit versions apart, the other advantage was that I'd be able to track whether they were running an executable with the md5sum I shipped, or if it had been hacked. Add that to an ip geolocation server, and now I've got a map of who is using a legal version and who is using an illegal version. I even plotted the success and spread of different cracks over time.. in our case, the Russian cracks usually lagged the Chinese cracks, but then had a better distribution network. Our auto-update function would check once a day on startup, based on the same version string and md5sum of the last check. So, we could see the person creating the hack.. same IP address, same version string, multiple md5sums, and their final md5sum would spread.

I also added the demo status and a unique machine id, and that let us answer questions like "Do paying customers ever install a hacked version?", "Do people who start with the hacked version ever pay?", "Into what languages should I translate my software", "How many demo users are in our funnel", "How long does it take a demo user to convert to paid", etc.
There is Pharo: http://www.pharo-project.org/

But it is more an IDE, not a general UI for work like Emacs.
(But it could for sure be turned into one)
Solitary is worse. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but if your personality crumbles away, you will lose _you_.
Thanks - I'd be delighted to get to the point where I have those kinds of problems!

What I will do is bear those limitations in mind and if I ever do have those problems there is, I guess, a reasonable chance that postgres development will have addressed them by them or I will redesign things to use a separate search engine.
About 2.5% of the users.
The title reminded to investigate emacs core package bindat (bidirectional pack/unpack of binary layouts) to generate disassemblers/patchers

http://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bindat-Exa...
Probably an X crash.
Ukraine orders Crimea withdrawal
For the even lazier: http://dotnetfiddle.net/gsdfJp
Perhaps you're already aware of Eclim, if not, check it out. Really useful for doing Android/Java in Vim.
Add Indicators Into Your Design
Thank you for spotting this. The transcriptions for the Newton papers are supplied by a third party (The Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk) so we will pass this onto them.
At a quick glance at a few pages it seems browsers are rendering various sections differently which may account for some errors.
Thanks again,
Cambridge Digital Library
Forks are also an indicator that people weren't happy with the origin.
UK to start charging VAT on digital media
Larry Page – Where is Google going next
When you say 'it was basically a wash', it is not clear what you mean. Which one breaks more pages?
> Jsonb has several missing useful features (from nested hstore), but that could be added later as an extension.

Which are those missing useful features?
Not exactly a PostgreSQL-only ORM

The excellent slick-pg library which extends the FRM library slick.
https://github.com/tminglei/slick-pg
You might want to look at the lemma for statistical noise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_noise
The Next Question Is Of Course, What Now?
Where Are the Best and Worst Countries to Do Business?
Tech is already so divisive against women. Now we are alienating older men too? This is suicidal for our industry.
Most "frameworks"/ORM can provide database-specific features, and it's especially easy for field types. e.g. http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_9/dialects/postgresql.ht... (data types local to SQL Alchemy's Postgres dialect) or https://github.com/djangonauts/django-hstore (hstore in Django)
The Economics of Reuse
Show HN: Built a really simple image hosting site
My first web project. Nothing too special here, just a utility that I use a lot and could not find a good and uncluttered version of anywhere else.
"They have the same experience with whatever the latest thing is."

This assumption is wrong. They don't have the same experience. Their direct experience (counted as the time they spent hacking with the latest thing) might be exactly the same, but this doesn't translate to the same effective experience / capability. When I was 20, it took me much longer to become productive with any new thing than it is now when I'm 30. A 20-year old with a 6-month experience with a new language would struggle a lot even with basic concepts. A 30 (or better 40) year old, who already knows 10 other languages and a ton of frameworks would pick it up in single days or weeks and became productive very fast, leaving him much more time to dig into the advanced concepts.

When I was about 18 years old, I struggled hard with a math proof related to number theory a teacher gave me. I never solved it then when I was at school and soon moved on to some other things. Recently, when on vacation I recalled that puzzle and started thinking about it just for fun. I solved it in a few minutes by just drawing with a stick on the sand. I never studied theoretical maths nor dealt with it professionally, so I had no direct experience in doing math proofs. Somehow, my capability now is much better than it was 10 years ago. I call it "indirect experience".
Let's Play...Have Fun and Learn with EduGames
Recently I interviewed a candidate, who upon meeting me said "Oh, I was expecting somebody older". It seems it cuts both ways: if you are a manager you are supposed to appear "older", otherwise some people have difficulty reporting into you.