skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much overlap is there between the types of companies in this article and the typical "we can't find anyone qualified to hire!" company? I suspect it's not total, but there's probably some overlap.

I can't wait until these 22 year olds of today hit their 40s and they reap what they've sown.

Zuckerburg said "younger people are just smarter"? Certainly there's a degree of hubris in youth that you don't lose without experiences of failure and compromise. But that's usually not "smarts" - just youth. I've had similar encounters with people where I've been able to guess parts of their business (and failures), and it's because I've already had my own.

One example - pardon the long rant...

I did a bit of prototyping with some college students about 15 months ago. Core idea was "coursera/udacity for medical students" - something like that. Being medical students, they saw a lack of useful material focusing on them, and wanted to fill that niche. "You'll have trouble getting content, and will likely run in to IP issues with professors and universities". I said this within the first 10 minutes of meeting them. "Oh no, we've already got people lined up, ready to create content," was the reply.

That intrigued me, because content is the hardest part. We met again, and again, and I did a small (small - like weekend prototype) set of code to let people upload instruction content based on the structure we'd laid out. Then.... nothing. Days to weeks to months... Nothing. What happened? They mistook "hey, great idea! yeah, I'll do it" sort of nice/polite feedback as real commitment. The few instructors who actually were interested in going further discovered they had to clear their involvement with their respective universities, as it seemed to constitute teaching and would conflict with their existing contracts (IIRC it could have been worked out with money/licensing, but there was no revenue at this point).

So... months later after a lot of legwork on their end, they came to the conclusion that I'd come to after 10 minutes. That's not to say "Ha, I was right, dumb idea" - the idea will happen, imo. They just sort of ignored me - I was an 'outsider' - they 'knew the space', etc. I'm the old guy who's not at university - how could I possibly know what student life is like now, in 2012? They could have saved themselves a lot of time by focusing on the issues I'd identified up front (which... was not just tooting my horn here - an older colleague identified the same issues on the same initial evening meeting).

But hey, "younger people are just smarter," right? Nothing is so cut and dried. Smarter people are smarter, energetic people are energetic, etc. There are 50 year olds that run rings around many 25 year olds that I know, both physically and activity-wise.
Flagged.

Was hoping for something more than a lousy t-shirt.
He's mentioned it on the forums directly, though I'm not in a position to dig it up right now. It's fairly easy to infer that he sold a lot at low prices, from his posts it doesn't seem that he is particularly rolling in the stuff. Probably best not to speculate on such things too much though unless he specifically brings it up.
I'm not sure I see this:

> The first is if you have only six months of experience
doing something your pay is likely to reflect that.

My experience is building things has very little to do with the current frameworks and languages. Building a payroll system with a NoSQL back end and an AWS front end is "different" than building the same with an Xwindows client and an Oracle back end, but the things that may a payroll system "good" or "bad" often have nothing to do with the bricks and mortar and more to do with the kinds of things that typically go wrong or requirements that are left unstated. Someone with 20 years of experience writing programs will often know that part much better than someone who has yet to experience them.

> You can hire a twenty year old or a fifty year old.
They have the same experience with whatever the
latest thing is. The twenty year old has the energy
of youth. No wife or children. He may come in
hungover occasionally but with enough Red Bull
he'll bounce back by noon.

That however is what sounds like actual age discrimination, that might be like not hiring a woman because "Darn it she decides to have a kid and then what? Force me to pay maternity leave? No thank you!" or "Hire that blind guy? Really like we all we need around here is someone whose computer keyboard costs more than a Retina Macbook, No thank you!" or any number of people "not like you."

> Who do you think is going to be more productive?
Who's going to put in 16 hour days at crunch time?

That is a good question, but one where the answer might surprise you. One of them might not have to put in 16 hours a day a crunch time, and one of them might be more productive in 6 hours than the other is in 12.

But if you assume work performance based on age, gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, you will always be doing it wrong.
The old Blackberry OS had something like this. You could "open" a URL even without any network connectivity and it would queue the request and let you know when it completed.
Top 5 eCommerce Solutions
It's hard to draw correlation between someone captured in iran and the many convicts in solitary confinement. Prisoners aren't just put into solitary for any arbitrary reason, many times it's due to a consistent history of violence outside and inside the prison system. While a woman and her husband getting nabbed is a completely different situation.

In any case, it seems obvious that solitary will affect mental health. But what do we do for consistently violent offenders? Clearly they do not function in general population. Do they get a solitary buddy to talk to for a few hours a day?
In the valley I think I'd rather be a software engineer than a doctor or lawyer if I wanted to maximize my expected career earnings.
And if you'd like to try your own hand at solving problems using some of these algorithms (a good way to get some hands-on practice in your favourite new language), Rosalind [1] offers a gentle learning curve.

There are hundreds of problems on the site, roughly graded by difficulty, easiest first. In the beginning you get to solve a few easy problems. As you solve each problem, more problems become available for you to try.

They are "a platform for learning bioinformatics through problem solving" so many of the problems are about strings, but there are also problems on graphs and other structures.

They also have a new section called "Algorithmic Heights", which is "A collection of exercises in introductory algorithms to accompany "Algorithms", the popular textbook by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani." I have submitted this for discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456390

[1] http://rosalind.info

(Edit: Minor fixes.)
I use Ghostery, but I believe it has been chided in the past for its 'GhostRank' feature (which, to their credit, isn't on by default).

This is anonymous usage tracking of the trackers encountered which is sold to businesses to "help them market to consumers more transparently, better manage their web properties and comply with privacy standards."

I would like to see more of a comparison of 'effectiveness' of both extensions though, if such a thing were possible.
Have I missed some news, or is your inclusion of Microsoft in the cabal erroneous?
Are you saying I'm in the wrong? If so, I'm not sure how you could justify that. The man was offending, distracting, and annoying everyone on the bus. His behavior wasn't illegal, but it should certainly be discouraged. Besides, photographing someone in a public place when they're currently being recorded by CCTV is about as benign an action as one can take.

I apologize if I've misinterpreted your comment.
Depends on what one defines as "competent" and the problem space. A lot of colleges that the thirty and under set that I've talked with don't always have a required path in CS that teaches systems and architecture, let alone C (or assembler). So, if one expect such from someone with a CS degree, that could be an issue.

The tooling accessible to people today as opposed to those that started 10 years prior is also extremely different. Running Windows? Trumpet Winsock, understanding the win.ini, config.sys, and autoexec.bat were important. Linux - a lot of people have wasted a lot of time getting sound and video drivers (as well as xf86config files) to work right, most just work fine now. All these required a level of digging that required knowing more about the system than you may have wanted.

Not saying your point isn't valid, but it does depend on what one's definition of "competent" is.
Comparing the financial performance of Netflix vs. HBO
$40 million is admirable. You could do that with a flat team where everyone knows everyone else and operate out the back of an established retail business.

Scaling that up would mean having three tiers of management, scores of interns, nobody knowing the names of anyone in the warehouse, the product team not talking to the customer care team, whole departments dealing with accounts things, it just goes on. You could have 100-250 extra people without noticing, banks to pay off, vast premises to rent, a huge marketing bill, considerable IT infrastructure and so on.

This would be fine if you really were that smart and that good. Why, you could be the next Amazon.com, even put them out of business. What is alarming is that people think that way, they let greed and arrogance cloud their judgement. It is like a disease.
I actually moved from the midwest to NYC for exactly that reason. I can't afford the in state public university in my home state, so I had to move here, as ridiculous as that sounds. Luckily, NYC is not nearly as expensive as people make it out to be. I pay about $200/month more in living expenses, but it's $10,000/year cheaper to go to school here and I get free health care through medicaid (important since I have a very painful health condition). I have no family support, so I have to make it work through, well, work and what little money I can get from federal financial aid.

I'm really grateful CCNY still exists to provide me a path out of poverty. However, they're hiking tuition by $800/year for the next few years, so soon it'll be unaffordable, too...
Indeed. This will be Apple's lever to make sure it never faces any credible tech competitor in selling media again.
I had to scroll halfway down the page to find your comment, which still depressed me.

As another young 20-something, I always wonder why people are so quick to use the "administrative bloat" or "federal loans" arguments when discussing rising tuition. The data seems to clearly support the relation between state funding and tuition costs, and yet less substantiated claims continue to rise to the top.

Do I think college administrations could stand to lay off some people? Sure. Does that mean that those extra employees are the reason I'm saddled with $40k in loans? Hell no. If you don't want to pitch in to fund college educations, then fine, but don't act like the reason students are paying more isn't because of you.
One might argue that in decisions about how to allocate a university's budget, they are the most powerful voting bloc.
The software industry has been growing rapidly in recent decades, and the growth has been concentrated in a few geographic areas. So employers in those areas (especially Silicon Valley, and also smaller hubs like Seattle and Boston) have to recruit a lot of their workers from other regions, as their job openings grow faster than the "organic" growth of the local worker population.

Theory: This importing of workers has negative effects on age and gender diversity, since it means a higher proportion of jobs go to people who can easily relocate for work. That includes young people (who are less likely to have kids and/or spouses) and men (who more often receive the primary or larger income in a household). I'm sure you can think of other things that are advantages or disadvantages when it comes to moving to California for a job.

There are ways to test whether this effect exists and how large it is. For example, you could compare age and gender diversity across industries. The theory predicts that age/gender imbalance is correlated with geographic concentration of employment growth for each industry. You could also see whether these imbalances are worse within industry hubs, compared to companies in the same industry outside the hubs. (Though the effect can also spread outside the hubs if it influences a culture that gets exported to the rest of the industry.)

I'll bet geographers or sociologists have published research on this subject, though I don't know enough to search for it effectively. (I found some vaguely related papers on Google Scholar, but nothing yet with data that would directly answer these questions.) There are some historical parallels of course, like gold rushes and resource extraction booms that cause new industries to grow suddenly in a particular area.
Have you tried blocking the internet access to HackerNews from the office?
I always figured that if I had to go to prison, I would rather solitary. As long as you can get decent books and have a TV, which is typical in the US, it sounds vastly better than having to sleep in a common area with dozens of real criminals (also typical enough).

It doesn't surprise me that men who get solitary for violent infractions hate it. These are hyper-social people, who need continuous interaction with others, whether as a friend or a competitor or a predator. By contrast, I can go weeks without speaking to a person. It just doesn't sound that bad, relatively.

Obviously, I'm speculating. But a real test, taking ordinary people and subjecting them either to solitary or a confined population of thugs, and comparing the results, would be pretty unethical. 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.
Shipping dates are therefore always met according to Scrum: just stop developing at the deadline and release the product in whatever state it was in at the end of the last Sprint.

The author perpetuates the myth that scrum is incompatible with businesses that have hard real-world deadlines. This is not true. Nothing in scrum requires you to blindly plow forward working through an un-altered backlog one week at a time until you either miss a big deadline or release a half-baked product. All scrum requires is that when adjustments are made (like cutting features in the face of an upcoming deadline), they are made according to an orderly process of prioritization that occurs during sprint planning and while grooming the backlog.

What agile buys you is early warning when inconsistent objectives emerge, so you can make adjustments well in advance instead of in a last-minute panic right before the deadline. Sprint-by-sprint demos ensure that you really know where you stand versus your backlog and roadmap. No more, "I think we're about 20% done with that".
I'd love to see those contracts. They either have to put in a nice big juicy monetary penalty(If it's not your new employer will cover it) that each year at your pay review you can point to and say you obviously think me leaving is worth this much why am I paid 2-20% of it, or they chuck in a non-compete which are often unenforceable (unless they continue to pay you) or doesn't really matter to the hiring company as they can stick you with an unrelated project as they're not looking to capitalize on your skill as much as screw the other company. Really the only way I see it working is with deffered forms of payment which means more equity or performance bonuses. Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough.
"If someone doesn't keep up with currently relevant technology, they will find themselves without the job skills that employers are looking for, regardless of whatever other qualities they may have. This isn't ageism."

Except.... I do see younger people getting hired who don't necessarily keep up with current technology. It may just be that they're ultimately cheaper, and it's just financial. But I do suspect that older devs are held to a higher standard on this front ("what? you're still using Rails 3? luddite!")

It's not necessarily rational unless the company holds all candidates to the same standards ("current with technology", for example).
From https://disconnect.me/disconnect :

Common tracking sites – Facebook, Google, and Twitter – are shown separately to make them easy to block or unblock. Click any icon to block or unblock a site.

...

Click the Facebook or Twitter icons to share these stats with your friends.

Anyone else find that rather ironic?
The Florence, Colorado Federal SuperMAX is the one of particular note. There are lots of people in there that are political prisoners locked away for no good reason.

The 21st hijacker - Zacarius Moussaoui - is a case in point. He had nothing to do with 9/11 yet during an early turf war between government departments vying for the money that went with The War Against Terror he got pretty much framed. He had over-stayed his visa and done nothing of harm to anyone, yet someone had to be scape-goated by the State Department.

There are plenty more 'suspected al-qaeda' locked away there, with conditions every bit as bad as Guantanamo, yet locked up purely so that once upon a time a President could have some orange terror alert pushing everything else out of the news headlines for a couple of days.

Sure there are the psychos that tried to kill prison staff elsewhere in the system that get the SuperMAX treatment, however, the Florence facility is too much like the Tower of London dungeons as used in medieval times.
I don't think this anecdote really illustrates your point. One day, some naive kid will actually be stupid enough to solve this problem. For that matter, I would guess a large number of highly successful startups solve exactly these sorts of problems. pg calls these schlep problems- http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html. I agree, this is not a cut and dry space.
lost it at bogo sort
More for the rest of us. If you're too old for most startups to look twice at your resume, apply to CircleCI: https://circleci.com/jobs. We value experience, and our backend is even written in Lisp [1].

[1] As we all know, all greybeards use Lisp ;)
Young people just smarter. Also, less experienced this is why they re-invent hot water every day (hello node.js). I have seen "young people" fail countless time because they could not get away from the "being in the Silicon valley, I must be super smart and I am always right" attitude. The most performant techie people are 30+ with significant relevant experience, they are not getting horny about a useless new technology over a blog post, understand the stack all the way, fluent in their language(s) and can make great decisions based on their experience (wisdom) and knowledge. The CEOs in their mid 20s are guys, nobody will remember maybe 1 out of 100 makes it to history the rest is just going to lead a mediocre company and quit when they realize that the IPO won't get them anywhere (if they make it to the IPO at all). As Paul Graham pointed out regarding LISP, using something that your competitors don't understand gives you an edge. Apply the same to hiring, and get some 30+ guys on your team now! Will ya?!?!?! :)
Older workers, while more experienced, are also more expensive. You can't hire a 40 or 50 yo hacker for what you can pay someone a few years out of college.

On the other hand there is a basic cost to each employee regardless of salary, so the higher pay is not proportionally as high as comparing salaries.

On the gripping hand, older employees often have families, who incur more expense for health care and so on. You can expect older people to have health issues on their own, too. This is a fairly big deal in the US, where the health care payment system is broken.
I guess I don't understand what 'Net' is. Is it the cost of the government, so if I earn 20k on the open market, are given 20k and taxed 10k (I have 30k in my pocket, and the gov has spent 10k)?
This also happens with Ghostery and to a lesser extent, Adblock. I switched from Ghostery to Disconnect and have found Disconnect to be a little better at not breaking some sites.

The worst sites I've ran into while using Ghostery/Disconnect are the ones that have a Google Analytics action tracking code in the middle of their Javascript methods (since the addons block GA) so the entire site/app fails to work.

Developers need to start testing their sites with these addons more to make sure silly errors like that aren't done (some optional tracking request failing to complete shouldn't make an entire app fail).
As long as you can see the sun, you need that. And it's got to be thick enough to stop secondary particles, a really thin shield can be worse.

The Apollo missions were timed for the part of the sun's cycle where activity was low, and I've read that their early termination was due in part to the schedule slipping and the last few planned missions edging into the period where the probability of a solar storm killing the astronauts became uncomfortably high.
Yeah, oil barons could voluntarily agree on selling for 500$/barrel as well and you could voluntarily not buy from them. Same goes for cable companies or electricity vendors or any other monopoly.
That would kinda suck if people controlling most of the resources (or all of them in given area) would agree to not compete. That's why it's immoral and illegal.
Wow, thank you for donating. I spent 5 years in federal prison, and the FAMM newsletters (FAMM-grams, they were called) were always helpful, and usually contained a glimmer of hope for fixing sentencing disparity. I knew plenty of people (non-violent drug offenders) with insane sentences of 10, 20, 30 years. Anyway, I just want to make sure you know that your donation actually does make a difference to real people.
So computer and pencils are involved in killing millions of people a year around the world, and over 50,000 a year in the USA?
The source is at: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect
I've been using Abine's DoNotTrackMe for a while. Is this any different/better?
Didn't you notice the teespring domain? That domain should be auto-flagged on HN.
Honestly I've found for the most part that those who work 6-9 hours get more done than those who work 10+. Usually those spending 10+ are playing catchup or learning a new technology at the same time.
> The best way to combat ageism is to stay technically relevant.

As I get older, I find that is easier said than done. I still spend quite a lot of time learning new things, but I've become less interested in learning things that are immediately marketable. Learning yet another framework that is marginally different than the one I used on the last project is not the interesting pursuit it once was. At this point I would rather invest that time in something that might fundamentally change my outlook and understanding of the world, which is beneficial in a meta way, but isn't really something that you can specifically write down on a resume.
Unfortunately the java links have been domain squatted
Maybe some kind of intranet access to chat with other prisoners locally ? It does not replace human contact, but it can bring some benefits nonetheless to make one feel less lonely.
Keep in mind that most of us aren't earning pensions and our 401Ks are earning peanuts so retirement at 60 effectively means "living on social security and whatever you managed to scrape together". Retirement will mean poverty for a great many people, I fear.