skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked as a COBOL programmer for two years (well, technically I did 2 summer internships and two short winter stints) so I have a little insight into the "community."

I worked at a (successful) company that develops banking software and processes bank data. The majority of our data processing and operations codebase was written in COBOL, running on some Unisys mainframes. There is a growing population of .NET developers on the team, but for the most part the cube farm is full of COBOL programmers. In general they don't read HN, use StackOverflow, or any other online community that I'm aware of. For the most part, when they need support they ask one of the local dinosaurs. I have noticed that most of them don't use their career to define themselves like a lot of "modern" programmers (myself included) do. I think it's more of a 9-5 for them.

And they don't seem to hate COBOL, either. In fact, a lot of them like it. I think part of the reason is that it's one of the first languages they were exposed to, and one of the first mainframe-based languages that "made sense."

It really is everywhere (although 80% seems high), but you don't usually find it in any of the glamorized jobs. It's heavily used in the banking, healthcare, insurance, and payroll industries.

I'm still working for the same company, but I'm doing .NET stuff now.
Decatur, GA
St. Petersburg, Florida here.
More or less. Rockville, MD
Playing Door games in RIP. It was like living in the future.

Thems was the times.
I'd guess everything worked fine, as he was able to unzip the single zip file on the floppy.
Omaha, Nebraska
I'm in Milwaukee as well. Great city.
Yes, the ZIP file was perfectly intact and there was nothing else on the floppy. It's worth noting the size of the ZIP file: it took up almost the entire disk.
And another Zürich-based (well, Dübendorf, but it's near enough, hey?) HN reader chiming in.

Soon to be Washington DC.
I enjoy Gruber's Daring Fireball.
http://daringfireball.net/
That might only work for the map though. I wouldn't want to have to download a pre-rendered tile every time that I moved a unit. It would make more sense to just pre-render the map tiles, and possibly the city tiles. Then the units would still have to be downloaded to the client and drawn on top of the map.

The same goes for changes that occur to the map (at least changes within the current view). Map tile improvements would be a pain if you had to download a section of the map just to update a single tile. It would probably make sense to have the sprites on-hand to update the currently viewed map section, and have it automatically added to future pre-rendered tile updates. This way you wouldn't have to download the map you already have to see the improvement, but when you downloaded future sections (or even come back to the current section) it will be part of the pre-rendered section.

All of this is disregarding whether or not there is a mode to show the map without improvements on it (IIRC, there was an option like this in Civ2). Then you might have to change these design decisions to accommodate that unless you're ok with the user needed to re-download all map sections whenever that options is flipped on/off.
CoreyLib: Universal XML/API Parser for PHP
Back during my year of unemployment after the first dot-com bubble burst, I met a woman who had been unemployed for two or three years, and she had COBOL experience. We got jobs within about a month of each other (she recommended me for a company that hired me, then I recommended her for a managerial opening at the same place), at a Java shop. So at least one of the following must be true:

* employers weren't all that desperate for COBOL programmers

* hiring managers in the COBOL world tended to be male chauvinist pigs

* this woman preferred unemployment to working in a COBOL shop
It's not enough to do anything, you're still limited to things a wealthy private investor could do - but a state can still do a lot more.

In the late 1700s, John 'Iron Mad' Wilkinson, British industrialist and inventor of the first iron boat offered to pay off the entire national debt.

With a mere $500M you couldn't build a motorway of any significance, you couldn't buy so much as a medium sized town, you'd struggle to build the world's tallest building unless it was just a spike, you couldn't jump start a large company such as an Intel/AMD competitor or an Amazon competitor or create license and market a new cellphone unless you had a very low cost startup/bootstrap approach.

You couldn't amass a world class art collection or establish an underwater city, fund a significant amount of anti-aging research or push a bill through congress or have your own Formula 1 team or brute force your way to the moon with some Flanderys domes, some GM plants and a seed terraforming plan.

In short, you could live a hedonistic life, become famous, seed invest, philanthrophise, give something back, make local successes, but you couldn't "really be disruptive" on the world scale.
Nashua New Hampshire, USA. (To the West thereof).
This article could be alternatively titled "characteristics of programmers I wouldn't want to work with".

Seriously, this sounds like a recipe book for one person writing code in isolation that nobody cares about, rather than any sort of serious criteria for judging the merits of a web developer.

Personally, I think being a good web developer is just the same as being a good developer. You always need to have a good working knowledge of your problem domain. You need to understand the environment you work in.

My favourite part was "needs to know english. Did you born in USA, UK, Canada, Australia or any other english speaking country?". Did I was ever!
LOL. The ways how you use your phone are illegal? Nope. The way Apple bans legitimate software are illegal. Imagine Microsoft banning some software from usage on your Windows PC.
In your opinion, why do you think they stay away from HN or Stack Overflow? Is it just that there's nothing there for them specifically or would you say that they're (on average) less interested in the wider programming ecosystem?
Everybody goes through that. "COBOL? What's the big deal? I think I'll try learning it some weekend."

Then they actually try learning it.

Then they are enlightened.
Phoenix here
Honestly, after living in Toronto for the last 3 months, I'd compare it more to Los Angeles than NYC.

Certainly safer than either LA or NYC, though. One of the safest Canadian cities, actually.
Creating a subscribe button with CSS
Chapel Hill, NC.

Miss living in Durham, though.
There's no question that newspapers often (sometimes?) do good reporting -- the Chicago Tribune is a great example of this. The real question is, are people willing to pay money for it and is it enough to maintain a business? I (and many others) would argue that the current structure of newspapers is not going to be profitable. When 90% of your content is filler from the AP or Reuters, why should people pay for it? The day of general purpose news organizations (with the exception of a few like AP and Reuters) is fast coming to an end.
Lexington, Kentucky
neat. It would be nice to do a sampling of many different storage media after a decade or more and see what the error rate is. Your example makes me wonder if we shouldn't wait another decade. It'll be harder and harder to find the hardware though.
An Interview with Rich Hickey about Clojure (A-Z series)
A grand total of 61 questions have been tagged on StackOverflow with 'cobol': http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/cobol

For comparsion, the count for "C#" is over 30,000, ".net" is close to 20,000, and "java" is about 17,000.
Malign Competition: Watch Out
It usually goes for about $30 / 750ml, which isn't the cheapest option but not really expensive relative to a lot of whiskey.
I'm still skeptical about the Cydia Store. I won't spent money on apps that might stop working with any update Apple may release. At least with the App Store I'm reasonably certain my applications will work on a future iPhone.

Also, 3G Unrestrictor has sold 10,000 times for $2 in the Cydia Store when you can get the VoipOver3G app for free? I also don't get why anyone would rather by something from the Cydia store (iWipe) than the App Store (iEraser). My guess would be the last one suffers from bad reviews.
+1 and I know from other threads that there are several more Houstonianon on HN too.
> Any magic reason for the 140 char limit is pretty much gone now.

This is incredibly short-sighted. I, for one, still only use Twitter via text. If Twitter allowed for longer messages, I'd be out, as would many of the people that I know.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but just becasue everyone you know uses an app, does not mean that everyone does. I'm sure txt is still _really important_ to Twitter overall.
..:: Twitter[1] Train Station Availability ::..

Twitter <--> HTML Status Page gateway so that commuters on twitter (lets say Streeters ) can tweet which stations are closed, or how long journeys are taking.

Streeters tweet to a protocol e.g. ::

@tubechannel: s:Canary Wharf e:Bond Street 50m

would say my journey from Canary Wharf to Bond Street took 50 mins (normal 20).

.

If you gave Streeters Karma, you could filter out the trolls (hope above experience)

Other commuters read your Status Page and see Google Adsense advertising.

---

[1] I don't use twitter, please forgive any slight format unrealities
As a point of strategy, let's hope that the tr.im founders knew they were taking a big gamble, because this was pretty obvious from the beginning.

With no clear business model except for a hope that someone buys them out, it was just a lottery ticket.

A business like a URL shortener is a particularly dangerous one, since if you succeed your costs skyrocket quickly yet you still have no business model. This forces people quickly to either sell or shut down. Even worse, you're likely to succeed at getting users since everyone knows what it is and needs one, tricking you into thinking you're succeeding when all you're doing is bleeding money.

If you're starting a business doing something that everyone loves and there are already 10 of them but you have no business model, you should probably stop right away unless you have some serious capital, preferably external capital.

There's gotta be at least another couple dozen of these failure coming in the future....
Every Second Counts
Prabhadevi.
Ask HN: Many Ideas but No "Hacking" Skills
I see many people posting here asking about ideas. Also, I see many new startups that are ONLY geared toward TechCrunch RSS subscribers.

I'm in the other end of the spectrum, after graduating w/ BSEE I been working in "real world" for couple of years. I see many simple apps that would would greatly benefit users in my industry and many other "real world" ideas.

So, I been trying to learn programming to build these apps (simple commenting/ratings). I been learning PHP/MySQL (mostly from w3schools) but in 6 months I went from a beginner to low-intermediate. I simply gave up because it takes me weeks to write something, that an expert can in hours.

What should I do:

1) keep on learning and do it by myself (not very reasonable)?

2) Hire contractors? (how do i begin? how much to pay?)

3) Apply to YC? (how realistic is it, if i only bring ideas and real world experience)

4) Any of you guys want to partner up? (How would we breakup ownership?)
Fort Worth for me, close enough to Dallas right?
I'm not sure this kind of entrenchment is endemic of COBOL programmers specifically. I knew plenty of people in college who, once they knew Java, were perfectly content with their ability to program, and will probably be happily employed for the foreseeable future. I think it just boils down to the difference between the 9am-5pm'ers and the 5pm-9am'ers.
I don't know if I'd trust a government-run organization to do any deep investigation of its masters, though.
In Raleigh as well
Maximize your RSS potential in minutes with these Wordpress plugins
Review: Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
me too...!!
+1 midtown
Bangalore N Boston -
Manassas, Virginia USA.
Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
UP the road from you, Crownsville, MD.

I saw something before about meetups, but I'm somewhat new to the area. Anybody know of anything in our area?
Startup Tips from the Notorious BIG
The Notorious BIG's classic track "Ten Crack Commandments" is decomposed to reveal ten useful tips for startup founders.
Ask HN: Do you actively contribute to open source projects?
If so, which project(s)? I'm curious how much overlap exists between startup hackers and open source hackers.
An enterprise-level application called SITS is heavily used by UK universities and colleges to manage courses, degree programs, student records and timetabling (for classes and exams).

SITS is cumbersome, expensive and has a truly appalling user experience. It is painful to use.

SITs is a very bad system but is deeply entrenched. Making something that is better should be very, very easy. Getting UK universities to switch should be very, very difficult.

Solve this and make many millions.
Dakar, Sénégal (West Africa)
Top Breast Cancer Myths
Agreed, I want to go freelance and get to work on a lot of different projects and things constantly.
My company is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where my partner lives. But I live most of the time in Barcelona. You should come to this:
http://www.sunsandandstartups.com
Field Notes + the Marvy Le Pen [http://www.lythastudios.com/marvy/] for walking around and making notes with.

Rhodia [http://www.rhodiapads.com/] and Whitelines [http://www.whitelines.se/en/] are great for sit-down work.
The SMS handling process runs as root. The protocol is used for all kinds of device <--> network traffic. Developers have the ability to make these SMS messages look however they want them to. Users have no indication when a malicious SMS is received.

I think we may see some real exploits happen soon.
Living here or just on holiday?
Did that analogy give anyone else shivers down their spines? That isn't to say that separating mechanism from policy is a bad idea.

I just hope that we get the words "client" and "server" defined correctly this time around.
And here's the bug in Sun's tracker that suggested switching in the first place: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6804124
I'm wondering whether google wave can solve the problem of having to use overly complicated interfaces like email or social sites just to share a link with friends.

I feel like I should be able to drag and drop an image or link into something and have it show up on my friend's computer.
I think that Google Wave will be interesting for the social place it falls into. Will it be the new Usenet, or IRC, or web forums? Will it be large and unified ("I'm on Wave, hit me up"), or fragmented ("Yeah, I switched over to the wave Matt's running. You should try it out")?

These are the interesting parts, I think.
Was Chicago just moved to hide in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania, two + hrs north of Philadelphia.
Excuse my ignorance, but I didn't understand a word of what the article was about. Could you explain me?
And then cry, if they are on your team. 5-10 mins of a flash game during a break ? No problem, it will help them relax. Several hours of FreeCiv (and Civ is a huge time-sink) ? Not during the workday, God no.
I'll reply here as swombat has raised the point that struck me.

My first question really WOULD be why are thye not using SVN. It could be they are: or perhaps using Git, Mercurial etc. (I would personally go with mercurial over anything else on a smaller team).

Or it could be that as they work in an office together they have different methods of source control between themselves.

Your first job is obviously to get some proper offsite SCM (I always recommend offsite for a small startup - that way you have a few guarantees. BitBucket (mercurial) give you one free private (hidden) repository [1] and GitHub (git) have fairly cheap plans for private repos [2]. Both of these integrate with most of the popular ticket / project management sites with little work.

Swombat is right: if they dont have any kind of control going on with their code then your looking at some bad programmers. But I would say SCM discipline is easy enough to learn: so dont automatically give up on them. Find out what their preference is (if any) and work with them on a good workflow plan for how to get the code into SCM and how to checkout and develop it from there on a day ot day basis (a common problem we have here with SCM noobs is that they tend to forget to check in at the end of the day, for example, or at lunch. Eventually leading to all manner of pain!). As it's a small office it should be easy to manage though :)

[1] http://bitbucket.org/plans/

[2] http://github.com/plans

EDIT: as an addendum I would personally ignore all the comments about adopting Agile development practices (especially things like Scrum which was specifically mentioned).

The major reason is that they simply do not work as well for you as they do for the people that "invented" the practice. Strict guidelines never work if you just implement them. Agile tends to be for teams that want to sound trendy and hip ;) it's faster just to develop your own process naturally.

Also if you leap into the office with all these new "agile" ideas you'll just be considered "management type" and probably not be greeted well by the existing team. You obviously need to bring in stuff but in as relaxed a way as possible is probably best. As it is a small team it wont take long to have a few meetings to decide the way forward - and with so few members there is not likely to be long drawn out discussions.

If you go in with some sensible stuff like SCM and workflow ideas and ask what they think of them you'l get a good response I'll bet.

Oh - and outline your role to them as clearly as possible. They might, for example, think your beign brought in to assess them and get rid of them (which in a way might be true - but best not to say that :D) rather than to manage the product so they can get on and code.

Hope that helps.
Say what you will, but T-Mobile has been an outstanding company - I've used them for 5+ years and I can't tell you the discounts, offers, late fees, other misc things they've taken care of. You get a sense they really value their customers, and especially value a long patronage with them.

I will be sticking with T-Mobile, as they just feel less evil than other cell phone companies.

In fact, even if I really wanted an iphone, I refuse to go at&t, I pay $50 less for unlimited nationwide calling, have 3G and a G1, close enough.
San Francsico, CA
Buffalo, New York
Sure:

http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/

And lots of little bits and pieces here and there.
Campfire is a metaphor for collaboration, that's different. He's named his product something specific that's materially incorrect.
I'm in Wilmington, about 30 mins away
As a programming guy I can tell you mild OCD is basically a requirement for programmers.
Decatur/Candler Park, GA, US
Bit.ly's not the only one who's made this offer. Whether the tr.im people see it as a helping hand or an opportunity to sell their stuff, though, is up to them.

I have half a feeling that this whole deal was designed to instigate a buyout. It certainly got enough peoples' attention.
-> Putney
COBOL has fixed point maths built-in, ergo it's popularity in accounting and business applications.

Most COBOL code is straightforward file "read-process-output". I could easily see a system that _generated_ COBOL code to do assigned tasks: the generator would maintain the database and a description of transformations. The developer would work at that level and never look at COBOL code.

But someone's probably written such a system in COBOL!-)
Hacking key/value localStorage to allow database-like collections:

http://mylittlehacks.appspot.com/localstorage

(Firefox only)
Zagreb, Croatia/Hrvatska
I did reasonably significant work on the ModelJUnit project for several months, but these days I'm back to concentrating on my own crazy schemes.

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~marku/mbt/modeljunit/
No problem, it's a pretty academic exercise what they're doing there but it is very interesting for lots of reasons.

The game of life is a cellular automaton 'game' designed by John Conway, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life for lots more detail.

Conways life has been proven to be 'Turning complete', which means that it can compute anything worth computing, even though due to practical limitations (time, memory) plenty of things that you could compute in theory in practice are not worth waiting for.

The basis of the 'Turing Completeness' argument for the game of life revolves around the 'glider', a simple pattern that moves across the grid that the 'life' cells play out their existence on. These gliders can be set up and timed in such a way that you can form simple logic gates with them, and from these simple gates you can construct more complicated digital logic circuitry, like adders and so on.

This in turn can lead to a life based universal computer, and it seems that these people have done just that. On top of that they seem to have a 'translator' that will produce the 'life' pattern you need to compute arbitrary calculations, which is the essence of a higher level language (the 'machine' language of life could be considered the initial state of the cells, to produce that you could set them all up by hand or you could have a computer program help you doing it).

I hope that explains it accurately enough and I hope that if it is accurate that it is clear.
Springfield, Missouri / Kansas City / Chicago
Define contribute? I tend to dabble in different things and contribute small patches for bug fixes, features etc. where I think it would be useful ;)

My friends call it Ninja Hacking.
The idea that you could foresee what you want in life and that what you need to reach that is money is astonishingly naive :)
I think it's a combination of factors. The obvious factor is that there is no COBOL content there. These communities tend to be focused on new and developing technologies, which aren't really relevant to their work most of the time.

I think the less obvious factor is related to the COBOL mentality. In COBOL's heyday, they didn't have communities like this (yeah yeah, usenet, BBS, I know, I know) so they figured out how to live without them. The old whitehaired COBOL gurus passed these traditions down, and it just became a way of life. Any COBOL-related help you need can probably be provided by the lifer in the cube down the aisle. They are a fairly self-sufficient group.

That being said, I am interested to see how the COBOL community changes when people from my generation start taking these jobs. I didn't stop reading when I was hired, and I don't think that most of the others will, either.
Eindhoven here as well (sometimes Berlin)
Kharagpur, India ( currently studying here )
How could we replace the capacity of the NYC subway?
An open letter to Joe "pansy boy" Abercrombie
The legality of this varies from state to state in the US. Where I live, Kansas City, MO only one of the parties on the line has to be aware of the recording, so this would be fine.
Personally, I would hire a professional, not necessarily a contractor, that can get the work done in a reasonable amount of time. Do you have any friends that are programmers that can assist you?
I'm the Security Officer for the FreeBSD operating system... does that count? :-)

EDIT: I should add that this is one of the main reasons I got started in the field of online backups: There were lots of online backup solutions available, but I wasn't impressed with their security -- and due to being FreeBSD Security Officer, I tend to have sensitive information (e.g., about unannounced security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL/BIND/Sendmail/Apache/etc), making it absolutely essential that my backups be secure.
Twitter could also just have their own URL shortener and require it be used which ensures all links on Twitter last just as long as Twitter does. The web interface could even show expanded URLs (or at least domain) since they'd automatically have that information on hand.