skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been programming professionally since 1986 when I had a 70+ year old mentor writing accounting and plant control systems in TurboDOS. Now I code AND design large complex systems using either .NET or Rails. I don't send CV's to people unless they ask for them and they have to know of me in the first place to even ask.

I think the older devs that are still relevant probably don't show up in the job seeking type of data, they are probably already booked with paying work and startups!

:)
Ask HN: Help Me Understand Yosemite's Lock Screen Apple Icon?
Why do you think Apple put their logo as a functionless icon in the top-left corner of the lock screen?

My first impression is that it adds unnecessary clutter to the interface, and is confusing to users because it is functionless in the lock screen (as opposed to being a menu item when the OS is unlocked).

Are there any designers out there who can help me understand the decision? Given the care Apple puts into their designs, I assume that I am missing something. :)

Thanks!
~ Mike

PS: Here's a link I found on google so you can see what I'm talking about:
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3851/14147481657_389c093f30_b.jpg
I think we're both right. He seems to have gone the independent contractor route - which is a perfectly legitimate career path for a rock star developer who wants freedom. It's also incredibly lucrative - independent contractors can easily make double what someone working at a company can while charging half of what contractors from professional services firms do.

But again, there's only so much market demand for that; and I would have trouble believing that more than 10% of his peer group at age 30 went that way.

This is more typical to what I've seen: someone started out as a developer writing back-end code, but noticed that it was more difficult to deploy the code consistently than it was to write. So they started helping out the tech ops team with that, until it became most of their job. Then the tech ops manager quits, and the company needs a replacement. The back-end developer was doing the job anyway; and it's a pay raise, so why not. Now they notice that the real reason it's so hard to deploy back-end code is because the servers are never patched, so they work on a process solution to make sure everything is consistent. The work is still technical in nature, but it's becoming much more process-oriented.

Maintaining a technical skillset is hard. Not many people have the energy to keep it up throughout their 30s when they're having children, taking care of sick parents, etc. So you'll see a lot of people gradually move to the business side - which isn't hard to do when you have an engineering mindset that helps you solve hard problems. It's also often a pay raise anyway.
Ask HN: What is the technology behind S3 and EBS?
I'm having trouble finding articles on the subject. I'm curious about the technology AWS is using behind the scenes to provide highly durable storage through S3 and mountable volumes through EBS.
Paul Krugman did not win the Nobel prize [1].

[1] http://www.alternet.org/economy/there-no-nobel-prize-economi...
git alias cw commit -a -m 'WIP'

;P

(and before the outrage beings, I always push these to my private fork of the main repo, so it's basically just a way of syncing code between machines. Other ways of achieving this with git seem to be always painful; you can push to another machine but only if you rename branches, which is tedious)
So if I sign up, I get the source code, then it will be me installing it from the code and I'll get support. Are the installation instructions available once you create an account?
I've had one issue with iCloud Drive - and that was with Threes. I don't know why/how they're using iCloud, but their instructions to fix it was turning off iCloud Drive for the app.

Other than that, I haven't had any problems. I have seen tweets of people who are having problems, and the most common recommendation I've seen is to turn iCloud Drive off for the app and turn it back on so it regenerates the sync key.
Sex 'emerged in ancient Scottish lake'
That has basically told me "never use iCloud, it's a proprietary Apple system that you can't get your data out of without their blessing".
CEO's and managers get a lot of shit on HN, but there is a reason they make more money (in general, obviously there are exceptions, especially at tech companies). The main reason is that what they do is more valuable.

At most companies the coding required is easy and doesn't require much thought, low-skill = low-pay. The job of allocating capital and people to the highest ROI areas is much more significant to most companies' success than having the best programmers.
I'm 47* and I've been around a bit (dotcom era startups to banking and telecoms) and I'm familiar with the 75% mentioned. There is a type of programmer that works away in blue chips turning up to work on time, doing what's asked of them and then knocking off at half five.

Sure they maybe repeat the same one year's experience year after year perhaps with some technology transitioning years from COBOL to VB to VB.NET or C# or maybe Java, that kinda thing. They'll know Oracle or MS SQL or DB2 well enough to make stuff work, or maybe they call into a message switch (with a pre-wrapped library for their language/framework) to read/write their LOB data.

They work there for years and years collecting their salary and annual (if there are any) bonuses and many will be the last lucky few to hang on to a decent occupational pension, in return to knocking out code to meet business requirements. But they do it well, they know their line of business apps for their organisation's market sector and "how things are done". These are conservative people working in conservative business environments.

The thing is who cares? Many of these folks have interesting lives outside their corporate bunkers which involve travelling the world, renovating houses, flying small aircraft, model trains and enjoying friends and family...and much, much more.

It's just a job and I'm sure these folks will have their own measure of job satisfaction which will be different from ours. It might not be as exciting as the seat of your pants local startup but it pays the mortgage and provides reasonable financial security.

Sure there are no absolute guarantees about job security, but I live in the UK and we're at a lot less risk of being fired for no reason other than "at will". It takes quite a bit of legal effort and cost to make employees redundant, especially in finance where you're fairly likely to be a member of a union (mass redundancies have to be negotiated and consulted on and redundancy payments agreed etc).

It's not depressing, it's just that these folks have different priorities in life.

Scott Hanselman described some of these folks as "Dark Matter Developers"[0].

[0]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...

* To address the Ayende's question, being 47 I'm probably an "older dev" I've worked for the same company since 2003 (ISP/Web Hoster), I like the work, I'm happy there, they treat me well, I work from home, it's (fingers crossed) reasonably secure. It'd take a really seriously good offer to make me change employers. This is not to say that I don't keep abreast of the latest tech and frameworks, the fact that I follow HN should make that abundantly clear; for example we're looking at how we could monetize Docker for our clients - first heard about here.
When I do a search on my local computer, say for a file or some email, there's no reason that data should go to Apple.
It's just another shell company for OVH, not an exclusive they just buy a lot of CPUs (especially Atom chips)

Also, it seems like you and a few others are sockpuppet accounts
I'm only 34 but already I'm finding most developer job ads target much younger developers who like to work hard and play hard. At some point Beer Fridays, foosball and video games stop being appealing "perks" and actually become a disincentive ("I don't want to work where everyone is 15 years younger than me and plays foosball all day!"). So if you're advertising jobs in this fashion you're self selecting for younger devs.

Older devs will just rely on previous connections to find new work or stay in positions that pay well and come with lots of vacation (as/more important than pay to me).
Thanks for your detailed answer. I think you are right in recommending a way of less tight version bounds.
Good to know, so mitm it is then. (If I ever have to play with one of these horribly locked down things).
Improve by working on side projects.
It is a good idea to use a slider with discretion. Sliders like what you have used is a bad usability practice. I wasn't able to slide the slider at all and I wasn't able to navigate the site at all.

But in cases, where you have limited data points to offer, having the slider bar readjust to the next data point is a good idea.
Okay, what I'm about to say might not be too popular with some people, but I'll say it anyway:

How much did you pay for CentOS? Perhaps if more people were willing to pay for RedHat and/or Samba, some of the more obscure bugs would more readily get fixed.

In the general case, developers need to put food on their dinner table and put a roof over their heads. Good quality "free" software only goes so far, OpenBSD pulls it off because they limit the scope of their efforts.

So, instead of complaining about CentOS, buy some RedHat licenses. The end result might not be any different but you'll at least have paid for the right to complain.
You have to purchase a license to get the source code. But yes, there are step by step docs to install Taskfort [Right now it's only Debian instructions but in the future I'll target RHEL and other OS's].

If you want, I can install it for you later tonight when I'm free.
This is the same as doing WIP commits then re-building the history when done, except you can't move your WIP between machines easily, can't leave yourself notes when wrapping up for the day, etc etc
Census Bureau News: 2013 American Housing Survey Released
You're being a little vague. 5% is which markets? A programmer in SF might earn as much as a CXX from North Dakota but the CXX in his market is making a lot more than him. Still, I think at the CXX level the total compensation is a lot more. >$300k? $500k?
Multiple Site GrayLog Servers
Start the Future
Yeah, you're probably right. Irreconcilable differences.

I think the origin of my socialism is that, honestly, I don't trust things. This is a topic that often comes up in Bitcoin threads: there is no such thing as a perfect store of value. There is no thing I can invest my time or money in that will not decay or depreciate over time. Currencies inflate. Houses fall down. Land fluctuates in value and can agriculturally fail. The gold supply inflates at a roughly constant rate of 1.5% as people dig more up. Uranium decays, albeit slowly.

On the other hand, I have a very positive view of social networks. I grew up in the middle of a strong safety net. My parents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles and cousins, we grew up close. If I needed help, they'd give it. If I lost everything today, they'd take me in for as long as I needed. Since then, I've acquired a few close friends who would help me out, with a job or a place to crash.

So even if I cannot trust my things not to betray me, having fifty people and all their resources there to catch me if I fall brings me a great deal of security and comfort. So I like the added layer of protection that comes from a safety net of 300 million people. I don't view taxes as something being taken from me, I view them as an investment I'm making in the only resource which has a chance of holding its own against time, no different than the time and money I invest in my kith and kin.
China collecting Apple iCloud data
Why do you let them treat you like that? There are other options.
what a surprise... the question was not if... but when. and the answer might well be: today.
Why is that so outrageous? Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling became a complete nutcase in later life, for example, strenuously advocating baseless and potentially destructive alternative medicine. Winning a Nobel Prize doesn't make a person immune to misbehavior.
Show HN: Open source chat app built from a static js page (NimbusFoundry)
I've just read their main website. Out bandwidth at $0.01 per GB? Has anybody tried this? Looks too good to be true.
Here's a screenshot: https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3851/14147481657_389c093f30_b...

Looks like nothing but branding to me, but I guess you could argue it provides some sort of consistency with the status bar. It might also be preparation for a more interactive lock-screen similar to what iOS 8 offers (http://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/img_00071.png).
“You Don't Know JS” Book Series
To C heaven
If you constrain a problem enough it eventually becomes impossible. The odds of staying "in the trenches" and getting a management level salary are extremely low outside of a company you own a large portion of or a consultancy. When you have the same skills everyone else has you can't command a salary appreciably greater than theirs.

Why is it this way? Because there are more programmers who can do your job than there are managers who can manage you. You can argue that's unfair, but it's the way it is. The managers have skills that are in demand, and despite what the general HN attitude towards managers/executives is they are important to the success of most businesses.
work in wall street or the City supporting traders and their ghastly self written excel POS - and expect to get the "I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entre wardrobe" gibes
Correct. Also, engineers are promoted "confirmationally" (meaning, after they're performing at level X) and managers are promoted "aspirationally" (when people think they should be able to reach level X). Google prides itself on promoting only confirmationally, and engineers like it that way because it's more meritocratic. The problem is that product people and management still get aspirational promotion, and that's a huge leg up.

Over time, they advance a lot faster than we do. We have to take on above-level responsibilities (which is politically dangerous, because people start to wonder if you're neglecting your at- and below-level job duties) to advance. They don't.
As an old dev (47) who's main focus is now management (the only thing I still program is devops stuff), there are some reasons why I stopped being a developer a few years back:

1) Developers are treated without much respect. Seriously, even with the scarcity, and even when we do get paid well (which is relatively rare) and have nice perks, developers still don't get the kind of respect other similarly highly skilled professionals get. At some point, when you get in your mid-30's and compare yourself with other professionals in the same age group, this really starts to grate.

2) The vast majority of companies still doesn't know how to make developers function properly. Those of us who discuss stuff like Agile, "manager / maker schedule", remote working, the pros and cons of open office plans, etcetera form a tiny minority, and we live in an echo chamber. 90% of all devs are still code monkeys in the basement. As a developer with a bit of experience and authority I decided to put my effort in changing that (i.e., get into management) to make life better for other developers.

3) I felt I was just repeating myself, basically doing the same thing on different platforms in different languages. I found it harder to learn new stuff not because I got "too old to learn", but because I didn't see anything particularly "new" in it, just same shit, different platform, which wasn't particularly motivating. (The only exception is the "cloud", because approaching the infrastructure as a dynamic, programmable resource is actually something new and challenging.)

Salary is still very much an issue. All this talk about developers getting paid so much is total bullshit, with the possible exception of a small minority of SV companies. Developers are seriously underpaid compared to their economic value and scarcity, and it's mostly just a matter of a lack of respect for "techies".

Personally, I don't care about the money (as a manager I currently choose to not get paid more than my best developers, which is making my bosses kinda nervous), but the feeling of getting screwed just pisses me off.

Most of you that are reading this: you are most likely not getting paid what you are worth. Not even close. Yes, even those who think they're doing fine. I've seen the numbers, and as a profession we are collectively getting screwed, with very few exceptions.

There are many professions in which people are less scarce, require less skill, knowledge and experience and add less economic value and still get paid considerably more simply because they are not "techies".
I'm not sure what's your point. Your claim was that constant-time was not a big issue for many people. Maybe it's not. But the Groestl people wrote an entire report on implementation strategies for it [1], specifically mentioning cache-timing issues on the table-based approaches. They clearly took it seriously.

There are many competing requirements when designing a primitive. Groestl's choices were not necessarily wrong, even when treating side-channel attacks as a "big issue". I don't like Groestl, but I get what they were trying to achieve; Keccak did it much better, though.

[1] http://www.groestl.info/groestl-implementation-guide.pdf
Its the reason I still wear my hair in a pony tail - I have good genes and am not losing my hair.
Submitter here, I went with name of project + github title rather than editorialize.
Young people usually write crap code in my 11 years experience. (Not all of them but probably the majority of them).
Not necessarily. Sync--particularly sync which can involve changes at the same time by different devices--is hard. A lot of devs just don't want to fully implement the required mechanisms.
IE 11 doesn't work with Node.js localhost + port
I am sure this isn't intentional, but when trying to purchase a license for TaskFort, I noticed that clicking just about anywhere in the form (in the # of licenses field, next to the Purchase button, etc) caused the "Auto-Renew" checkbox to toggle on and off.

Your product looks great, but that's one hell of a way to turn people off from trusting/paying you.

My experience was on Windows 7 64-bit, Firefox 32.0.3.
That's interesting to know; thanks for posting that. I've never seen failing RAM give SBEs but not MBEs but, like you said, I have not operated servers at large scale. It's good to know that can happen!
We automated this pretty trivially at my last job using Fabric[0]. All we had to do was cycle through a list of servers and apply the remove from LB, update, add to LB steps. Removing from the LB should simply block until connections drain (or some reasonable timeout). It makes deploys take longer for sure, but avoiding the inevitable killing of user connections was worth it.

[0] http://www.fabfile.org/
There is also a webinar available: http://www.invincea.com/2014/10/webinar-targeted-malvertisin...

A recent HN discussion brought up the application virtualization tech Invencia offers, including some of its drawbacks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8428453
How Does the Internet Work? [2002]
Yes, web developers are generally unfamiliar with shell interspersed with Make. Not wanting two additional languages for your project is an excellent reason to use a tool that matches the rest of your project.
I'm 53 with an EE degree, went to programming because it so happened that there was a telecommunications research center close by the school. And programming looked cooler and easier than EE.

I compare programming to writing, more than engineering. There is no engineering in programming. No matter how many "methodologies" are created, writing good programs and good systems is akin to writing a good story or a good book. It takes practice, it takes courage to remove instead of adding, to make it as simple as possible. The best programmers are Hemingways to me. Terse, to the point. It just works. It looks beautiful.

In the same vein, a writer doesn't usually become a manager. He keeps on writing, until old age, until forever. That's what we do, what we like to do. Sometimes one becomes a manager due to money pressures - after all who's going to pay a programmer the same as a GM or VP. But people like myself secretly or not see themselves programming until the bitter end.
I wasn't necessarily expecting the parts for a keyboard build to be cheaper than an already assembled mechanical but that Gons site is selling keyboard kits for $470 !? That seems really high to me. I'm not even sure if that price includes everything you need to build on. I'm wondering how normal that is for this kind of thing or if you're kind of buying support along with the price, which would make it worth it I guess.
FWIW I know someone who used to work in IT for a bank whose yearly bonus was bigger than my (decent) wage as a programmer at a startup during the Dotcom 1.0 boom. I guess they had to trickle-down some bonuses to the IT guys so they didn't get jealous when the traders were getting their 6 or 7 figure bonuses at the end of the year.

He worked in networking. I guess it was one of the largest private networks in the world, and they had a big budget and got to use tons of interesting gear (make it fast! make it secure!). I don't think his department was mediocre in any way and was probably a rewarding job (providing you can get over the working for an evil corporate kinda thing).
Can anybody explain the sorts of workloads for which the Power8 architecture would be a cost-effective option?
"The main reason is that what they do is more valuable."

Personally I would have said a big part of it is that they control payroll.
Monopolies and monopsonies only matter when they're difficult to overcome because their size gives them an insurmountable competitive advantage. Absent that, they only exist as long as people are happy with them.

Amazon is easy to bypass. The major publishers could set up their own online stores tomorrow if they wanted to. Authors could set up their own stores too. There are a ton of viable alternatives.
More Bitcoin Companies Shut Down, Lose Customer Funds
This misses the point. Statically typed functional languages. Safety is the selling point here.
Come on.. Maybe you've seen developers at Google or somewhere like that make LameFailingCompanyCEO-level pay, but I highly doubt that "top-notch" developers anywhere earn salaries that approach CEO-level pay IN THE SAME COMPANY. Everywhere I've worked there has been a huge compensation cliff between the senior managers (anyone with the C?O title or their direct reports) and the rest of the peasants. I'm talking orders of magnitude difference. Sure, there are outliers, but I'd guess the typical tech workplace (lets say Bay Area cost of living) is structured, on average:

Junior developers: $75k-100k + $2-3k equity/bonus

Senior developers: $90k-140k + $4-8k equity/bonus

Engineering manager: $120-160k + $10-15k equity/bonus

Director or Super-smart architect: $140k-$180k + $15k-20k equity/bonus

VP (senior manager): $250k-350k + $200k-1MM equity/bonus

CxO: $300k-$1MM + $5MM-50MM equity/bonus

So when you say "Mary in the cubicle next to me makes more than me," you're probably talking about at most a $50k difference, which is a rounding error for the senior execs. You'll be hard pressed to find a non-senior exec in any line of work (engineering, QA, project management, mid-level management) whose compensation even comes close to what the big shots are making.