skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: My 56-year-old father is a developer having a tough time finding a job
Hi everyone,

My father, who is a 56-years old software engineer and introduced me to software development, got unemployed some months ago and is having an extremely tough time getting a job here in Spain.

In his whole life he has worked as a developer, businessmen and executive at various companies such as Xerox.
However, he went the developer path these past decades instead of moving on to something more 'senior oriented' such as being a project manager.

He has been always learning new stuff, so right now he has a MongoDB certification and is totally fluent in Django. But most of the companies he applies to just see his age and step back.
And I'm also worried because here in Spain large companies are seeing the crisis and the really high youth unemployment as an opportunity to hire youngsters under really poor conditions, and they can actually hire five young developers for the price of one senior dev.

So I'm not really sure how I can help him, I actually know a lot of people in the startup ecosystem but startups usually want people in their 20s and 30s. I have also read a lot of posts regarding 'old developers', and he has read them as well.

He has a fresh mindset, wants to move to another city/country if it's required, and has tons of experience, so it's very hard for me to see him having this tough time... Any tip would be very helpful

Thanks a lot
A person who is financially independent (of investor money or otherwise) enough to embark on a business without taking a salary is one who doesn't need investor money for his business anyway. That is, unless the goal is explicitly to have rocket growth and exit, lottery style (via IPO or acquisition).

On the other hand, businesses for which "rocket growth to a large exit" are feasible are not going to have their success hinge on whether the founders pay themselves a market salary once they have funding. So it seems to me the restriction you quote of an investor is more an assertion of power than a reasonable constraint.
And one of the crowd-sourcing examples, Wikipedia, has this built in functionality. Certain Wikipedia pages are under constant attack and diligent contributors do what they can to keep them accurate.
Top 20 US Cities for Tech Startup Funding
Personally, I do think asking Eric Schmidt to leak this kind of stuff was a horrible idea. But this reminds me of the anti poaching scandal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005
JokeDuino a DIY kit to build an arduino device for pranks and jokes
yep, you actually can execute trades on saturdays on some retail brokers (they usually act as the counter-party) if you're willing to take the humongous spreads during those hours.
Hi All - we are looking for some feedback about the JokeDuino project. What is unclear, what to improve on the website, how would you use it etc... Thanks
> It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled

You're not spending enough time on your start up AND you're not spending enough time with your family. You're losing on both counts but you will only realize this in ten years.

What's the rush? Couldn't you have accepted a job at a big company for a few years while you plan a start up once your kids are a bit older?
How large a chunk of assembly is needed to balance out the JNI overhead? And are you keeping an eye on Panama so you can do this insane thing faster? :-)
Thanks for providing these links. Very interesting stuff.

I heard about Telegram after it's rise in popularity in Asian countries; shame that they have (BIG) issues like this.
The last section reads like the ravings of a conspiracy nut. From associating the DARPA grants that fund many university computer science projects with nefarious spy collaboration to repeating PRISM is the long-debunked full take program of Greenwald's fantasy, it's straight lunacy.
Have you looked through the videos?

I like microscope tech and have been following a little some of the structured light stuff. With this, frankly, I now need new pants.
The graph of overall CS enrollment backs up your comment that there was a decline in STEM degrees in the 80s.

Interestingly the next peak of CS degrees hits in 2002-3. While the obvious explanation of the dot-com boom fits, I would say students graduating at this time were considerably affected by the 1980s home computing culture and that early experiences with a C64 or other computer could have been positive, not negative, influences on their choice to study CS.

(The reason I say this being that I graduated with a CS degree in 2003, so am squarely in that camp, and the dot-com boom had no bearing on that decision - by the time I had picked my A-level subjects and applied to university, the dot-com craziness was not in full swing, though I was in the UK. However, growing up in the C64/BBC Micro/ZX Spectrum era was definitely a big factor in my ensuing nerdiness.)
Are my family members/friends also in that stadium? Can I contribute to their fund? What about children and notable figures?

If I can only contribute to myself, I'd pay all of the money in my bank.
Woodworking forum invite for Facebook's new Room app
Most classes don't require an expert-level of knowledge and some teachers are completely incompetent, especially prior to high school. I had a science teacher in junior high that did not believe in evolution.
> We're curiously macho about this, as if 14 hour workdays are a unique point of startup pride and not a very common characteristic of systems designed to acculturate young men into professions via hazing.

Curious indeed. I've worked at startups where PagerDuty alerts went off in the middle of the night with false alarms every day for two weeks, and wasn't allowed to fix the alerting system because... well, responding to them shows my dedication. It's very important we all suffer together! Just don't let PagerDuty escalate the issue to your frat brothers, initiate.
Does Nadella really deserve credit for Azure though, or Scott Guthrie? Azure was a joke until Guthrie took over, even MS employees couldn't figure out how to use it, and he turned it around in a matter of months.
A lot of what's happened in the past ten years is straight out of the rantings of 1990s-era conspiracy nuts.

If anything, the 90s conspiracy wackos were too conservative. Nobody would have imagined that everyone would think it perfectly okay to carry a portable device that constantly reports their location to central servers 24/7, not to mention that it has a microphone that can be switched on by malware.
I like more instrumental post-rock stuff like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky, as well as some more electronic stuff like Vondelpark or CFCF.
Ask HN: What do you do while compiling?
As a software engineer I regularly encounter occasional downtimes on the order of 1-3 minutes. My knee-jerk response is to pull up HN, but that usually turns into a 10 minute downtime (or worse). What do you do to prevent loss of focus during these times?
I'm not sure if they're details or opinions. I find the original meeting much more interesting. It's a legitmate exchange between two smart people.
He writes well, and it's an interesting look at how intertwined the government has become (was it ever not?) enmeshed with corporate empires. Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable. The average user wouldn't know about their being saddled with military contracts through their Boston Dynamics acquisition, for example. For this, and other reasons, 99 times out of 100, "free market" consumer action such as boycotts have negligible impact. That's alright though, when you can trust the state to properly monitor and regulate ethical conduct, though it doesn't look like we'll be quite so lucky here.

Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government.
Facebook built the same thing as me
And we just got approved! Took ~2 hours.
I think comparing Brave New World to 1984 misses a bit of the point. The books came out near each other and deal with similar themes, so they very often get compared to each other. But they are also significant and important books in isolation.

Yes, BNW is a better dystopia to live in than 1984. But... it's still a dystopia. Free thinkers are socially ostracized, personal preferences (outside a certain set) are ignored, personal destiny is decided at conception (one case where the world of 1984 is preferable). It's a shocking world, and one that I wouldn't want to live in.

And inevitably, the discussion revolves around the fact that it's not as bad as 1984. As if "actually only the second-worst dystopia in classic fiction" is anything but damning.

Having a dystopia-off distracts from a significant part of the value that these works have to us as members of a society: There is more than one road to hell (and more than one hell to reach). 1984 shows an example of a possible future, why it is bad, and how it got that way. BNW shows an example of a very different future, why it is bad, and (less clearly) how it got that way. They give useful common ideas for possible outcomes of current actions. While BNW is preferable to 1984, it still shows that avoiding a 1984 outcome as hard as you can is not enough because there are other ways that freedom can be destroyed. To simply say "I would prefer my freedom be destroyed in one of these two ways" is not the most useful thing one can take away from reading these two books.
New in Core Data and iOS 8: Asynchronous Fetching
Debunked?
Could you address specifically which parts you are referring to? I speed-read through it and didn't notice anything that wasn't established fact, especially the DARPA bits.
That's a lot of citations there, thanks for backing up your claims!
And: If I close the game and want to continue the game later, is the game stored for me?
Show HN: Error Correcting Passwords for Memorization of Secrets
"Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government."

It's both, really. Companies are incentivized to meddle with government because government meddles with them. The revolving door goes in both directions. It's the dark side of "public-private partnership."

BTW... I really wonder if it's possible to get as big as Google without kowtowing to the state. Are you allowed to get that big without being summoned to some... ahem... "interesting" meetings? Seems to me that no government would allow private power of that magnitude without ensuring that its leadership was somehow beholden to state interests or at least was "with the program."
In all of Chrome, Firefox and IE, after a few moments the page background turns black, and then it's unreadable (black text on black background). Is this happening to anyone else? Is there a readable link? :P
How come this doesn't work on an iPhone?
RAW: Gas leak explosion in Germany caught on camera
That was interesting.

I've always been a bit curious about Schmidt and what sort of measure someone who is neither in awe nor seeking to impress might make of him.

I think the whole piece is probably best summed up with this line towards then end.

>"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first."

That certainly makes sense.
Useful to note that the UIDH changes every 7 days.
Twitter Digits: decoupling identity from email is the key to a more equal web
Here is more about negotiating in general (including the "never give a number first" thing): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7713290
In Haskell, sandboxes usually force you to rebuild stuff which you have already built over and over.

Anyway, sandboxes are pointless hacks which wouldn't be necessary if things had been done properly from the beginning.

They are like Node.JS ... yes, it enables you to develop with JavaScript on the server, but how the hell did you end up with using JavaScript in the first place?!
A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
Chinese Government Executes MITM Attack Against iCloud
We need an analogue of Godwin's law for the use of the phrase "conspiracy theory." It's a term used by naive establishmentarians to discredit any attempt to dig into the darker reaches of politics, even when the stuff being discussed is well documented and consistent with historical fact.
Happening to me. Unreadable.
I did not realize what a nut Assange has become. The more there is the danger that he might be forgotten, the more ridiculous his theories of the world.

However, you have to think about his target audience. The audience doesn't consist of people who are familiar with things like DARPA grants, and think tanks. For people in the know, this writing will read like lunacy, because they will understand that Assange sees demons behind every innocuous shadow. Some random college kid from middle America, on the other hand, won't know that his writing is lunacy.

For example, think about his casual implication that DARPA funding of Page and Brin's Stanford research might be a signal of their nefarious links to some cabal of elites in the defense industry. Anyone who has worked in a top-ten engineering program knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Those grants go out, in a bureaucratic fashion, to tons of people, without any such elites getting involved at all. In fact the worst thing you can say about those DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

But think about how that accusation looks to some kid. It seems like there is this grand conspiracy because Larry Page and Sergey Brin took DARPA money ... of course they must be deep cover CIA implants right?

Its complete stupidity from start to finish, but its the type of stupidity that can only be debunked by actually being there and seeing that Assange speaks nonsense. This guy is an entertainer and self-promoter of extraordinary cunning. Think of the audacity it takes to write this gibberish with such confidence.
I like WMD on bandcamp:
https://wmdchiptune.bandcamp.com/album/this-was-the-end

I also really liked this set, but some people may find it a bit much:
https://chibitech.bandcamp.com/album/chibi-tech-live-blip-fe...
> Ireland was probably chosen because of low corporate tax rates.

Perhaps you are right. It just sounds incredibly short sighted if true. That's like, to use notax's example location, locating your startup in North Dakota because the rent is cheap over there.

Amsterdam would have been a much better location with better and cheaper bandwidth from a much larger selection of providers. In addition to better infrastructure, Amsterdam has a wider and deeper talent pool for datacenter talent.

I also have a hard time really buying the tax argument as Facebook and Google have European datacenters outside Ireland and they seem to manage their Irish tax strategy just fine. Even Apple is reportedly eyeing a datacenter in the Netherlands and I doubt they would consider one if it messed with their Irish sandwitch.

> This might have been more important when the first location was chosen than it is now, and latencies in Europe are mostly pretty minimal anyway.

From experience I can tell you that there is plenty of latency to go around in Europe. Part of that is Amazon's dubious choice of location and part of it is their network. Cloudping easily gives you latencies comparable to east coast - west coast ping times when testing from various European location to AWS Ireland.

Unlike popular entertainment would have you believe, Europe in not a country and neither is it the size of a postage stamp. You'd also be advised to consider that previously Ireland was Amazon's closest location to Russia and that in itself is a pretty big country.

Amusingly enough Amazon's Irish location is almost exactly like putting your datacenter in North Dakota as notax quipped.

Just look at this map:
http://www.powercycle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/FireSho...
Not true. It was founded and is headquartered at CUA.

While this is about Catholic Charities of Baltimore, their national office is Catholic Charities USA-

>Catholic Charities began with the establishment of the Catholic Church in America. John Carroll, the first Bishop of Baltimore, declared in 1792 that one-third of all parish revenues should go to “the relief of the poor.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Catholic_Charities#H...
> Security purists love to advocate that password reuse is evil, but who in the first place is going to be your attacker and for which purpose?

You don't know, that's why password reuse is evil.

Years ago when I made my Facebook account it used the same password as all my other accounts. Now that I use Facebook as an OpenID provider for pretty much any news site I would be exposing myself and my friends to all sorts of attacks if someone found hacked a phpBB forum that I frequented years ago. You could make the argument that only important sites should have unique passwords, but you, your grandmother, and I all have a different definition of important sites.
This will be the 57th meetup of this name, here in San Diego.
Tried a bunch of Linux distributions: Caldera, Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, ....

Then came Corel and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Clean, smooth, effortless install; everything working right out of the box; all the necessary applications; professional look and feel.

Microsoft must have had its eyes on the situation as they immediately bought into Corel. The next thing you knew, Corel was history.

Ubuntu is not nearly as pleasant an experience as Corel was back then, but it just does a lot of the basic stuff right, even though it does leave a lot to be desired in terms of polish, privacy concerns, look-and-feel, usability, openness, etc.

Hopefully, Canonical attends to these issues or someone else takes the helm in improving things.
> DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

I think this is what a lot of people outside academia don't realize. DARPA brings up connotations of inventing Arpanet, but the reality (like VC investing) is that a lot of silly research is funded by DARPA grants.
The coloration thing is cute, but it really breaks the invite system. I couldn't for the life of me get it to scan the San Francisco invite. Until I popped it open in Acorn and changed the green to black. That worked really well.

San Francisco invite that works: http://i.imgur.com/87rGMHw.jpg
Amazon Fire phone flops
I am not into the research field of general artifical intelligence. How does the "Human Brain Project" fit into this matter? It seems to me like the EU is directing quite a financial package into the direction of AGI, at least when it comes to understanding human brain activity and functionality.

link: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/
It took over a year to move a local city to the right island. (Langley, WA, really on Whidbey Island was listed on Hat Island, a private island with no roads)
And when you are retired and can't afford rent increases move to third world country and live on potatoes

Bloomberg..

Housing ownership is tied with a healthy middle class and healthy economy. If we banned predatory lending, you would know you couldn't afford it because no one would approve your 30-year fixed-rate loan!
>>Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable.

Well, for me I _still_[1] think of Google as the good guys because I place the blame for this mess squarely on USgov, which perhaps ultimately leads to the public's lack of empathy - but I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem. I don't know if USgov laws created a socioeconomic setup that made people too stressed about day-to-day life not care, or people not caring resulted in our current socioeconomic setup. That's the cycle I'd like to break; but blaming Google solves nothing. What are they suppose to do? Just straight up say "Screw you USgov, we're not obeying the law. Don't care about your gag-orders or your subpoenas. We're just going to flat out refuse. Do your worst, come at me bro." --- I would think even Google must crumble under the full force of USgov that would swiftly follow such an act of rebellion.

Afterall, Google cannot dodge, bob and weave like say... Snowden.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796
Here's a version of the invite that can actually be easily scanned:

http://i.imgur.com/pvSeGtY.jpg
GT Advanced Announces Settlement Agreement with Apple
No android love? Also no linux option under operating system?
Trackmemo – Get Updates from All Your Cloud Apps in a Single News Feed
we've been asked to keep this video private (within the fb group/mailing list) until it's approved by Airbnb. Please remove this link!
>if you write applications which expose some sort of API over a socket that will scale to clusters, not just multicore

And it will be way slower for all those use cases where I don't need to scale to clusters. Or where it won't actually scale to clusters because I need shared memory, the latency to ask another node is simply too high. I had to move to haskell specifically because of ocaml's "who cares about multicore" stance.
At an individual level voting doesn't seem to make much of an impact, but the whole point of voting is that it's a group activity.

Washington state has legal pot. Texas has strict abortion laws. The reason the laws of a state reflect the beliefs of the populous is due to voting. The fact that seniors vote in high numbers, while college students vote in low numbers, is why universities get budget cuts but social security is sacred.

The idea that voting doesn't make a difference is a fiction.
Godel, Russel, etc didn't really build upon any of Boole's work, though, did they? Other than being influenced by the general idea of applying mathematics to logic. I guess I was wondering how much Boole's work was actually used; but I see your point about it being foundational in the same way Descartes and Leibniz were, even if we don't use their actual work these days.

Random thought - why were truth tables not invented until 1921, 57 years after Boole's death (at least, that's what wikipedia tells me - Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)? Are they really that revolutionary of an idea? are they one of those ideas that is obvious in retrospect but required a genius to discover? Or was no one even really thinking about this until Wittgenstein, or what?

Sorry if my thoughts seem disorganized, I'm just sort of writing down ideas as they come to me.
Would be interesting to see the equivalent analysis of enrollment in CS degrees in China and India. I work with dozens of female coders; 90% of them are from China, India or Russia.
Wow. Thats not bad at all. It must be a pretty cursory look, or maybe just a static analysis looking for something specific. That's good news
One a half hour for a new app
Basic C question. In the rb_class_new_instance function, isn't "VALUE obj" a local variable and therefor should not be returned?
Meet the Medieval Manuscript
Interesting that Huxley refers to Orwell as Orwell instead of Mr Blair
Your father should try to find development work online. Nobody cares about your age, or even your qualifications. It's all about your track record and your capacity to get things done. It takes a while to get your first few gigs, but once you build up a small client base, work goes smoothly.
Mark Zuckerberg Chinese Interview Translated to English
In other words, creation took 100 times as many moves and about 40 times longer than destruction.

So, yeah, pick your new engineering hires veeeery carefully.
This is why we freaked when it was reported that China controlled the markets for unusual materials.
Lecture 10: How to Start a Startup