skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/gait_anim.html

Part 8:

"The reason why snakes are limbless is first that nature makes nothing without purpose, but always regards what is the best possible for each individual, preserving the peculiar essence of each and its intended character, and secondly the principle we laid down above that no Sanguineous creature can move itself at more than four points. Granting this it is evident that Sanguineous animals like snakes, whose length is out of proportion to the rest of their dimensions, cannot possibly have limbs; for they cannot have more than four (or they would be bloodless), and if they had two or four they would be practically stationary; so slow and unprofitable would their movement necessarily be. "
"Microsoft uses bad performance reviews (“The How”) as a tool to eliminate the elder (40+) and senior ranked employees."

Proof please. This not only reeks of confirmation bias, but could it also be explained by resistance to acquire new skills in line with advances in fast-paced technological improvements?
The strangely enduring power of kitsch
Hello ZSH; Goodbye Bash
And of course the court granted custody to mother wanting to live with a psychopath. So much about sex discrimination in real life. Very different from liberal media portrayed world now, isn't it?
Oh right. Thank you.
Agree they should all be tried but in practice the best sequence may be to start at the bottom and establish there that crimes took place and have the defences establish the orders given as mitigation to build that case against the politicians and senior leadership.

Having the juniors in prision would build political pressure from those who follow orders (military etc.) for the politicians to join them and hopefully make it less of a party political issue.
Simple way to validate an e-mail address in C#
No disrespect, I have something that is pressing on my heart.

I am absolutely mind blown by reading the comments here. You are afraid of what will happen to your job when you reach 40? Ask yourself this: how do you think people managed to live and have a job a hundred years ago when they hit 40 or 50?

OK, perhaps this is a cultural thing. I am from eastern Europe where a "normal" annual income, for a single person, can be $12,000. So a couple can bring $24,000 I assume this would be devastating in US. Just like the news the other day with the president of a university (in UK?) where he was complaining of having to deal with an €220,000 annual income.

But of course, you are aware of this discrepancy. Otherwise why would these kind of job offerings exist: https://www.elance.com/j/wordpress-plugin-theme-developer-mo...

$300 / month "FULL-TIME wordpress plugin and theme developer from Pakistan and India only."

Please, if you are being laid off at 40 and in the case you are not suffering from a company downsizing, bankruptcy or you don't have medical issues (another interesting topic to talk about) it means that you are either an incompetent or a lazy individual.

No disrespect, please just wake up from your dream.

EDIT: I just realized from the feedback to this message how completely and utterly naive I am to not taking into account that HN is in no way representative of the average worker in US. Here, the absolute majority seems to be only people from IT which don't quite appreciate the opportunity and privilege actually to be able to code and think that only > $60,000 salaries are worth their time and effort.

Good luck then!
Could we not be so aggressive? It's an important issue, and the best way to close people's minds is to belittle them. Besides, malyk's concerns are legitimate, and they've spent time researching this issue. We should be the ones willing to listen to all points of view. I know passions are high about this, but progress requires patience and a willingness to explore all the ideas.
Can you still hide large ships these days with all those steel birds high up in orbit?
Going from zero to $40 billion in a few years isn't real impact? Those silly investors. If only they'd give all those Nice Guy Inc. a chance..
>If Not Idioms Then What?

Shibboleths?
Microsoft's got a LOT of fat accumulated over the many years. They got royally stagnated under Ballmer, too much office politicking, designing by committee - all especially true in the management layers. This is what Nadella is purging. Not "high-performing older employees" specifically.
I agree. The UN isn't close to a great organization in reality, but at least on paper this is where the Human Rights are from and that's something most sane people can agree on.

In the end what really matters is to make sure people don't get tortured and that torture is frowned upon. I think this might be a step into the right direction. However, like with all such things I do not know if that's true. It could also mean there will be more secrecy and torture until death will become standard, to prevent these things from ever getting into any media. History will show us.

To me it seems impossible to predict the outcome, but I think you can't change things like these when they are not frowned upon.

This makes me think a bit of Operation Paperclip, where the US was also defending people who tortured other things. Of course you can't compare it like 1:1 (you never can). The thing though is that a huge society (Germany) changed a lot, because all the things that happened in the past are frowned upon. Yes, there are individuals who didn't learn from it, but they are a rather rare exception. What this means is that there are fewer people being harmed.

Sorry for pulling of Nazi-Comparison. It's just a great example for the change of thought in a society. It also happened to East Germany or a lot of Eastern European countries, that were indoctrinated by Stalinism and maybe even look at Ukraine. There it got so far that (on the mainland, in Kiev) they hate communism/Russia so much that the biggest party actually have SS runes.

That might seem far fetched now, but that's the point where I agree. One shouldn't just switch to the other side and blindly follow them, just because you share their hate. This is true for states, but also institutions or political systems.

Hopefully I didn't get too far with that connection.
This is interesting. However, considering how 4GB to 8GB RAM is getting so common nowadays, using a ramdisk e.g. a tmpfs partition is quite useful. I've set Firefox and Google Chrome to use a 1 GB tmpfs partition for their cache and the performance improvement is clearly visible.
Ralph Baer – The Father of Video Games
While not being open source, BitTorrent Inc. does promote the open standardization of the protocol[1], and employs the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen[2], as chief scientist.

μTorrent is, I think, the best suggestion for a client for people who need client suggestions. (having tried a large number of very mediocre competitors, free, open, or otherwise)

I usually stick to rtorrent on the commandline, but that's a shitty suggestion for helping bring awareness to hacker issues.

1. http://bittorrent.org/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
There is also a trickier and more interesting case 3:

Experienced guy in his 50's, seen it all before. Remembers the era of object databases, knows why SQL was invented, and shuts down his hipster colleague's plans to use Mongodb. Remembers CORBA, SOA and J2EE and is skeptical about microservices. Understands why logging/metrics/dependency injection is necessary and pushes RoR guys to use more verbose syntax to support it.

Younger folks dislike him because of this. There is conflict. Management has a real problem, since they both need experience but the senior guy can't build everything on his own.
No disrespect, but fuck off and learn some basic economics before you call people incompetent and lazy. Cost of living varies vastly in different places, which accounts for much of the wage discrepancy. You simply can't afford a place to stay or food to eat if you live in the US and make $300/mo. Also, just because jobs at a specific price point exist in other places doesn't mean that they exist here. The low end of the US job market is notoriously competitive and exploitative. Often, it's simply impossible to find work at that low level, and the US has no real safety net to speak of.
Your line of thought relies very strongly on the assumption that the skills of software engineers are tied to the particular language or framework they are using. Surely that's just complete nonsense?
Do you remember about when this was? I've been searching for the post on HN and can't find anything.
In passing he also mentions a Tumblr posting screenshots from scans. This appears to be the page: http://mainframesproject.tumblr.com/
I bought a kano/raspberry kit for my 5yr old. We explore the terminal, python interpreter, minecraft etc and he is totally pumped, with the ipad lying idly just by his side. What really clicked for him was the fact that he now had a real computer that did stuff like dad's and calls himself a 'real hacker'.
How exactly is that a fundamental detail?

BTW the word is "peeve."
Where I have lived, the age of getting children has been getting higher and higher. It's not unusual for couples to have their firstborn in their mid-30's.

And yes: family does come first.
They are not the Free Software Foundation!
Turkey launches crackdown on opposition, announced on Twitter by whistle-blower
Replace "AAA game" with (made as a) blockbuster and "B" game with "independent one that might work out" and we agree

See: Minecraft

But yeah, today's "Holywood super-production" games demand a lot of work.
Sounds like a classic recipe for burnout.
Nobody wonders this at all.
Why use a disk cache on a ramdisk instead of using the memory cache of the browsers? Is it to survive browser restarts?
are we just highly technified ants?
Presumably, if they prosecuted the people responsible then Bush would end up in jail?

Can't see the US doing that.
"High-tech industry is not a monopoly."

While that may be, employers in the same field with geographical vicinity are known to negotiate on shared terms of employment - in effect creating leverage over individual employees when negotiating the terms of their employment.

A union may devolve to many things but one of the valuable facets are that it creates leverage for the employees against the employers.

I don't have to like it, you don't have to like it but that is the way the market works.

"still have to drag around these useless clowns that religiously observe their mandated 4 coffee breaks and time their arrival and departure with sub-second precision."

I would have just used the words 'non-productive' - that amount of verbiage creates the feeling that there is non-spoken behavioural pattern that is used as the metric of an employeed value rather than the value they produce.

Especially in high tech the moments when an employee actually performs value adding work can be spurious, unlike in lower tech industries like logging where the work you see is actually the work input you are getting.
Focusable – Set a spotlight focus on DOM element
I'm really shocked to see how many people were inspired by text adventure games. My story is similar to the others here (posted the short version). Scott Adams Pirate Adventure FTW!
"The best" sounds like a status and validation thing in this case.
Aggressive? My post was mellow except my response to

> I think it's not reasonable to blindly obey over-aggressive and unfounded requests

which is a perspective that will LITERALLY get someone killed if they believe it. That is why I used uppercase, because it is actually really important, not everyone takes the time to properly research what rights they have (and don't have).
Cesare, the Destroyer Creator
Simple answer: 90% of us (including me) started programming because they want to make videogames. Nobody wants to start programming because "I want to make Drupal/WordPress/Whatever websites".

;-)
I believe that you are correct about the terminology - the way the CIA operates is detailed in books like Robert Baer's See No Evil.

However, I'm not sure that this kind of nitpicking actually matters - from what we now know people employed by the CIA tortured people and it doesn't really matter whether the correct term for these people within the CIA is "officers" or "agents" - everyone else is going to call them "torturers".

[NB I actually up-voted you because I didn't think you deserved to be down-voted. The agent/officer distinction is really important for how spies actually work (and the CIA is not alone in this) but it's distracting from the main point here].
Then the IRS ads this benefit in kind to you income for tax purposes so the actual benefit is taxed. I would rather have an extra 3.75 k in options which are much more tax efficient.
> Perhaps the Indie Game Dev movement is a better way to go...

For every Indie game that makes the charts that are hundreds that die along the way. Those people also need money.

Even those that do make the charts happen to be 1-hit success leading to studios closing down.

If you follow Gamasutra or magazines like RetroGamer, most in games development community either eventually leave it, or embrace it and switch cities, countries every time a studio goes down.

There are people that enjoy living like that, me not.
If we take the global perspective the quality of the state funded safety nets combined with the local culture and job market greatly affect what the implications of a lay-off are. And they can vary drastically.

For instance in the USA the economically worse off are in relative terms considerably more worse off than in countries with lower income inequality.
In case anyone is interested in the collective wisdom of the Hacker News community, you could look at the extensive discussion of this article from just over a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8554996

Earlier submissions, but with no discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7964797

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034390
OS X Yosemite – The Blurry Boundaries of Design
I stop hearing about it when GNOME switched their WM.
Yes, those details of the divorce proceedings that you just made up are very different indeed.
Internet Census 2012 (mass scan)
I think that going out for lunch and getting away from the office is better in the long run
I am sorry but I don't agree with your excessive controls. You may end up raising very mean and materialistic kid. I have 5 year old daughter too, but strongly disagree with your methods.
The food benefit isn't taxed. To get the same $3,750 food benefit via salary, your employer would have to pay you $5,000-$6,000 more in salary.
> Compare with being a designer working at Apple vs being a designer working at Dell.

I bet they would work similar amount of hours and payments.
Proof please.

I'm kinda thinking that's what the case could possibly be about?

Is this one of those divert the conversation by asking for citations for things that are obvious sockpuppet things?
I was going to say the same thing. Unions are not too expensive, and mine has probably already paid itself simply by reading job contracts and advising me in payment negotiations.

It's also nice to have a group of people lobbying for the interests of IT workers, say.
Incidentally if you ever find you miss coding, there are plenty of modern languages that are much easier than C++, which is pretty much the most complicated one you could have picked.
Yes, it is Mozilla, Mozilla makes Rust.
> fuck off

> learn some basic economics

Madam or mister, it seems you don't understand from my message the essence of it.

A valuable, reliable person with a salary that is not massively higher then it was 3 years ago (so I am mainly talking about inflation correction) will not be let off. As a younger man and when I did IT maintenance I had often found employes over 50 on jobs which were good enough to allow them to still keep their kids in colleges, allow them to be dressed nicely at work and so forth. They were on jobs which younger employes refused to take. They were desk jobs varying from constructions (estimates and offerings) to accounting to work safety management to human resourcing etc.

And just for your record, food here can and IS more expensive than in US. Clothes and electronics have the exact same price or are more expensive. Cars too are equally or more expensive (taking into consideration maintenance as well).

Please don't bring the economic aspect into discussion. You have a higher standard of living. That is a fact. Lower your standards a little if you are incompetent or lazy and you will be happy no matter what.
> Few people willingly pay car insurance; fewer still have any confidence that their insurance will pay-out. But we pay the premiums because it is a legal requirement, even though it might be more effective for some people to put that money into a bond instead.

What country are you from? In the US most people who can afford it have more than the legally-required car insurance and insurance companies are expected to pay out in the event of an accident.

A bond isn't insurance because, on average, it won't cover your expenses (if you earn enough on it to pay for a catastrophe, that means you didn't need it). The whole point of insurance (and unions) is to share risk over a large number of people, only some (random) fraction of whom will ever "need" the insurance.
FWIW, if any Australians are reading this : Union fees are tax deductible. And your employer doesn't need to know your part of the union until absolutely necessary. Seriously, I know there is a lot of bad press about unions because of a few arseholes, but they are necessary and you may find you need them the longer Abbott is in power.
Good question. I assume you're referring to satellites? First: they don't cover the whole globe - in fact their passses aren't that hard to figure out. In his book "See no evil", former cia operative Baer indicates that the Kurds were adept at moving and attacking "invisibily" with quite large forces during the gulf 1 conflict. One of the reasons he left the service was that Langely didn believe his reports on the ground: claiming the satellites hadn't seen anything: he must be wrong. (This was when the focus was on gadgets and not HUMINT, afaik CIA have gone back to using more human sources again, having been made fools of by Al Qaida etc).

Second: we don't know much about what anti-satellite weapons the various powers command.

Edit: also submarines can't be detected from space
Interesting language in the title.

How about 'CIA agents who tortured could be brought to justice in any country?'
Ha, indeed. :-)

Watson didn't even remotely consider me. What do I have to do to get its attention?!
I just cannot believe you are arguing that in US you have a more hard time finding a job then in a less developed country like in Eastern Europe.

> You seem rather ignorant of the U.S. then.

To this type of a comment you can easily answer the same way. You madam or sir seem to be equally ignorant of Europe as well.
As you say, YMMV.
That's fair 0x83F1, that would be a valid attack. The economic incentive for that attack is pretty low (unless Chain is working with miners to boost their fees), but I see your point, you are definitely giving up some level of security and the trustless nature of Bitcoin by using an API for sure.

I do think as the Bitcoin ecosystem grows, it's going to be inevitable that some tradeoffs are made for usability, convenience and extensibility by mainstream users. I would be most worried about any tradeoff that was both a) open to a technical attack vector b) created economic incentives for parties to be malicious. Situations with only a) or b) but not both will likely be tolerated by users and only reinvented when major issues arise.
I wish there was an open-source OS supporting phones like Nokia 1202 http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_1202-2573.php or cycle computers http://www.sigmasport.com/en/produkte/bikecomputer/topline_w... - tiny devices with dot matrix displays and traditionally limited capabilities.

I thought it's never going to happen (unless I get wealthy and support creating such a device, of course) but this one is close.
Wow, I'm trying to imagine what that age distribution curve looks like. It must start out pretty heavy, and then have a super hard drop right after 40.
Would just like to say thanks for your really fascinating story :) This is the intellectual highlight of my day. Don't let the naysayers get to you. Not sure what you're doing at the moment, but I'm sure you've directed your technical skills towards something that pays well and acquired new ones in the meantime :)

The projects you describe here are obviously works of love that show great technical talent. Too bad you didn't have access to better learning resources at an earlier point in time, but learning is thankfully a multi-decade project. (I also hope your P.O.S. stepfather got what was coming to him in the end).
To me privilege and oppression are two sides of the same coin though.

No, they're not. A child may benefit from the privileges of parents' favoritism, it doesn't imply that her siblings are oppressed.

Privilege and Oppression are 2 distinct coins with 2 faces each. There's privilege (+1) and lack thereof (0), and there's oppression (-1) and lack thereof (0).

Being well aware of your privileges won't necessarily make you see people in "the norm" as victims, but it may give you pause when trying to form a hasty opinion of them.

Unfortunately, as stated, it's much harder to recognize one's own privileges, than it is to identify a form of oppression. So people keep presuming to know what everybody else should be, should do, should think, should eat, etc, because they presume that the apparent lack of prejudice signals a levelled playing field.
Interest sparks hope for insolvent wave energy poineer Pelamis
You seem rather ignorant of the U.S. then.
Especially when having no citations of his own. It's mainly used as a tool to deflect the debate into a meta-debate about citation qualities.
For a counterpoint, you might want to look into Argentina's "Law of due obedience"[1]. Of course, Argentinean law doesn't affect US law, but the fact that this law was eventually repealed sets an international precedent that "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense from prosecution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_de_Obediencia_Debida
Forex Cash Snipper
I meant industrial design. I would think the (pretty small) industrial design team at Apple work longer hours for more pay than their equivalents at Dell, though that's just a guess.
Minecraft was one of a million.
But those are the ones that it easier to target so they are the ones managed out not the career politicians.

Nadella should have been fired by the board over that "karma" fiasco if you fuck up that badly when at an internal event where some one throws you a soft easy Q you couldn't be trusted run a whelk stall (I suppose hot dog stand is the US equivalent)