skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I went to college in 1999, our guidance counselor told us that for every student graduating with a Computer Science degree, there were 5 companies competing to hire them. She said "You have a 500% chance of getting a job with a Computer Science degree." When I graduated in 2003, 1/3 of my classmates got a job doing software engineering, 1/3 went back to their job they did before they got into college (usually some sort of retail), and the final 1/3 went back to live with their parents and were unemployed.

The only area that was really hiring at the time was the Government, and I lived on the east coast so I was able to work for a Government contractor a few months after graduating. It took quite a bit longer for some of my friends to finally use their degree and some still never have.
Maybe I didn't know about Alta Vista at the time, I can't remember the search engines I was using back then, but what I remember is that every single search was returning thousands of porn results.

Google was a revelation, it actually found things !
Super terrible. First off, there were far fewer tech companies total. Worse, the internet was still immature. Which had a couple consequences.

One, there were just fewer jobs and yet a lot of people competing for them, so it was especially hard if you didn't have a strong resume. Second, remote work was uncommon so if you didn't already live in a tech hub city you were pretty screwed. Third, performing the hiring process via the internet was iffy. Going through the process back then often involved stuffing a printed resume into an envelope and mailing it somewhere along with a printed cover letter, then waiting for a return letter or a phone call (which will probably just go to your voicemail or answering machine).

Granted, the tech field was a little better but not much, and not universally.
Super terrible. First off, there were far fewer tech companies total. Worse, the internet was still immature. Which had a couple consequences.

One, there were just fewer jobs and yet a lot of people competing for them, so it was especially hard if you didn't have a strong resume. Second, remote work was unCommon so if you didn't already live in a tech hub city you were pretty screwed. Third, performing the hiring process via the internet was iffy. Going through the progress back then often involved stuffing a printed resume into an envelope and mailing it somewhere along with a printed cover letter, then waiting for a return letter or a phone call (which will probably just go to your voicemail or answering machine).

Granted, the tech field was a little better but not much, and not universally.
10 mm wafers? Were they ever that small? I've never heard of less than 1 inch...
Update on twitter: https://twitter.com/CthulhuSec
"People have taken my mere suspicions way too seriously. I haven't even mentioned a specific agency and the theories are already flowing."

Update on tor-talk:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...

In the first original email, he writes "At this moment in time I am under no gagging orders or influence from external parties/agencies. If no update is provided within 48 hours you may draw your own conclusions."

Please may I call your attention that this canary paragraph is missing from the latest tor-talk update. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned F*cked Company so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

I graduated from ArsDigita University in 2001. Right time, right place to see stuff completely implode. I must have sent 100+ resumes during 2001, and temped at Harvard for a while until getting a job through a friend in Feb 2002, in Java development. It wasn't great, so I kept up the job search and finally went to grad school in 2003 while finding a part-time consulting job, also in Java. That kept me afloat until I graduated in 2006, and moved out of the USA.

Looking back, the companies acted like they could do no wrong, and it bit them hard. ArsDigita was a dot-com darling for a while, but it did crazy things like sign ten-year leases for a branch office that could seat 20-30 people and they had 2-3 actual employees in that city.

I remember in ArsDigita University, we weren't based in the actual office but a place about a metro stop away (where ITA Software based themselves a decade later, yay lisp), in the basement. We started the program in September, and one day in March we were let into a larger, nicer office on the first floor and were told that AD also rented this part as well, anticipating another 20 or so programmers would work here as well. It remained empty until we moved out of the space later that year.
Unless you need one of the new features on offer, there is no reason why you would need to upgrade right away. It's perfectly okay to give a new Rails release a couple of months to settle, including gems that need to be compatible with it.
What will work for 1MHz won't work for 10MHz and for even 50MHz you often need to redesign PCB. Breadboards stop working at about 10MHz - you will experience transient errors that will prevent your design from working properly at all.

Hardware is full of side effects, the higher are frequency and smaller the components, the harder they are manifesting themselves.
Pretty sure Jake Appelbaum stated at 30c3 that the Mouse Jiggler will cause the system to lock immediately if plugged into Systemd [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU
Reminds me of the Impossible Game [0]. Very similar game mechanics, just missing platforms that can be landed on. (Or, at least, I didn't get far enough to see them).

[0] http://www.flukedude.com/theimpossiblegame/
It's wonderful to see posts like this. I've been often very frustrated by exactly similar issues. But this seems to be much more common than I thought.

One guy used select max(id) from table; for over 5gb table without id column index, periodically. It took quite a while every time maxing the disk I/O.

Usually developers claim that the server doesn't have enough memory or it should jave more cores and we should buy enterprise SSDs. Which is simply insane when you could fix the issue very easily.
I prefer social media sign up
Yes, helmets do provide some protection, but so would helmets for pedestrians, five-point safety belts in cars, safety belts in buses, etc.

Unless it was seriously down hill or with a serious tail wind, and she was extremely lucky, I bet she wasn't doing 25-30 mph.

I think that bet is safe because the world one hour record for women is about http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour_record#One_Hour_records_... 29 mph.

Also, a bicycle helmet doesn't do much good in a head-on impact at 25 mph. It only gives you a few mm of deceleration distance. So, if the impact was at 25mph, that dent in the car likely did way more for her than her helmet.
> What were job-prospects like?

The market, at least in Dallas/Austin was barren. The only new job postings on job boards were repost by recruiters looking to pad their portfolios.

> How were your wages affected?

I keep lowering my expected hourly rate/salary weekly. When I got it down to 50% a recruiter called me back and got me something.

> Did recruiters simply cease to exist?

All the opportunistic, bad recruiters crawled back to whatever hole they came from. Same with all the unqualified "bandwagon programmers" who cashed on the bubble and gave all of us a bad reputation forcing hiring managers into brutal interviewing processes.

Recruiters were let go too, agencies closed or downsized. A few good ones remained.

> More to the point, what advice do you have for developers who want to be well-insulated if/when the next crash happens?

Well first, you got to have some sort of financial cushion and a plan to cut down expenses to the bone: the day I was laid of on 2001 I canceled my phone, cable, any other superfluous monthly expense. Also moved to smaller apartment as soon as I could. I knew it was going to be rough for a while.

Next is to know which industry to aim for: after 9/11 lots of money flowed to military contractors so I started aiming for that industry. I ended up programming for a company that provided services for the military until the market recovered.
It's emphatically not an interpreter. It's a just-in-time, line-by-line compiler.
Because we now have [ag](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher), which is similar to ack, but much faster
I rather strongly prefer Google Account integration to most other signup options (particularly for a specifically Android-based app), but I'd prefer service-specific signup to most "social" options.
Ada is a language that is specifically for writing secure code.
Unix admin here too. I also spent more time with Linux and FreeBSD during the dotcom era, but, strangely, for a lot of enterprise companies because I was working more on the security side of things. When I had to cast my net wider after the bubble burst, and after having moved to a new country, my lack of deep enterprise Solaris experience did bite me. Fortunately after a few years Red Hat was starting to do really well in the enterprise market and I ended up in banking, where I picked up a bit of Solaris again but I didn't really bother too much since the bank was actively getting rid of Solaris. I suspect many technologies used in the startup world now will get taken on in the enterprise after the bubble burst, but it will certainly take a few years and these companies will be weary of people who doesn't have enterprise experience.
I see what you are saying, but I would have to guess that it's so very rare that the authorities know for sure that a suspect has information to give, that it is almost irrelevant to debate the scenario.

Not to mention, the use of the ticking-time bomb scenarios were used to justify use of torture by the CIA. Which entity determines if a suspect has usable information, to stave off 'improper' use of torture? If you can't trust the CIA to make a definitive call in that regards, why even consider torture as an option in any form?
Simple, Powerful App Promotion Tool for Mobile Developers
A Meadow in the Ocean with 'Flowers' Everywhere
You all are forgetting FC. Fucked was the front page of the startup scene. What was the bubble like? Discovering you were laid off by reading it on FC. Thanks to archive for saving all the content.

Oh, and having a friend who is a very good engineer (ms cs from mit) take a job for $45k to put a dent in their mortgage.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010201083400/http://fuckedcomp...
Not all that much to be honest. it has much more features than the clones and is slower in some conditions.

I suspect improving grep would have been a better idea than making tools that aren't as versatile as grep, but...
Which latest tor-talk update is missing the canary?

The one you linked to says:

> 7. Again, at this moment in time I am under no gagging orders or unreasonably withholding information under orders.
Ars Digita was fucked by the ceo VCs brought in. You can read some very unhappy posts about it from Phil Greenspun. He took them down, I presume as part of a lawsuit settlement, but you can still find them if you google.

Actually, here's a copy
http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
Instead of all these crypto expert complaining about how bad it is why doesn't any of them fix it and make a pull request or fork the project if it is at such a dismal state?

Maybe the reason so many coders are bad at crypto is because the crypto community is mostly spooks and the rest are unwilling take the time to explain and teach what they know.

Instead they spend hours writing and analyzing other peoples work just so they can gloat on how bad it is.
Thanks for the feedback. Not the best phrase I guess.

I also agree that good fit in a team is critical and couldn't agree more with your notion of the subconscious coming up with most of the breakthrough ideas. I rely on that heavily using interest, frustration and tinkering as the guideposts, figuring out the right question and then doing something else or nothing at all and letting the big part of the mind do its thing in its own time. Might be the best habit I ever developed.
I used to say that the bubble bursting got the people who quickly got themselves an MCSE so they can 'work in IT' and get paid well while they have no IT skills, to go back to the jobs they should have been doing like sales.

That's what happened, and many of them then ended up as estate agents.
I'd like to add that in my specific area of the United States, Washington State, we've seen a huge move from international buyers swooping in on investment properties that became available on the market post-2008. There's a big move on Chinese and Canadian investors moving in on foreclosures, low interest rates, and honest to god: cold-hard-cash buyouts (it's extremely rare but in my market it's happened a few times). I'm in my mid-twenties and I feel like my significant other and I have to both be working full-time jobs at $20+ an hour to afford a 3 bedroom house anywhere near a reasonable commute from work. We also don't want to be stuck with the burden of upkeep maintenance, property tax, and unpredictable economy. Back on the topic of marriage; we're still iffy on the idea based off of fear that if our marriage went south we couldn't imagine dealing with the divorce; both psychological and financially speaking... However, our financial situation is a bit different in terms of debt and interest rates. We are both afraid of being to far sunken in debt.
The link works fine for me. Try loading it again. Oh BTW the OP is not the author of the article.
> there could be bugs in unsafe code in the standard library

For any embedded work or kernels, you wouldn't be pulling in the standard library via a `#![no_std]` attribute.

But you're right that bugs in the compiler could produce safety issues.
I also feel that algorithm based recommendation services are not going to be better than humans at least for a long time. Algorithms can recommend related stuff well(?) but that's not enough as our tastes keep changing and as you said they don't take risk.

I am thinking of building a radio like service where the playlist is curated by people listening to it. Do you think it's worth building? Any other inputs you'd like to add?
The blood work at my annual checkup cost $600. Test blood twice a year, plus send a nurse out to get it, and you're in for $1300.

Monthly interviewing to monitor diet adds another couple hundred dollars.
That's a really interesting comment, and I think you're correct. Look at feminism today vs. back when it was actually relevant. Now, since it can't credibly be argued that women are oppressed in Western nations, it's turned into a movement about hating men and oppressing them.
Star Wars API: The First Data Viz
The "under no influence" part is missing.
Sums up the appeal of Nim [1], which recently benchmarked favorably to C++ [2].

import rdstdin, strutils

let
time24 = readLineFromStdin("Enter a 24-hour time: ").split(':').map(parseInt)
hours24 = time24[0]
minutes24 = time24[1]
flights: array[8, tuple[since: int,
depart: string,
arrive: string]] = [(480, "8:00 a.m.", "10:16 a.m."),
(583, "9:43 a.m.", "11:52 a.m."),
(679, "11:19 a.m.", "1:31 p.m."),
(767, "12:47 p.m.", "3:00 p.m."),
(840, "2:00 p.m.", "4:08 p.m."),
(945, "3:45 p.m.", "5:55 p.m."),
(1140, "7:00 p.m.", "9:20 p.m."),
(1305, "9:45 p.m.", "11:58 p.m.")]

proc minutesSinceMidnight(hours: int = hours24, minutes: int = minutes24): int =
hours * 60 + minutes

proc cmpFlights(m = minutesSinceMidnight()): seq[int] =
result = newSeq[int](flights.len)
for i in 0 .. <flights.len:
result[i] = abs(m - flights[i].since)

proc getClosest(): int =
for k,v in cmpFlights():
if v == cmpFlights().min: return k

echo "Closest departure time is ", flights[getClosest()].depart,
", arriving at ", flights[getClosest()].arrive

[1] https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/wiki/Nimrod-for-C-programmers

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2pvf68/armv7_v...
This is what inspires me to continue learning more about programming, anyone else feel the same way?
One of my first thoughts when I saw this post was that it would be a site where you give it an existing URL-shortened link and it could tell you if it safe to go to it or not. I'm thinking such a site may be more useful in that it lets the consumer decide to check for NSFW instead of the producer.

Also, this could be pretty useful if associated with a browser extension that changes existing links to use the service.
Congress Steps in to Protect the Internet
The erratic price prevents it from being a store of value or a unit of account. So it is a currency that clocks in as a medium of value transfer only. Even then, the transfer involves another currency on either end in almost all cases.
>Go in my opinion is the best proof that our industry is fashion driven.

It's not though. What is fashionable about Go? Most testimonies I've seen state solid reasons for choosing it. Nobody claims it to be a marvelous language like Haskell. It's a simple language that's easy to pick up, implement an idea, and deploy. Much like python, but with much greater performance.

I don't see what fashion has to do with it.
Can they make a model wear the grips pick up your heart rate? PLEASE!?!? This would be the coolest most insanely awesome mod I'd to to my bike! v2 v2!
Alternately, there is 'cool-retro-term':

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
This game is actually a lot simpler than the one you link to. Just jumping.

It was originally inspired by the Chrome T-Rex easter egg (https://plus.google.com/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/LUtLvQYMFZK)
And the NSA:

http://article.olduse.net/14337@mgweed.UUCP

http://article.olduse.net/839%40houxf.UUCP

http://article.olduse.net/221%40looking.UUCP

http://article.olduse.net/237%40celerity.UUCP
FWIW, funding for Tribler has significantly dried up, probably also due to this.

When I read about this sequence of severe fundamental security screw-ups in Tribler, it really scares me that Pouwelse has recently started to position himself as a cyber security expert.

I don't think that TU Delft considers Tribler a publicity stunt, but that they see it as a serious initiative, even though it probably does more harm than good to both its users and the university. Outside the academic papers and review comment process, there often isn't much of a feedback channel back into academia and giving the mass of academic conferences, it is only a matter of persistence to get something (bad) accepted.
It has already happened, you just don't know about it, and neither do I. I've had experience in the scene for many years. Though I don't go there these days, I can almost guarantee that the big players have long had their databases downloaded and spread throughout multiple nations.

Your guess is as good as mine...
I second the recommendation of Diana Kleiner's video lectures. Absolutely fantastic, thorough, and well explained.
I think some work needs to be done on how the content flows, at the moment it doesn't feel very read worthy, rather - a lot of text stuffed on a single page. Perhaps, adding separate containers/divs for each specific content piece might fix this problem? At the end of the day, I want to read stuff, not browse it. :)
>Are you denying all these metrics as a whole

I'm denying the ones I've commented on are important.

>implying that Bitcoin's usage is either stagnating or declining

I think it is but thats not what I'm implying. I'm implying that people heavily invested in bitcoin tend to use vanity metrics like this.

That said the things I look at that make me believe bitcoin is stagnating/declining are things like the continued slide of the price over the year, Bitcoin Black Friday 2014 being a huge failure, Overstock missing their bitcoin sales expectations by 17 million dollars. Basically every vendor I've seen comment on sales has said there have been pretty much none this year. The fact that 2014 was meant to be the year of bitcoin and there has been no breakout in the general public. Everyone seems vaguely aware of bitcoin but no one is investing any time in learning anything about it because it solves problems that most people don't care about(freedom) and creates problems they do(security).

Now I just see people in the community rallying around remittance and the killer app that will save bitcoin but the actual transfer of funds isn't the expensive part of remittance the compliance around the transfer of funds is and the existing services that do remittance cheaper using bitcoin only work now because they are ignoring compliance completely. They will either get more expensive or be shut down in the near future.
The Star Wars API Is Live
Beginner's Guide to Fuzzing Part 3: Instrumented fuzzing
No. Chemicals are different, structures are different, design is different (cmos), etching equipment is different. I am at a loss to name a recognizable thing.
Check his series of posts on the subject: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/index.html

(TL;DR: Yes, he thought things through and are ntimed is implementing a few new tricks.)
Yes, and there's more - Portland cement is made of constituent parts, each presumably extracted from different stones (using energy intensive processes) and then precisely recombined in certain ratios. Roman concrete, lime mortar, and Natural cement are made largely from just moderately heating limestone.
Not too long ago, I saw https://www.interviewcake.com/ being mentioned here. I found it interesting enough to sign up for it even tho' I wasn't interviewing at the time.

I have a little review (/rave) about the site here: http://lonetwin.github.io/blog/html/2014/12/09/interview_cak...
For anyone with actual skill, nothing really changed. But then again, for people with actual skill nothing has really changed throughout the last 25 years, despite the crisis.

Yes, there was a huge market through Y2K and the dot-com bubble for people who knew how to operate a keyboard, and that market collapsed. But those people where as much developers as I am a surgeon because I know how to apply a band-aid. Personally I was glad the bubble burst, because it became increasingly harder to avoid landing in a place where most of the "developers" weren't utterly incompetent.

HN isn't a representative audience though. Most of those people wouldn't be on the early 2000's equivalents of HN either. If this is a bubble and it bursts, most of HN-ers that get affected won't be out of work for more than a month.

Many may have to take a boring enterprise gig, but that's pretty much how the second wave of internet-companies started: bored and with time on their hands, many hackers started to work on what was then called "social software" projects, which eventually resulted in a wave of social media startups.

Things may be different in SV, especially when it comes to the balance of wages vs cost of living, but SV is an outlier.
Immutable Objects Are Not Dumb
Does pair programming improve the correctness of software?
There's actually a few takes on the history, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun#ArsDigita_his...

But you are right, that CEO was not the right guy for the job. His personality + Philip's no-bullshit attitude ended it.
pretty slack may also kill IRC in the same way (seriously)
at some point nobody is going to use either
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=068AFYvd58E
AFAIK, PHK has written quite a bit of the FreeBSD kernel, most of Varnish (and a few other popular bits) in C.

I think it's safe to say that he's forgotten more about C/kernel/low-level/... programming than HN'ers will ever know.
Yes, that's what I used—however, I just realized I may have been conflating the difficulty of doing package management in Rust with some packages that I used that were enormously difficult to use or were outdated (speaks to the pre-1.0 thing, I suppose).
What killed GG is that for the longest time it was swamped with spam. Took them surprisingly long to get on top of that.
Save the real elf of your phone battery
Would iOS/Android be considered enterprise today?
Maximally Powerful, Minimally Useful