skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first paragraph mentions two employees with different salaries. One resents the others and so wants them equalized. If the difference is _not_ merit based then equalizing the salaries is a _good_ thing. Since the articles states equalizing is a bad thing, there is a hidden assumption that inequality is due to merit.

Likewise you do not want decision makers to be deterred from giving raises to some and not to others. This behavior would only be desirable if those raises were merit based. If they were not merit based than they should indeed be deterred. etc.

> Assuming both are equally human, you'd expect people to have a tendency to slack off and to like it when it doesn't hurt their bottom line.

Yes, presumably every employee will try to get the highest pay per work unit possible. If they do not know the salary of their coworker and their coworker has negotiated a higher rate then a disparity will exist that is not due to merit but due to negotiation. If they know about this disparity then either 1. they can demand the same rate thus be more meritocratic or 2. (less likely) the low productivity employee will be pressured or have his (lack of) work more reported on by peers. In this case, the resentment you mention is actually a useful thing.

If a pay differential is justifiable then the employer will have no problem explaining it to the lesser paid person or, if he gripes, replacing him with someone who produces the same or more per dollar and being better of for it.

Put simply, if two employees are paid the same and know it but one spends the day on facebook, the other will demand a raise and the employer will either grant it or loose one of the workers. Any of those three outcomes is an improvement.

Put even more succinctly, a system with more open information (eg regarding salaries) will be more efficient than a more information closed system.
Jason Rohrer’s arcane-themed magic square betting game has officially launched
Shame you can't complete the survey using a cURL request.
Data migration in Python
Thanks, that's very kind of you.
I recognize those flaws as well, so I presume by the author's definition I am a progressive militiaman.

Or maybe I'm just an intelligent individual.

Big "maybe" there, admittedly.
I honestly don't think there are many jobs an experienced MIT engineer couldn't do that a liberal arts graduate could. I think the matter here is most old folks with an MIT degree with a comfortable financial position would rather be unemployed just managing investments and other activities than work a low paying job.
The rich prodomiently hold their wealth in assets. These assets are more akin to rise in an inflationary environment (ie. Stock market.)

It usually the middle class that is desvated as most do not have any assets other than their homes and rely on a salary for the majority of their income.

It is possible for inflation and deflation to co-exist.

Wages could down while the cost of food, housing and energy raises.
Due to lens distorsion, rendering are done at higher resolution in order to get 1:1 pixel density at the center of the screens.
First Ever Internet of Things Hacking Village to Be Organized at DEF CON 23
I was able to get a demo of the Crescent Bay prototype (hand-built tech demo of the consumer version) at PAX East this year. I've also tried the DK1 and DK2.

If you've been playing with the DK1 or DK2, the consumer version is fundamentally better. Do not assume you know what the state of the art is until you've gotten your hands on a preview. I don't know exactly what the resolution differences are, and I don't care - it's not the relevant spec to compare. It's gotten to the point where resolution is "good enough" to trick the mind and anyone who says otherwise is bikeshedding. They've gotten the screen door effect under control. With head tracking implemented and drift solved as a side effect, two huge problems are gone. Their low-latency head tracking stops people from feeling nauseated like they did with DK1. I could barely stand without wanting to vomit after playing the Doom demo. The only game I could play for any length of time was a simple platform jumping game called Rift Rush.

I don't know what they consider their largest hurdles, but from my perspective the hardware/software problems are solved for now and they need excellent made-for-VR content. When done well, the effect is stunning - in one of that calmer, more exploration-oriented demos I just stared at the light glinting off a metal bowl as I moved around it for at least 30 seconds.

But the difference between "good" and "mind blowing" was often the result of things that nobody has thought about before. In the movie-like demos, sometimes I missed things because I had my back to the action. In VR movies, the user controls the camera and needs to be told where to look; that's a problem nobody making movies has ever faced before. Even Pixar's demo suffered from this - the action was too spread out for the screen's field of view.
Germany, Too, Is Accused of Spying on Friends
From their homepage, "this is the only way to make Open Source web apps viable." What does viable mean in this context? Why is this service different from hosting on heroku or my own free Amazon instance? Is it just convenience or is there something more?
I love programming. I find it to be a fun and enjoyable activity. However, when I have to do something, sometimes its not fun, but then if, later, I do the exact same thing when I want to, its fun again.

I think its the same thing with games - some games I play do feel like work, but I still enjoy them and I think the reason is because I choose to play when I want to. If I were told "you have to play this game now", then I'd probably hate it, but if I can decide for myself, then I enjoy it. Which games I would choose to play in a given moment depends on the mood I'm in.
Self-driving semi hits the road
Too many people getting motion sickness could kill the VR market for years.
They would probably have to build a product at least 2x better than Zenefit's current offerings to gain back market share. It looks like Zenefits is starting to be the way to do things as many smaller startups.
Developers don't always have access rights to the build systems or artifact repositories. Most of the devs I work with don't - not because I'm not willing to share, but because they're supremely uninterested in the deployment systems. If there's an outage, the people who can fix it aren't always available right then and there.
Good idea using the HBase apis. Internally, Google storage is very reliable because of multiple cell replication. That said, as convenient as it would be to hand off data storage to a vendor, it would feel a little strange to have one's company so dependent on a third party like Google. Same concerns over relying on SimpleDB or Azure table storage.

For personal storage I replicate on Microsoft and Google's offerings but at large scale the cost of replication between vendors would be huge.
I'm 57 and doing iOS but yeah, I think some people want to ignore you if your resume is too long thinking you are making it all up. But I am in the DFW area which is basically a Silicon Black Hole for programmers anyway.
This "it's almost fixed, I'll email the client soon" pattern is something I have personally struggled with a lot, and I agree it appears to be common with engineers.

My workaround has been to make something else responsible for sending the email. In a team, this could be a manager setting a cut-off point after which communication must be made. When working on my own, I set an alarm for X minutes. When that alarm goes off I ignore the internal voice which says "just try one more thing, then send the email", and send an update to let the relevant people know my current progress, ETA to fix, and when they can expect the next update.

I think this is similar to how GTD encourages us to use systems for storing to-do lists instead of trying to remember them - our fragile human brains are not always to be trusted.
Show HN: Quench: The Gulp file generator
I think there is a real shift though. People talk about "nintendo hard" because most of the games of that era were that hard. Five or ten years ago health was a carefully managed resource in any "AAA" FPS; nowadays regenerating health is very much the norm.
iBeacons for IT and Device Management
The "No" is to the question, "did you ask your friends and family?"
Reinventing the Job Description
14 nm GPUs are coming in 2016.
Seeing as it also reads multiple files and/or standard input, I am reminded of this:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

"cat isn't for printing files with line numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files."

Why not make it just a syntax highlighting filter? Or is the "cat" functionality too trivial to be factored out, and thus it has grown to include other things? I suppose it's a bit of a philosophical question...
I'm imagining the job interview.

"We want to sponsor your distributed database research, but not your Barbie animated GIF production."
Sure, let's go with that. It is all subjective. What political color am I now?

My real argument is that the article had merit until the subtle mud slinging and big reveal of the author's bias.
In my experience if an older engineer/programmer is more expensive than a younger one --- but the older one is better --- the older one will be hired. You get what you pay for. As long as your skill set isn't basically a "commodity" (generic web design for example) you will be ok. Put another way---if your decades of experience _don't_ give you some appreciable advantage over a 20-something new guy, then yes maybe you are in the wrong business.
As a Clojurist, I approve of this message.
Currently it is 32-bit only so you can't really use it for anything in the store. They are working on 64bit.
I'm 25 and find this kind of depressing, any good society takes care of its elders (read: not old, just older) These are the folks that toiled away on the compilers, libraries, and patterns that we have been standing on to build the current generation of tech, and this is how some of them have fared? I suppose the ruthless competition of this industry is a double edged sword.
Especially if you need something more than "JavaScript, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, and C" - pygments has a list of supported languages a tiny bit longer than that: http://pygments.org/languages/

True, it takes some time to highlight some files - for example 5k loc long Racket files or very long XML/HTML files - but it supports all the languages I use (or used or may use in the future), while this tool supports only one of the languages I use on a daily basis.
Depending on the language, this can be expensive even if you're not actually logging the data.

And it invites timing-based heisenbugs (enable tracing, problem goes away).

Still a neat approach, however.
Basically what you're doing is marking data as a function in the executable/library metadata.
Okay, but that's exception and exception handling not crashing. Crashing means the whole program dies. I can understand if the term "crash" is defined differently in Erlang world, but I don't understand why Erlang citizens don't know that the rest of the world calls that "exception" and that "exception handling" is implemented in many high level languages by default, doing exactly as the article explains you should be doing it. I mean, Erlang people also know other languages, right? I think there are more Erlang experts who know C++ than C++ experts who know Erlang.
Note: I'm not close to 50 like this topic asks, but I think this perception is a weird one I haven't personally witnessed.

I think this stereotype/assumption (east coast, FWIW) - is probably due to the radical uptake on the field. There are a lot of young people, and that's starting to die off a bit more as computers are "a given" and those people themselves get older.

Simply put - there will be a LOT of people in this bracket in not too long, and a lot of useful work to do. This group will also have some of the most architectural experience.

My last company had most of the developers in their mid thirties (as am I), for instance. Admittedly, that's not over 50, but larger companies tend to skew a bit higher in that direction.

New startups also generally pay less, which is also a reason more experienced engineers sometimes don't go to new startups - or even seek out larger companies. While there are some aspects that may be boring, larger companies also have more resources, sometimes have more interesting labs, and while you can see and change less of the system, you are less apt to have to deal with certain parts of the system you don't want to deal with too - because there's more specialization and organizational seperation.

As people get older, there's simply not going to be a management job for each of them, and not everyone is going to want to do management - and that's great. Management is not "better". I suspect the ageism will go away simply as more people get older and realize they too are not just out of college anymore.

And having that experience is good for everyone.

Hopefully it also slows down the rate at which javascript programming frameworks are replaced as these folks also get tired of replacing things every two weeks :) Ok, kidding on that last part.

Anyway, my guess is ageism in tech isn't really proven yet. it's a theory, based on the wrong assumptions.

However, yes, if your company is still shooting nerf guns at each other, and irresponsibly managing release schedules to be in constant crunch time, a wide amount of people aren't going to want to work for you.
Man VS Woman: who will better run a Startup
The USD is a pretty lousy global currency. You can't exactly use it anywhere in any sort of transaction. I've only ever heard of a handful of places outside of the States where the local currency is terrible enough that local people prefer to hold and transact in USD over long periods of time. A true global currency would be one that you could use to buy practically anything, anywhere, whether it was a very large or very small transaction.

Regardless, Bitcoin has several advantages. For one thing, you're not dependent upon continually obtaining a flow of paper notes from a foreign country that may lie halfway around the world. For another, you can divide Bitcoin to extremely small and precise quantities - the dollar on the other hand doesn't scale as well to economies where a penny may start to approach a significant individual unit of money.

There are of course many other advantages of Bitcoin that make it attractive for people in many different countries to adopt. The fact that you can transmit and receive it to and from anywhere in the world, with the same certainty of transaction confirmation as cash in hand, without the need to either physically ship cash or rely on a network of physical cash shipment, is a pretty good one, especially as the world grows ever smaller.

A final advantage would be that you are never hostage to the political dangers of a nation-state controlled currency (i.e. a small group of rich white men can at any point decide to devalue your savings, to the point of destruction, by printing an unlimited amount of the currency.)
Nice you are being inventive! I wish more job hunters did the same :)
> And the central bank can still manipulate that value, they just have to buy and sell the asset to do it.

Yes, true. But the fact that there is SOME LIMIT is pretty nice. In other words, the Fed could create as many dollars as there are bits to represent them without much effort at all. Only once you start overflowing a 64 bit integer does there start to be any kind of restraint on the amount of dollars created and only for a year or two until all the software gets migrated to use 128 bit long long long longs!

Commodities -- especially gold and silver which have widespread historical precedent as money -- can't really just be made up. Yes they're vulnerable to the vagaries of the market, but that market is at least based on some reality! And before you say "but the central bank can just make the prices go to infinity" thus achieving their price goals anyhow, I would respectfully disagree. The point of commodity backing of paper notes is that if you lose faith in the value of the notes you can always demand the commodity and hold that instead.
I continually find this idea that there aren't older developers really really strange, from my own experience. Every job I've had has included me being on the younger end of the spectrum and developers a lot older than me.

The lead developer at my current company is in his mid-50s and he's as interested as anyone I've known (and more interested than a lot of engineers I've known) in learning new APIs, etc.

I know, anecdata and all that :)
Or Google has shown what happens when a 'gadget' doesn't meet expectations.
You'd prefer they didn't honor robots.txt at all?
Wages could down while the cost of food, housing and energy raises. -> is inflation?
Site doesn't load in Safari on iPad 1.
He's now fully retired but my dad moved pretty heavily into microcontroller work at the very end of his career. It seemed to be an area that leaned towards older, more experienced developers with lots of electronics experience (which he had).

If I had to extract any pattern I see with older developers who are doing well, it's that those who can connect together a life of experiences (such as with electronics, management, medicine, law, or other areas they may have worked in) can really make more sense for many projects than less experienced developers. It's no coincidence that it seems to be the older developers who are the TDD, BDD, Agile, etc. gurus - they're the ones with the years of experience of dealing with people and applying that to our discipline.
Haskell Web Server in a 5MB Docker Image
OK, there are no errors now but I still get the error. Does it use some other port? Do I need to open one?

OK. I see it opens a websocket which I guess I need to also forward to my server.
I'd say it's close enough to being there, that it's there. I get about 95% accuracy, and the 5% is overcome by how much faster it is than poking fake keys.

This only applies to generic language. Unusual phrasings, niche words, or proper nouns come out wrong. This make speech perfect for quick texting, but still unusable for real writing.
In addition to logging, you can send out a statsd[0] message, graph it, and use something like Skyline[1] for alerting based on trend issues. You can also use logstash to generate metrics on logs when sending them up to Elasticsearch.

[0] https://github.com/etsy/statsd
[1] https://github.com/etsy/skyline
Mandatory mention: Emacs works here as well, but is less practical because of longer startup times.
The code is building is coming from the local checkout. As for third party libraries, npm used to be so unreliable that we needed a strategy for that.
Btw. I now think the Erlang term "crash" might mean the same thing as, e.g. the Java/Python/C++ term "Exception". Do you know about that? Is it really as similar as I think?

Because it does exactly what the article says: You experience some unexpected system state, stop what you are doing, raise an Exception with an error type and error message and let a higher level element do something about it, which might include a restart of the subsystem if so desired.
Cost per node per hour - $0.65; Minimum number of nodes per cluster - 3

0.65 x 3 x 24 x 30 = $1404 / month

And that's before any storage costs.
Sooooo ... tell me about conditions & restarts in Clojure these days ;-P

On a serious note, a good friend of mine recently evaluated Clojure and fell in love with it. Interestingly, he loves it for the same reason I didn't: the JVM.

He saw his life being made easier by great Java integration, I saw the language and tooling being hindered by having to target the JVM. I think we're both right :)
An MIT bachelor's degree includes a decent amount of liberal arts. The HASS requirement has been around for a long time -- 1980s? http://web.mit.edu/hassreq/
So some people want a log format that is more structured than plain text lines. That is going to require some sort of specialized tool. So if a dependency is allowable (instead of leaving the log in a format that is already readable by ~everything), why can't the specialized tool generate an efficient index?

A traditional log with a parallel index would be completely backwards compatible, the query tool should work the same way, and you could even treat the index file as a rebuildable cache which can be useful. The interface presented by a specialized tool doesn't have to depend on any specific storage method.

Really, this recent fad of trying to remove old formats in the believe the old format was somehow preventing any new format from working in parallel reminds me of JWZ's recommendations[1] on mbox "summary files" over the complexity of an actual database. Sometimes you can get the features you want without sacrificing performance or compatibility.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
This is what I don't get. I trust github as a central platform more than hosting my own gitlab in the cloud.

There's a lot of people spreading a holier than thou attitude in this thread.
I never got to use Crescent Bay, but I've got a DK2 at home. Resolution for me will be a non-issue once I can read smallish text on virtual signs/displays. I'm thinking mostly for games like Elite Dangerous and other simulators like that, where a cockpit display is part of the game. Do you think the crescent bay prototype is at that point? (this might be a naive question as it's been awhile since I've looked up anything on the newest prototypes)

Otherwise I'm with you. Positional tracking was the thing that really made it awesome for me. There are so many tiny head movements that you make when you're looking around; if positional tracking isn't pretty much 100%, then it just feels wrong.
Oculus Rift Consumer VR System Pre-Orders Start Later This Year, Ships Q1 2016
> To the Paredit user who just clicked the comments link followed by Ctrl+F paredit: what do you think of it?

How the hell did you see me doing that? :O. I searched for it after reading top-level thread since a lot of comments are basically describing Paredit.

I'm using Paredit to write Lisp and I really miss this style in other languages. It takes some time to get used to - I finally grokked it after spending ~1 hour (two pomodoros) on structuring and restructuring a block of Lisp code. But after that hour of practice, writing code feels much different.

Lisp code is an explicit tree structure, and what Paredit does is enforce that structure. It lets you move things up and down the tree, or left and right at the same level, automatically maintaining the structure (keeping your parens balanced). It properly handles cutting and pasting parts of a tree. After you internalize those features, you really start to think of code in terms of trees instead of text representation.
I like the design. It's the first time I land on this website. Good idea.

Where are the price pulled from? I guess they are US prices?
> "Money does not decay over time..." ... except in the form of inflation.

We've experienced another form of decay. We had a few old leftover dollar bills from a trip to the USA we made last century. When we wanted to exchange them back into local currency a couple of years ago, all exchange houses would only give back around 70% of their face value, merely because they were old bills (they were in good condition).
My impression is that age-ism is definitely a thing, but that it's a lot more complicated than just how old you are. The ugly truth is that a lot of people just don't present a very attractive package to the world as they get older.

There's a whole 'nother set of life challenges that we face in our middle years. Most folks do almost nothing to prepare themselves for these challenges, and that becomes increasingly obvious with age. But it's not simply the age that matters.
My english is far from perfect, but there are effectively 7 words, no?