skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, age is an issue but only at some organizations and you are probably better off staying away.

A couple of observations on interviews focussed on api's -

I do not have a problem with being asked a question on specific api if I have listed it in my skill sets. I would not expect to answer an api question on struts FrontRequestProcessor just because I have MVC listed on my resume.

Usually when I have been asked such questions, it has been when interviewing with junior to mid level programmers, all of them significantly 'younger' than me.

The older folks have all transitioned into managerial function, some of them know the engineering terms obtained from reading technical publications but have not written code in a while.

Organizations with an emphasis on such questions tend to more often than not lack an "engineering culture". Emphasis is placed on delivering requirements from a backlog rather then innovating on behalf of customers and I would stay away from them.

Age is an issue, but not at the ones that matter (to me at least)
Agree. I was thinking more along the lines of don't tip your hand and let the guy lay it all out. If company rep is laying out plan A,B,C and you get all excited at B, he might drop and never mention C. Also, as you say you could even press for more and should consider that your estimate of your value to the company needs to be revised.
I think users of Squid get sent to http://www.to/ ...
Wow. I feel like I need to go smoke a cigarette after reading that list. I also want to print off 10,000 copies and throw them like confetti around several of my previous jobs.

"in a room full of expert software designers, if any two agree, that's a majority!"
Unfortunately, not yet. What type of work do you do though, I may know some people looking for someone with your skills. See my above comment for my email.
Normally I don't care about the url shortening service I use. They more or less provide the same thing, short url, and some stats. Winr has all that and PRIZES. Can I haz a cheezburger? Hells yea.
Agreed that an expensive 409A valuation is not needed prefunding but would add that, in most cases, companies simply skip it altogether in the prefunding stage. While 409A applies to companies at all stages, it is difficult for the IRS to second-guess prefunding valuations. More importantly, 409A applies to "deferred" compensation and, in practical terms for startups, this means options - options are not used nearly as much in the prefunding stage as is restricted stock or outright grants (neither of which vehicles are subject to the 409A requirements).
So basically the concept is to frame the content with an ad unit for the clicker in order for the person who shortened the url to have the chance of winning an iPod nano?

Checking the tweet asking people to vote up this post (http://twitter.com/wi_nr/status/6307532154) delivered and adsense unit for me. Does this comply with adsense rules? Framing people's content with a URL redirect sounds like something that google isn't gonna like.
> The ticket seller might want

But that's unrelated to market efficiency. People in this thread are trying to define "seller not getting what they want" or "particular type of consumer not getting what they want" into market inefficiency, and it doesn't work like that.

I'm not an economist. Perhaps I'm wrong, but in this case please make the case in terms of a definition you can cite.

(In practical terms, they seller could reach that aim by giving people a cashback at a random time during the event for those who turned up - for example swapping a single ticket for a cashback at the end of the show as people were leaving the gates. The reason venues don't like scalpers is that they don't like price discovery because of reasons like these: (1) they want to be able to make a killing on late tickets, even if it's only for a few events per year and (2) they want to be able to sell tickets to poor people through some mechanisms at one price, and tickets to richer people through different mechanisms at another price, such as through coupon clipping or discount books or through ticket offices in poor areas, (3) they don't want tickets won through competitions being given away. That way they get to charge wealthier people a higher price than time-rich people who are typically poorer. That's inefficiency.)
"Then again, people shouldn't click random links."

What does this even mean? The web's primary use case is clicking random links as defined in some context. Shortened links rarely show up in a tweet without any defining context.
Memorizing was important when you have no other way to document information. But I doubt it to be important when you know how to search and judge/experiment the information recently. Sometime people ask for apis just to see whether the person had experience with the technology.

At the other hand, remember important facts, theorems, plus good analytical thinking saving a lot of troubles.

What I find annoying is the education systems make most people misunderstanding 'good memory' as 'smart'. At the other hand, I see good problem solving ability as smartness. Not so many educators are as wise as Richard Feynman's father is in teaching Richard Feynman memorization is not understanding how a bird's behaviors. It is hard to teach problem solving.
Price discovery is not 'artificial inflation' - it contributes to efficiency.

In effect, they will have decided that the natural
supply/demand situation is unsuitable to them and
manipulated the market to create an artificial scarcity.

No - the situation where artificial scarcity occurs is where people who buy the tickets are prevented from onselling them. In this case the venue has an advantage that contributes to economic inefficiency.

The interests of the ticket maker and the efficiency of the economy are separate considerations.

Even in the situation where one scalper gets all the tickets, if they sell them to people who are themselves then free to onsell them then even this creates a more efficient market than what you have when the venue has a monopoly over the direction of transactions.

I always thought it was strange that event venues were able to coax legislators into introducing anti-scalping legislation. It's only now I see the arguments being brought against scalpers that I appreciate the murkiness of the issue when pitched from certain perspectives.
I think this is a "is it a bug or a feature?" type of conversation. Some folks will see age as a bug, some as a feature.

I'm in my 40s, so I'm closer to you than the younger crowd. I've also had quite a bit of experience hiring folks, and it's never been an issue for me.

I once had a contract with a company where the average age was 24 -- and I was 32. During the interview they asked "so do you think age will be an issue?" to which I replied "Why should it? I love working with people of all ages."

I think as you get older you realize that good programming is in knowledge of general heuristics and systems, not api calls. But when you're young, everything new and shiny must be mastered to the fullest extent.

Be aware of this. Always be learning "just enough" of what is new and flashy in order to be able to develop with it (or look it up and develop with it) quickly if need be." If you stop learning at the deeper-than-superficial-but-not-guru level, it's not going to work.

Having said all of that, I think age, as long as you are self-motivated, is a feature and not a bug. If your head is still in the game, you're going to bring a lot to the table in terms of tacit knowledge. Having somebody who has been-there, done-that can be a great boon to a team working in tough situations.
Cash. Or if they have no understanding of Economics, a gift card to Amazon.
That inline bookmarklet didn't work in Safari 4 (OSX 10.6), but the bookmarklet from http://www.longurlplease.com/ did--thank you for sharing it.
It's not much at the moment (mostly a glorified and incomplete GEOS C API wrapper), but I am thinking about some interesting applications -- like a super-fast, non-blocking geospatial index search for millions of objects.
I'm thinking of getting my parents a roomba. Anyone have any experience with those?
I think this comparison shows a fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is really trying to find a use-case and serve a purpose that in some way adds to the productivity of this planet. Whereas Facebook's goal seems to suck as much of people's time as possible by having them do menial activities, while turning a profit. While the two companies may be in the same "industry" -- they certainly have very different missions (I think), whether they realize it or not.
eg most people.
Zed Shaw: Librelist to take on Google, Yahoo mailing lists
It's more of a 'link-bait-and-switch' title.
personally speaking, I owe jquery several beers.
Yep, I am having a ball... specially because I work because I want to, not because I have to :)

I just felt weird being filtered out because of "trivial pursuit" type of questioning.. (to be fair my memory for technical minutia is no where what it used to be..)
Aren't they spreading themselves a little thin a little too early? Google can afford to explore different areas, but I think these guys should first work on an impressive engine for pulling together information on the web in a meaningful way before looking at more niche things like resolving math. Unless it somehow calls on the same AI base and was very little work to develop.
Twisted 9.0.0 released
How to do a distributed Twitter (MSM)
Also LibyanSpider.com
bit.ly stole TinyURL's startup idea!

It's the execution that matters.
URL Shortener makes sense in this context for sure. I think providing your own friendly paths in web apps you build is a good idea too, so people don't feel the necessity to use a url shortener which is one more thing to do.

The maps URLs are ridiculous. Google should provide their own shortener for these imo. Then you get the best of both worlds, smaller more readable URLs and within a domain you recognize / trust.
The Great Dysfunctional Corporate Budgeting Process
The Dark Art of Negotiation
Some information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earths_atmosp...

Also have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_p...:

"Carbon dioxide has a variable atmospheric lifetime, and cannot be specified precisely. Recent work indicates that recovery from a large input of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels will result in an effective lifetime of tens of thousands of years."

The usual disclaimer about the accuracy of information on Wikipedia applies of course ;-)
When a company raises capital at a $1 Billion valuation, the dilution to early investors who do not participate is minimal...
Why is he listed as "Mr. Schmidt" rather than "Dr. Schmidt"?
Ask HN: Unethical Programming?
The recent story about FaceBook's Farmville having more traffic than Twitter got me thinking: is there such a thing as unethical programming?

I know many of you will say that Farmville is harmless because it takes people away from boredom and provides them with entertainment. And, after all, they choose to do it.

But there is an undeniably addictive nature to these games. Each game not only competes with other games that a person might play when bored, but it also competes with stuff a person should be doing.

So -- where's the line? Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery? (Put another way, if you were designing medical software, would you add game-like hooks to keep people's attention focused on it as a way of competing with other medical devices?)

Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow? FaceBook's games are using players to perform hours and hours of menial, mindless tasks as they market and sell to them and other FB users. At what point do you cross the line between simply entertaining people and harmfully manipulating them and using them?
"Search engine for forty programmers"... my one little digression on HN.
This is cool. I wonder how hard it would be to hook up to spatial databases like PostGIS?
Works with Chrome (Windows) just fine...
This article is just wrong. Interns want a fair salary so that they can cover their expenses for the summer and perhaps save a little for the coming school year. Beyond that the largest hurdle is getting interns to know about you. At my college job fair there were only big name marquee corporations. I didn't really even learn of the large size of the start up scene until after graduation.
It was a joke :(
unobfuscated source: http://pastebin.com/m3e39a034
Man 'finishes' World of Warcraft
The End of Days for “View Source”?
Techniques to help you think better (google tech talk)
Probably trickier than I think. I want to wrap the GDAL OGR library, which provides a common API for reading and writing spatial datasources, including PostGIS, however the trick will be the dealing with the subtleties of blocking I/O for each underlying access method (shapefiles and other file-based sources, PostGIS, ODBC, etc.).

Ryan's node_postgres add-on [1] is a good example for how one might implement this.

[1] http://github.com/ry/node_postgres
Agreed. People talk about Twitter's revenue model - though in reality they are getting undisclosed amounts from several sources (not just Google and Microsoft).
Ugh, that stock art photograph of a bunch of posers at the top of the screen just drains me of all motivation to read this. I'm that shallow it seems.
Mad Mimi created a 75k a month business in a couple years
Man. One moment he is donating an old Unix box to a local hacker or rambling about obscure details of contemporary graphics cards, the next he is comparing his F50 to his custom built TVR.

Now I know where the term 'rock star programmer' came from.
Introducing Google Public DNS: A new DNS resolver from Google
This tells me Google should consider providing shortened URLs. maps.google.com/a7sga would be great.
I often lament the fact that the .plan format isn't credited more often as the original blogging format. Finger and .plan was very common before 2000, especially in the game industry and lots of hackers build their own aggregators for it.
Who Really Killed the Crunchpad?
Steve Souders: Fewer HTTP requests through resource packages
From now on I'll show this:

RES1. Many software researchers advocate rather than investigate. As a result, (a) some advocated concepts are worth less than their advocates believe and (b) there is a shortage of evaluative research to help determine the actual value of new tools and techniques

to a researcher friend of mine every time he advocates the use of Lisp in commercial projects claiming that such a great language will just inevitably bring more productivity to the team in comparison with such a poor language like Java (or any other Blub.)
I find it interesting how there is a high degree of animosity towards finance people on this site.

My theory is that it has something to do with them being successful and making millions without having to venture out and start their own business.

I mean, there are only a couple of roads that lead you to riches. Building a successful company is one of them, being successful in finance is another. I guess on this site, we've all chosen more or less, one road, so we have to rationalize to ourselves why we didn't pursue the other.

Or at least that's just how I feel sometimes.
I got a Roomba 530 recently and it works great. I have both carpet and hard wood floors, and it does fine with the transitions. I'm thinking about getting one for my parents too. Tip: I got mine from Bed Bath and Beyond for 20% by signing up for their email list and printing off the coupon they sent me for doing that.
Twitter should solve this problem, they should stick links separately to the 140 characters. Like they don't force you to encode the picture of the person in the 140 characters.

For SMS, well if the link goes beyond 140, send it in a separate SMS? Should SMS messaging compatibility for Twitter break the whole paradigm of transparency of addressing on the web?

Time to move on and create solutions looking forward, not backward.
This isn’t to say that for-profit companies are bad, it’s just that if they can make money by tracking your behavior and serving you ads, then that will take precedence over giving your project a good user experience.

This strikes me as hitting the nail on the head!
Exactly.

And while they're at it, they could emphasize the actual root domain when showing links.

The fact that scammer links with obfuscated URLs are still successful is shameful.
EDIT: Zed just addressed this with some basic plans: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744

Overall it looks nice. The most interesting/controversial bit to me is the following (taken from librelist.com):

Nobody Can Be Taken Off

The “libre” in the name means freedom for everyone to discuss their opinions, so nobody will have the right to boot you off or enforce arbitrary “list Nazi” rules simply because you disagree with them.

That of course doesn’t mean you should act like a jerk, but the librelist.com philosophy is that healthy communities can survive and need “trolls”.
I think my corporate proxy is blocking this as well, or perhaps our DNS servers or something. In any case, I assume there will be a large swath of people for whom this redirection will not work.
In this case the venue has an advantage that contributes to economic inefficiency.

The same total sum of goods and services is available with scalpers buying up the supply, but those goods and services are now provided at higher total cost than otherwise. This is, so far as I'm aware, the definition of inefficiency and consists solely of artificial inflation of prices.
Schmidt contradicts himself :
He tells us that newspapers can get good money using targeted ads , and then he tells us that google(which is the leader in ad targeting) get very little revenue from ads next to newspapers stories.

So ads might not be the solution for the current problems of newspapers.

But if you look at google news , every story gets published in hundred of newspapers with some little variation.
Seems like a huge redundancy , that takes a lot of work , and shares the ad revenue between many many sources.
Holy cow, this makes bit.ly look like long-domain-name-i-spent-10-dollars-on-just-to-put-one-snarky-word-in-96-point-helvetica.com
While we're being pedantic: Tim Ferriss did a good job at this
This is rather blatant:

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

The inevitable conclusion: "If a divergence exists between measured temperatures and those derived from dendrochronological data after (circa) 1960, then discarding only the post-1960 figures is disingenuous, to say the least. The very existence of a divergence betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. If it's bogus beyond a set threshold, then any honest man of science would instinctively question its integrity prior to that boundary. And only the lowliest would apply a hack in order to produce a desired result."
http://to./loop0
Great idea. I've started to smell the "funk" recently around Google Groups; Zed pinned down exactly what it was. This will be a very interesting project moving forward.
I think what annoys murdoch et al. is that they are dealing
with a commercial entity (Google) over which they have very
little leverage, if any. This puts them in a very weak negotiating position. However, I read an article recently speculating on whether it might be in their interest to foster competition between search engines for their content, and in particular between Bing and Google. To do this,
the article suggested they ban Google from indexing their content, and get Microsoft to pay them for the privilege.
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?st...
The open question with this strategy is whether they could make enough money from Microsoft to offset the loss of click through revenue from Google. Moreover, it is unclear whether they could get sufficient scale to hurt Google in terms of the number of news organisations that participate.
Google launches their own Public DNS
bit.ly isn't winning because of the length, but because of the reliability, commitment to persistence, anti-spam, and analytics.

This is blindingly obvious. A few characters shorter just doesn't matter.
Chart of NASA website traffic
> every story gets published in hundred of newspapers with some little variation. Seems like a huge redundancy, that takes a lot of work, and shares the ad revenue between many many sources

Exactly. The newspaper industry as a distribution model, with many players redistributing content created by a few, and sharing the revenue, just won't make sense when distribution online is effectively free... both in terms of cost and expectation of cost.

However, the content creation industry will thrive. Non-syndicated, subscription services like the Economist will do just fine.
InclinedPlane's comment already says it, but I think it's worth putting more strongly. The OP is nothing but a synopsis of Glass' book Facts and Fallcies of Software Engineering, which is remarkable precisely for the fact that it does provide supporting references for every one of its claims. Glass' meticulousness in this respect is nearly unique in the space (Steve Mcconnell also comes to mind) and he deserves to be better known for it.

That being said, the effect of all those references (on me anyway) was more to highlight the weakness of the research literature than to make a convincing case. But that's not Glass' fault. He does a great job of reporting what the literature says.
Anything from John Chow's website is incoherent self-serving drivel as part of his marketing funnel to get you to help him make more money... so he can blog about how he makes more money.

This article had good intentions, but guest blogging on John Chow's website is doing him a disservice.
Magnetic Health Therapy and Pain Relief
We've got a strong team that's going to give all the money to charity (Red Cross). If you'd like to help, report your balloon sightings to
http://www.ispyaredballoon.com/
or at facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=201028633372
Tell HN : 3 years ago, I recorded christmas songs
I began with "JingoBelle" I thought I could do a beautiful version on the piano, but things didn't turn out well, listen to the end of the song...
This was inevitable, and will give OpenDNS some major competition. Google could make tons of money from ads and sponsored results on error pages.
Regarding games, Richard Bartles book, Designing Virtual Worlds, touches on this topic. Its an interesting read.

Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow?

I have no issues with this. Then again, I never did get into WoW, so...

Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery?

I probably wouldn't feel very comfortable about this however.
ASCII Art from 1934
Ok this is preposterous. If the entire peer-review process was "hacked" we can't trust any climate science? I guess all that science must be thrown away with the coal companies' refuse water.
a solution to a problem that doesn't exist

I do not use them, but long URLs are a pain in many contexts, and it's not always possible to [link]wrap a tag around it[/link]. Server > client communication has gotten incredibly flexible, but client > server or client > peer communication is still mostly text-driven, and many URLs are not text-friendly or human-friendly.

The widespread use of these shorteners strongly argues that they do solve a problem, just not one that matters to you as a programmer.