skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What will happen to the value of a programmer over time?

Do you think opportunities to make an economic impact with software are increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? (I'd say they are increasing, as the world depends more and more on software.)

If you want to earn high wages, you should probably aim for skills that are (1) in high demand, (2) in short supply, and (3) not easily replaced by substitutes. So find a niche where there will be real demand and supply is limited (because it's hard to master: think "programming" + electrical or mechanical engineering, or computer vision, or...).
Correction, openstack dropped python 2.6 support in its kilo release, you can of course run python 2.7 on centos6.x/rhel6.x (and I know companies doing this, including godaddy and yahoo) via a variety of manners, and then openstack will work for you again (until u can shift to centos7.x or rhel7.x).
There are only three action approaches.

1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than just what relates to this specific situation.

2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit - there is nothing without them.

3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).

#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too late.
It terminates for an arbitrary j smaller than 2^53, which is enough for most people.
It already is a bad profession. All professions are bad, if your goal is to make money.

If your goal is to maximize money in your pocket, standard employment is a bad model.
The lawyers who find positions may get paid well, but the issue isn't just salaries - the legal market was completely swamped about 5 years ago, around the same time many of my friends were graduating law school. A good number of them never managed to find positions with firms, and many either returned to grad school or are (funnily enough) now programming.

edit: a word
As a lawyer turned programmer, I've written a bit about this here: http://www.williamha.com/economics-of-software-development-v...

I also did an interview on Above the Law about how some people in the legal profession may be better off in software:
http://abovethelaw.com/2015/06/should-you-leave-law-and-lear...

And for the record, the majority of new lawyers in the United States are paid as much if not less than an junior software developer these days.
I believe the statement to be true. The rate at which new jobs are created for computer scientists even outpaces the rate at which newly graduated CS majors enter the workforce.

Meaning demand is going to increase at an increasing rate, supply will remain at a constant growth rate.

In the future, while technology may replace many things, It will never replace entertainers, engineers, designers or people who create creative things in general.

The killer fact to me is that software is hard. It is something that cannot be seen. Imagine trying to diagnose traffic problems when you can't see the cars or the roads or the traffic signals. Software is so hard that even if you build a system that accomplishes the main objective, it can be extremely hard to modify the system in the future if the quality is low. Top talent will always be in demand. Over time a few expensive talented programmers will always create a better product than hundreds of cheap mediocre ones.
I'm curious how this was communicated to the admins. Even in the case where, say, she punched kn0thing in the nose and was currently being carted off to jail, I imagine you could say "Hey mods, something came up, since it's a personnel matter there's unfortunate legal stuff involved, but we needed to terminate Victoria's employment a couple of minutes ago. For now, full responsibility for running AMAs is with so-and-so, who is not going to be as good at it but will try their best. This is what records we have, this is what we don't and we're working on getting them as soon as possible. This sucks and we're really sorry about the impact on AMAs, but so-and-so will try to make things as non-bad as possible, and they will be super easily reachable for you until we figure out what's happening long term."
Computer science grads have the highest starting salaries of all college majors
Why are interactions and custom elements global?
Why do you dislike NGINX?
Fair enough if you don't appreciate the comment, but asking someone to delete their account is incredibly rude. There are much more tactful ways of telling someone their attempt at humour is not appreciated.
Maybe this is the IPA talking, but I don't think I ever want to work at a company with a style guide again.

This is no worse that others I've seen, but they all codify what some group found useful at some point in time, and then that becomes Company Policy set in stone for the rest of time.
The necessity of the human practice of software development doesn't end until the onset of general artificial intelligence. In the time between then and now it will increasingly be the hammer that is used for humanity's nails.
Lip service is the first step.
That makes sense.

I'm curious what you think about variants on the PageRank idea that address the slowness problem you point out. You state in an earlier comment “so if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great”. You could theoretically have a PageRank-like system where some nodes are papers, some nodes are committees, and (maybe) some nodes are individuals. Then there could be different types of edges, expressing relations like “has cited this paper” or “deems this to be a quality paper” or “recognizes the competence/authority/prestige/whatever of this person/committee”. Then run PageRank on the whole mess.
It's sad that you capitulated. I agree with your original point more. Is this thing really flexible, composable, and implementable? How long do we have to wait for people to provide solid implementations on top of all the popular programming language and database backends? Feels like SQL all over again. Someone will be writing layers on top of this in javascript in the frontend and ruby/python/javascript/etc. in the backend. Then we are in another ORM hell. (Perhaps I am being too pessimistic here, it could very well be great, but I have some serious reservations...)
I wrote out a well thought out response to this, but decided to simply ask you to re-read your own post.

> Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there.

This is true, and all the more worrying. It has a track record of being unsuccessful both at the managerial level and a financial one.

> look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments

"popcorn tastes good" -670 karma

With submissions frozen on top subreddits, massive community backlash against the CEO, and a huge schism forming among communities he decides to antagonize a bit and keep his head down.

> the celeb nudes debacle

reddit is 4chan with a better layout. It is frankly absurd they didn't have a contingency for this, and that they didn't communicate it well. This is hallmark of the company ethos of a lack of preparedness, lack of consistency and above all, a failure to communicate.

> CEO Yishan Wong

Unprofessional for a CEO to go into a thread and blast an employee publicly. At least it felt that way as he never seemed to post visibly but did this simply to settle a score. Also said employee claimed his questioning of allocating 10% of all revenue for the year to charity. Whatever the reason he was fired, if your company is struggling an not posting acceptable profits it is irrational to give $0.10 of every dollar away and operate close to a loss.

>jailbait

This was sort of the beginning of when free speech really came to a head against morality. They have made no progress on this front. Also, jailbait was probably a little closer to black and white than things like gamergate and this adolescent namecalling.

Conclusion

So those massive problems, which are mostly unreseolved, or are symptoms of unresolved issues, have culminated in hiring of techs most hated person of 2014-2015, who has no credible qualifications to run this company. Compounding those issues, she really failed to connect with the community and I would suspect (guessing here) that the transition has been tough in the office as well. The only thing that has kept reddit working this whole time were moderators and the community which have now totally turned on it.

tl;dr arguing a company has a track record of being run poorly but still managing to survive, doesn't seem like a great argument for its success.
How good of a test could it be, if its population is limited to a single Dutch city?

Europeans from small countries love to tout their welfare policies as "so much better" than places like the U.S., but they ignore one massive difference: Small European countries are localized, ethnically homogenous populations. The U.S. has to deal with more land, and more people, from more places. You cannot make an apples-to-apples comparison between welfare systems in the U.S. and small countries.
Nope, in fact you are going to see salaries start to retreat as more people get into the industry.

The field that will collapse the hardest is going to be data science. I speak to this as a data scientist, where most I meet don't have the knowledge to perform their duties. Eventually our salaries will decrease to those of traditional office workers/middle managers.

What is a engineer to do in this situation? The answer is to specialize, or gain exclusive access. Specialization is obvious, and exclusive access are things like clearances, certifications, and networks. Of course, this omits paths such as entrepreneurship.
The estimate is that 80% of all effort in software goes to maintenance of existing systems, of which 21% goes into bug fixing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_maintenance

With every new system successfully brought online by one programmer, they are creating a future need for four programmers to maintain that system.

Just to keep the existing body of software afloat, the existing body of programmers is dramatically insufficient. We have known this problem for decades. You will find lots of old papers raising exactly this issue.

Concerning developing countries, to an important extent they have already been absorbed into the global workforce. Certainly India is already supplying its best and its brightest. Only a limited percentage of the workforce is capable of working as a programmer. Furthermore, developing countries increasingly consume their own supply of software services. Therefore, third-world supply may already be largely exhausted.

With the world increasingly dependent on software (Has it every been increasingly dependent on lawyers?) stopping to hire programmers pretty much means scrapping systems on which organizations depend. This happens all the time already, but the net effect is still to add new systems.
I'd say people who think Diggs change was anything similar to the current reddit changes has a very short memory.
Since learning clojure I've really come to appreciate that descriptive names are better than short ones.

It depends on context, but many-named-functions exhibit-long-groupings for-sake-of-clarity. It's easier to come back to code months later and know what's going on. If you are doing simple math, like a dot product, naming your vectors u and v is not a big deal that much is obvious.
However, if you have to document out what a variable stands for, you might as well use a long name; bytes are cheap, addresses/references are internally the same length they would be whether or not you named the variable g or george-harrison, and humans are the ones reading and editing it, not robots.

I would argue that longer is better, for the above reasons, and that is one big difference between 16-year-old coder-me and current-coder-me.
I am also surprised. I wonder what this is going to do for their SEO because there is a lot of content now missing once googles bot gets to some of these pages.
Application Weezchat: la solution pour les rencontres en ligne sur Android
At 472 commits my guess is it's truly a "guide" rather than a rulebook and a living, changing one at that!
Depends how far into the future you're asking. 5 years, 10 years, 50 years? My two cents is that everything is cyclical. It's easy now to forget about the 2007 real estate crash, the 1999-2001 dotcom bust, the recession in the late 80's and early 90's. We're roughly due for another economic downturn, but the cause is anyone's guess and the software industry is not immune to external market forces. Nothing stays up forever, and nothing stays down forever either (in economics and business).
> Balding is the most depressing thing.

Being a young man who's balding might seem depressing, but I can certainly think of something far more depressing. Propecia's labeling was recently updated to say that erectile dysfunction may be permanent, even if you stop taking the drug.
Agreed fully, this and machine curation of news stories.
That remains to be seen. Software has been around far less time than the boom/bust cycle.
Casio is making smartwatches, too
How is it worse than recruiting random undergrads?
Note that this £240 billion will have the overheads of running the welfare system built into it too. So the actual pension checks are only a percentage of that figure, with a basic income that's not means tested the government has far less overhead.
> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand

This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
Take it as an opportunity to learn about linux and use it as a test bed to upskill yourself, if you're into that sort of thing.

Install a hyper-visor and start playing with VMs, containers etc.
Your Developers Aren’t Bricklayers, They’re Writers
I don't know about that conclusion. And that wasn't what I said either.
The blacked-out subreddits have millions of users. Wow.

AMAgeddon.
Yes, I have a product www.qrunched.com which I would like to sell.

Thanks
Actually a significant group of people are upset with kn0thing about this whole thing, because he commented about this whole mess [0] and gave what many called a "non-answer".

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...

The current Reddit management doesn't seem to be handling this well.
Very nice work, but not sure that I'm onboard with switching `var` to `const | let`. Is the only difference between `var` and `let` scoping?
Ah yes I had unlock maybe that's why?
Next to arrow functions and optional arguments, better object syntax is one of the big reasons you should be using Babel today. You know how sometimes you need to precalculate values that are going to be returned in an object, so at the end of the function, you return something like this?

return {
foo: foo,
bar: bar,
baz: baz
};

You don't have to do that in ES6.

return {foo, bar, baz};

Keys without values use variables with the same name as their values.
That's... interesting. I guess it makes a little sense -- `let` seems to be for developers who don't like `var` semantics. Usually that seems to be about wanting block instead of function scope, but maybe there's a contingent that dislikes `undefined` too.
/r/pics has joined in.
Email Id hacked
My company hacked into my email Id and extracted a very important document which could result in a charge-sheet.I wanna know how they could even get into my email account when i am in a different country
I'm sure there will be a hundred clones. I do hope someone will just try a brand new way of doing content and people will be like "Oh yeah! That works really well!"

I've been disillusioned with reddit when I saw that the niche subreddits no longer get updated :/ and the bigger subreddits are ruled by an iron fist of mods. The content doesn't refresh as often as I'd like either (in the 2nd tier subreddits, the ones that aren't default but are still really popular).

Anyways, all good points. I used HC and Slack both and have to say that they seem almost identical to me.
Who needs an evesdropper backend when you can just watch the network traffic? The messages back and forth are just data, and an MITM proxy is invisible. The end result being that the company has a face of providing privacy, but knows every little thing about you.
In JS `const` just means that you can't reassign that variable, not that the value it references can't change:

const a = {foo: 5};
a.foo = 42; // This is perfectly valid.
a = 'nope'; // But this isn't. It raises a SyntaxError.
Ask HN: How to estimate Customer Lifetime Value when just starting?
When starting a business, the company could be in a state of not being profitable for quite a while.

How should CLV be estimated in this case?

Should the predicted profit margins once becoming profitable be used, or the 'loss' period plays a role too?
Reddit it's founders/community/company have been against PIPA/CISPA/TPP and pro EFF . Freedom on the site and an anti-censorship policy is "that one thing you need to get right", and will allow you to survive through getting a lot of other things wrong.
San Francisco Hotels Are The Priciest in The World
well, you could start by downloading unetbootin... ;)
I'll give you the size and population thing but "ethnically homogenous populations" is bullshit:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... - ~79% White

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... ~80% White/Dutch

So both nations have a similar level of "ethnically homogenous populations".
I agree that it's impossible to predict the future. There may be some discontinuity that we haven't foreseen. That said, it hasn't happened yet.

I think the run of the mill work will get more commoditized. Building web sites is already pretty cheap. Programmers in Europe make a fraction of what their counterparts in the US make.

But the fact remains, programming is still more of an art than a science, despite all the effort that has gone into making it a repeatable technical discipline. As smcquaid said, software is hard. Many new products require invention on the spot, albeit using more well understood techniques as the years go on. But as the scope of techniques continues to expand, so does the problem space within which they must be applied. Software is being used to streamline more and more of our world.

As much as we try to make it repeatable, it is still an art. Agile has gone a long way towards this goal, which is one reason we see run of the mill work being commoditized. Many people are certified in Scrum. But that will never completely solve the problem. As long as there are new challenges to be solved, those who do it well will be compensated accordingly. There's a reason good doctors and lawyers still make a good living, centuries into the advent of their professions.
MUDs, the both spiritual and technological precursors to UO also used flat files for storage of both maps and users. it's not too surprising the UO storage was the same.
I'm slightly confused. A PM url is a broken link for everyone else right?
I believe that people who can work as part of team to solve difficult problems using computational tools will continue to be highly paid.

I doubt whether people will continue paying high salaries for hacking up crud apps.

Concretely, I expect the peak salaries for people who program for a living to continue to increase more or less monotonically. However, I also expect the average salary in the field to fluctuate, and I believe that in 40 years from now, these past few years will stand out on an inflation-adjusted graph as "the good years".
> This argument is nearly uncounterable [...]

I'm not sure I understand your objection here. Most people spend their time interacting with people who are similar to them. If anything, this is an argument that anecdotal evidence is quite limited in general. But that doesn't seem controversial at all!
I'm glad someone replied who recognized the game. I started in around ~2001 when its spiritual successor game (SOE Cosmic Rift) went pay-to-pay and killed off its dedicated beta player base.

I login every so often to check my ?messages and see if any old friends are online. The zone I eventually sysoped in is dead these days but the community is still strong.

The game honestly started my programming and tech career with things like bot and zone/squad website dev. I plan to check in tomorrow for the Steam launch.

> "you can almost hear the other guy snap his keyboard in rage."

This made me chuckle as it 100% spot on.

Do you know your brothers alias or would you be willing to ask him if he was ever involved in SS[*] RedStar or knew me? (game alias same as hn account)
Uh, you don't. You have to have the box showing the correct arrow type as the arrow enters it. You can press the correct arrow type before the arrow reaches the box.
Coding is getting much, much easier. Building an application that might have taken a team of 10 a year in the 1980s now takes a team of 2 just a few months. There's lots of reasons for this, but largely it's because programming languages are higher level, frameworks make the hard things trivial (especially UI and networking), and patching broken code is far easier so you can ship a buggy product without customers getting as annoyed. With SaaS things are even easier - essentially there's a single installation to patch and you can log every error rather than having to wait for feedback.

These changes will continue. Software will get easier and easier to build. What takes times today, say algorithm optimisation, will take a fraction of the time in a decade because we'll have better tools for doing it and hardware will be fast enough that it won't matter as much. The fact it'll be a less skilled job will exert downward pressure on wages.

Conversely though, the amount of software needed will continue to increase, so demand will keep wages up.

The question is which force will win out in the end.
From a systems dynamics point-of-view, single points of failure are problematic.

However, in human dynamics and the foundation of all leadership (and thus creating genuine followership), it requires a single point of accountability.

Leaders of any community are accountable to their followers.
Leaders have to realize that the community and the purpose are always more important than them.

I think the reason why u/chooter was considered a leader (or top-notch liason between admins and mods) was because of her commitment to the quality of the AMA.

I think the reason why u/chooter is adored by readers was for the same reason, though typically expressed by her inate ability to capture the AMA guests voices, mannerisms, etc. She was being 100% accountable to the community and the purpose that she was serving.

This is a thing to be admired, encouraged, and emulated. Not scorned or spoken of in terms of an acronym.

I'm not picking a thread fight, as I think your perspective is very important within hardware networks and/or very relevant in process management, it's quite inaccurate when describing the human dynamics involved with building a community.