skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When companies find out I don't have a degree that's usually the end of the road.

So, this is the reason why no one will hire you? I find it hard to believe. The current company I'm working in found out that I don't have a degree after I signed the contract — they just didn't care at all.

But I would have huge problems hiring someone spent last 10 years responding to emails and doing nothing.

Judging by how easily you dismiss advice about github, you must have tried it. Care to give a link?
I've spent the last 13/14 years writing Perl so I started getting worried a year or two back that I was making myself unemployable by not branching out. I've been doing a lot of front-end development since, learning JavaScript and NodeJS to a good level, familiarising myself with JavaScript frameworks like React and Angular and learning/launching a couple of simple sites using NodeJS/Express and Python/Django (two other technologies I recently started to learn). Turns out this was the correct thing to do as I was made redundant about 6 weeks ago and it turns out there are a lot more JavaScript jobs in my area than Perl jobs. At least I've got a couple of projects I can point to now to show I have some experience. I'm still looking for something new, but I'm very glad I started working on expanding my skills before it became an immediate necessity. I guess this is the industry we work in. Oh, I also created a "hireme" website to try and sell myself. I'm not sure how effective it will be, but if nothing else, creating the website and listing my skills was a big confidence boost (I didn't realise how much I knew) - https://hireme.grepular.com - Feel free to steal the idea/design.
When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.

Isn't that how AOL was in the 90's or Yahoo.com a decade ago but with much less community interaction? AOL had a screen with 20 options, I remember. You go to a homepage that has most of everything you need, which saves time. I don't really see the problem.
Deploy Your Ember App Along with Your Ruby on Rails App via Capistrano
Privacy by the way,

Is there an alternative to Bing and google translate?
I used to use Navfree (which uses OSM) when I had an Android phone. It was as good as Google maps. Neither were perfect, and made errors every so often, but neither drastically more than the other. I am in Spain, so I don't know if that makes a difference.
Some time back, i had read about a very noticeable flatulence issue for soylent drinkers. Was that ever addressed?
It's still there, just not as easily accessible.

bib, wcd, ptp and so on…
CoreOS CEO: Security is fundamental
Was there anything Dave that you were holding off till you became successful - by whatever your definition of that is.
I did mostly software engineering and software architecture in my studies, just to find out that no one gives you a job as software architect right after university. Everyone has to start as a developer and one day, if he's lucky, he will score a job as software architect.

If I wouldn't have had a job as a programmer on the side (first a few months as intern) while studying, I wouldn't know much about programming.
Why doesn't Google copy successful startup ideas?
clickable -> https://mocloud.io
It's funny you mention that. My hiring success (in terms of impact the new hires made) went way up when we stopped wording job postings using traditional enterprisy language & bullets and instead posted much simpler "hackers wanted" at the local universities. Note: this was in Mexico, not the US, though a handful of the folks I recruited there have gone on to work for SV startups. I feel obligated to note one special case because I still feel a little hurt by it and consider it poaching. (Gbox) http://www.gbox.com has 5 of my former employees (3 devs, 1 SQA lead, 1 UI/UX) out of their total staff of about 20-25.
Also there are two data plans; Facebook and/or Internet. This was discussed before. We should blame the ISPs too.
Perhaps, this shows how people perceive the world:

Internet = browsing web pages on PC/Mac (using a web browser)

FB = apps/software on phones and tablets (or in a web browser, occasionally)

FB is then much more a standalone/native app than a website.
I´d say it would be common courtesy to get yourself a poster: http://www.sparkdesignspace.com/is/shop/product/reykjavik-ce... instead of printing out our copyrighted material that took years to make ;)
I believe so in the last batch
Hmm... I'm a 35 year old programmer and I work in Defense/Aerospace. If you think finding a good developer is hard, try finding a good developer who also holds a security clearance. If you're any good at all, you will always be employed and well compensated. The work can be dull, with Vogon-esque processes and procedures, but I have side projects to keep me sane :)

Every couple of years (ok, at least every year) I'll try to apply to non-defense jobs, and I get the impression that there's a glut of highly qualified engineers in the private sector -- "Sorry, we're being deluged with applications right now, we'll totally get back to you someday." And the interviews generally involve 3-4 rounds of hazing via Knuth. In the defense sector, they verify your clearance and credentials, check for a pulse, then show you to your desk.

Some are interested until they hear my current salary "You'd have to be a 10x RockNinja to make that kind of salary here." Yes, even Silicon Valley companies (and I live in an area with a relatively low COL). I'd love to find a remote job, but those seem to be even more competitive (understandable, I suppose).

Guess I'm stuck.
Given that soy is one of the common allergens, this sounds amazing (especially with it being high-fat which matches modern nutritional science) except for the soy. They should make one called "Soylent -1.0" or something. Are there any alternatives?
Completely agree, you can spot the competent programmer from miles away who was atleast some opensource projects he thinks of as "hobbies" in his portfolio.

companies dont care what you think you can do, because you have a degree. they care for what you can do for them, if what you are doing in your own time complements the things they would like somebody have done for them. the choice becomes easy.
> There are plenty of senses in which [...]

Yes, perhaps. But still it IS not a number.

Calling infinity a number is a "hack" done by mathematicians.
I don't believe the book is ready to ship yet, but I'm looking forward to when it is! I had the pleasure of working with Linda (author of this book) a few years back and she is really a wonderful person and I'm very happy for the initial success of Hello Ruby.
I'm a bit past my mid-20s, so I might be talking out of my ass, but can't you rebrand yourself as an "independent contractor"? "Years of industry experience, broad skills applicable to your situation, comfortable with legacy code bases, able to get started immediately, flexible payment options tailored to your project, etc."

Better yet, find some more people like you, as you're trying to do, and start a consulting company together. You could each use your connections to find work for the others, put in a bit of your profits towards upkeep of the company, grow your network and so on.

You may be unemployable if you put yourself in the same bucket as the recent college graduates, so make your own bucket.
This kills me, it means I can no longer bring 20 pounds of soylent back to Argentina with me (in powder form). Or will they continue to sell soylent in powder form?
The issue isn't that they wanted to increase the salaries, but that it was executed in an extremely naive way.

This seems something done more on a whim than after any kind of significant research.
So what, it doesn't change a thing. The person dies, now other people, not him, receive money that they did not work for, in the order of millions, which completely changes equal the rules of an equal opportunity system, transfers social mobility without merit, advantages a person over everyone else based on luck, not merit, and creates huge inequalities that are again, not based in merit. It's the opposite of the American dream, that social mobility is gained by working hard, instead it happens to be mostly inherited and those unequal inheritances create barriers for everyone else's social mobility.

That's why it ought to be limited more than it is now.

For example, the estate tax in 2001 was less than $700k exempted, above that you paid 55%. So you could get more than half a million tax free, and if you got say 5 million more, you'd keep another 2.5 million. It's still a gigantic advantage over everyone else to inherit $675k tax free, and half of anything above that. (I inherited money myself, and it's ludicrous).

By 2008 the figure shot up to $2m exempt from taxes, and the tax rate above that dropped to 45%.

And then a weird thing happened, it went to $5m by 2011 and the rate dropped further, to 35%. Today it's beyond even that, and it's starting to get insane.

Now look at what that means. Imagine inheriting $5m and putting it towards stocks, which have a long term average ROI of 7%, already inflation adjusted. You'd get an annual salary of $350k, taxed low by the way because top capital gains tax rates are much lower than top tax rates on labor.

Imagine 'receiving' a ticket for a lifetime (inflation-adjusting & compounding) $350k income-per-year like that from someone else who actually worked for it (or guess what, inherited it himself), would you ever have to work? Would you have a difficult time increasing that money while spending $100k on yourself per year, without working? Would you be able to give away more money at the end of your life than you received, without ever working? Would receiving this financial claim over other people's future work (a definition of money) based on blood right be akin to medieval nepotism? Would this create a system not just with unequal outcomes, but with inequality by design? The answer to all these questions is yes.

Which is why it's time to consider reforming estate tax. I'm sympathetic to receiving and giving part of your wealth to others without the government stepping in. And we can keep that to large amounts, like say $100k. But there have to be limits, and the limit of $5.5m and just a 40% tax above that like we have today, is way too high.
Hard to carry a 90×67 cm poster around ;) We'd have gladly paid for a foldable map if one were available.
PyDev of the Week: Patrick Maupin
Now available in Canada!

I'll finally be able to try this, do current drinkers like the 1.5? Or is 2.0 such an improvement that I should wait for 2.0?

edit - Oh I guess the main thing is that it's a drink now.
No, but if OSM becomes good, then, say, Ford, can just grab it and use it in their cars for free. They're just going to use it, not improve it, so there's nothing to contribute back.

Then Audi, BMW and Mercedes spent $1b, and at the end of the day, their maps are the exact same as Ford's (who spend $0).
Well, the product is named soylent after all... !
A lot of workplaces use regular "games"

Spolosky talks about this quite a bit in the StackOverflow/StackExchange podcasts in relation to online communities. The podcasts have been recorded from the beginning as StackOverflow was built.

The problem with regular jokes in online communities:

+ They separate the insiders from the outsiders

+ They become a focus of online activity for regular users in lieu of the public organizing principle.

StackOverflow is useful for solving problems precisely because meme-making and joke cracking is not allowed to be anyone's primary activity. The same holds true on HN, nobody is popular just because they are funny. It's not that HN doesn't like humor so much as it favors cleverness, knowledge, and insight; and most attempts at humor lack all three.

If it takes Seinfeld years to get a joke pitch perfect, what are the average HN'ers odds of doing so in 74 keystrokes? I find that the delete link is really useful whenever I succumb to the urge.

Good luck.
Aye. When I hear people talking about "watching less television" (including myself), I substitute in "surfing social media" one-for-one with television time.
If we stand still, we go backwards
Single-handedly might be part of the problem; part of what employers looking for open source work want to see is collaboration.
> Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.

Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place.

Analogies, these days...
The absurd example in the second paragraph put me off, so I didn't really find it in me to read the argument thoroughly. But if the premise is that a single man can "come up with an idea" and magically produce an ipod with comparable personal effort, and no reliance of a third world factory economy -- as an author can come up with a book -- then I don't think the author of the article has the required connection to reality to discuss economics at all.

Earlier today I came across this, which may (or may not) be an interesting counter-point -- or at least make a meta-point: "Exposing the false prophets of social transformation": https://opendemocracy.net/transformation/nicole-aschoff/expo...
Microsoft Encryption to Protect Against Quantum Computers
"On top of that I suspect (but can't prove) that a faster site will lead to people viewing more pages on that same site simply because of the convenience."

I'm reasonably sure that this theory is backed up by data. I don't have the time to look up the studies just now, but as someone with a professional interest in this, I'm pretty sure I've seen them in the past.

Certainly, page speed has a surprisingly large impact on overall user experience - backed up by studies like Amazon's and Google's, both of which showed a correlation between faster page load and increased user activity.
What’s Wrong with the Web?
What does “there's a shortage of talent” mean?
I've heard from various reliable sources that there's "a shortage of talent" in the tech industry.

On the other hand, I read things like http://unemployable.pen.io/ about people struggling to find jobs. Additionally, I recently graduated from one of the top coding bootcamps, and while I did find a job, I got non-responses or rejections from pretty much everywhere I applied. And this is the story I hear from everyone I talk to at the bootcamp. We're told that it's a "numbers game".

So what is meant by "there's a shortage of talent"? In the context of that claim, what is threshold you have to surpass to be considered "talent"?
I also am consistently disappointed by their reliance on wheat and soy proteins, I'm allergic (IgE) to both and struggle horribly to find typical office-lunch type food I can eat. Also being in the EU it's very difficult and expensive to procure Soylent anyway, even the alt. recipes as all of the Amazon shopping lists link to the US stores. Particularly the typical 3lb bag of flour, a couple of bucks in the US store is being sold for €200 on the German amazon store, presumably by someone trying to game people who've clicked a pre-filled-basket link on an Amazon shopping list.
To the author of this piece:

Have you tried any of the following alternative in your quest to land a job:

1- Theme marketplaces like Envato.

The competition is really fierce but you could make it and establish a name and sharpen your skills and be up to date when the latest trends and movements in our profession.

2- Kickstarter campaign to crowd-fund a technical project that you're passionate about to showcase your technical skills and expertise and as an opportunity for you to reboot your career.
The book "Fixing My Gaze" by Susan Barry details her journey to to gaining stereo vision for the first time at age 50.
Yes you can (I managed it and it works beautifully).
But you have to make it ignore Package Class at the moment because top functions in a package (say my.great.pack) can be in different .kt files and are gathered in a single class (my.great.pack.PackPackage) and pit doesn't seem to be able to cope with a class whose source come from more than 1 file (or I missed something).

Just put something like this in your gradle.build file :

apply plugin: "info.solidsoft.pitest"

pitest {
targetClasses = ['org.lakedaemon.suggest.', 'org.lakedaemon.compress.']
//by default "${project.group}."
excludedClasses = ['org.lakedaemon.compress.decoders.DecodersPackage', 'org.lakedaemon.compress.decoders.EncodersPackage']
avoidCallsTo = ['org.apache.log4j.', 'org.lakedaemon.L.', 'org.slf4j.', 'java.util.logging.']
pitestVersion = "1.1.4" //not needed when a default PIT version should be used
threads = 4
outputFormats = ['XML', 'HTML']
enableDefaultIncrementalAnalysis = true
testSourceSets = [sourceSets.test/, sourceSets.integrationTest/]
mainSourceSets = [sourceSets.main/, sourceSets.additionalMain*/]
}
How European a company is it? Some significant part of it is made out of Navteq, which was headquartered in Chicago.
> Not knowing what the internet is is akin to illiteracy in today's world.

Ya, just like programming is the fourth 'R.'

They know where to get to where they want to go. That Facebook is another site on the internet really isn't important. They use Facebook and when they want to get on the internet they go to Google and search.

What people call it and what it is just isn't important. They're not fixing it and they're not working with it at a technical level, they're just using it without needing to know details of how it works.

Just like I don't need to know anything about how gas explodes to make my car go forward in order to drive it.
That happened to me in a similarly restrictive field. I eventually just quit my job so that I would be forced to reinvent myself. That led me back to a graduate program in analytics, where my programming background was enormously useful. While the ~ 9 months in the program were expensive and stressful, the degree made me very employable, and the programming background gave me a huge advantage during the recruitment process.
I believe it was. Also, anecdotally speaking, it's very common for people who don't get enough protein or fiber in the their diets to have some flatulence when they start adding more. After a short adjustment period their body gets used to it and the flatulence stops.
We don't need to : I read somewhere that it was on their roadmap...
There has been a huge shift with the number of jobs someone has in there lifetime. If you work as say 3 jobs for 15 years each then taking 6 months to find a jobs is not the end of the world. But if you work for 3 years and then spend 6 months finding a job that's a huge issue.

So, while the value while looking may not have changed the number times people look for a new job has.
That sound like pretty strong agreement, unless you are just targeting Windows?
I use digg reader (yes, really). It works just like the google reader did.

http://digg.com/reader
Doesn't mean it's been done well, it's been done to the point it's usable to anyone other than the originator, or it's been done and subsequently published in a way that's available to the general public, though :)
Who's desire does it fill? My rational system 2 brain? Or my impulsive system 1 brain. The reason you can't justify shitty content with "we're just giving you what you want" is because we really want something better, but if you give us shit that appeals to our impulses, you can make us act against our best interests. So we keep scrolling through the news feed at 2AM, thinking we should really go to bed, but failing to resist the feeling that some huge payoff lies just a few scrolls down.
So how does Reddit manage to have ad-less subscriptions and yet still restrain themselves from creating obtrusive interstitial ads? Superhuman strength? Immortality? Some other heretofore unknown super power?

The truth is, there is nothing on the NY Times or WaPo that is worth paying twice for.
Eh, I can say from personal experience that the problem has not been fully solved in version 1.5 of the powder (and probably can't be). Your gut flora need time to readjust, and until then-- beware!
I watched a few of your live coding streams on twitch. Cool stuff!
Seems odd that we're at 2.0 now and it's still not available in the EU - is there a legal reason for this?
Is Soylent ever going to be sold in Europe? I would love to try it.
You must be disappointed a lot then?

I did believe in her product. What I didn't believe in was an utter lack of regard to KS backers, poor communication, misdirections, a publishing contract with Macmillan, a late delivery (while being less than truthful with KS about it).

The author bears some responsibility for changing my mind from believing in her product (what you call helping, "someone realise their product") to simply just wanting the end result of what I paid for at a higher cost than retail.
Although true, wouldn't an efficient advertiser try not to pay for ads that target those "cheap people" anyway? Seems like they would be a waste of ad budget in any case.
Creative quoting on your part but let's not pretend he was talking about communism. It stated pretty clearly [countries with] "highly socialistic economic policy (welfare countries)". All the mentioned countries are successfull capitalistic countries with better safeguards and policies.
My first thought whenever I see soylent is that we have studies proving that we can't replace breast milk with baby formula. Some of that is due to immune system being passed on to the infant, but we haven't yet mastered the nutritional content of real food to the point where we can confidently say it's safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly.

It takes me back to the whole issue with processed dog foods -- kibble, while even the most expensive brands claim to be "nutritionally complete", miss the fact that dogs cannot process/absorb the many nutrients within (and why their waste is... more than a nuisance). Eg, calcium added to dog food is nearly worthless, while calcium from eating raw bones is readily absorbed by their bodies. Same with many other vitamins and minerals.

We have a lot of work ahead of us in this sector. It's good that someone is trying, though.
How we got 1.400.000 downloads on our app (now 1.5M)
> what is to stop the ad being switched to something else (video, pr0n eptc) on the 3rd party server?

That's when you're lucky. If you're unlucky it's malware injected via ad networks.

Browsing the web without an adblocker is like sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.
Even AIX on x86 was abandoned after a beta run many years ago. AIX and PPC are hand in hand and remain what they always were.
I'm not sure. I've never used PowerShell either.
> where ad blocking was always possible and widespread.

Majority of people don't root.
Conservative ideology, utilitarianism, and rich jerks
"Soylent 2.0 makes complete nutrition accessible to all ..."

"All", assuming you're in the USA or Canada.. I actually thought it meant they were gonna start shipping to more countries! Bummer.
This is actually a large departure from all prior formulas, which used brown rice protein exclusively. Their product has never had any wheat in it and the only soy was the soy lecithin emulsifier.

This change from rice -> soy and from powdered to bottle - the wording makes it sound like you need 5 bottles per day - is making me think it's time to cancel.
Ouch, that lack of distribution must be frustrating there.

I think you're right a drink could really cash in on (and help) people who can't eat normally.