skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except in the case of Facebook, they don't go further afield. People stay within Facebook's walled garden, posting updates in Facebook, liking brands in Facebook, talking to their friends in Facebook, playing games in Facebook ... they don't leave.

To me this raises an interesting philosophical question - is Facebook actually separate to the internet? It uses the underlying transport mechanisms of the net, sure, but that's not really what we mean when we say the internet. When my mother says she's using the internet she doesn't mean she's generating HTTP GET requests to query servers and render the resulting HTML. She means she's using a browser to read a page and then clicking on a link to get another page. Facebook certainly isn't the world wide web or email, which is what most people mean when they say "internet". If what you're doing is in an largely separate, walled-off area, that you mostly access with an app rather than a browser, is that really what we mean when we say the internet?

I'd need to think about it more, but I imagine there's quite a compelling argument that using Facebook is not using the internet for any non-technical definition of 'the internet'.
I don't think you understood the comment I was replying to, which advocated going to a totally different platform from the one your parents use in order to not share your life with them.
It's rather simple in my mind.

Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.

You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.

Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice.

Want to make money? try a subscription model.

Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world.

[EDIT]:

This was the previous opening sentence:
"Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free."

I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to deliver.
Well, I am not convinced. The Apollo program probably looked cheap and easy when JFK promised it. It did not try and create exotic solutions, but had to for example push the frontiers of chip fabrication just to get 72kb of memory on board.

I am pretty certain that some of the nice cheap ideas mentioned (automated fuel production?) seem simple in a lab on earth but making it work reliably after landing on Mars will take extra effort - even if the basic underlying technology is under grad level right now.

I will still say that the last closest thing humanity tried to Mars landing was Apollo, and 4.4% of federal budget per annum is a good proxy for the cost of a Mars landing. No matter how much tried and true technology you think you can bring in from elsewhere.

Of course I hope I am wrong and we have built most of the basics in Apollo and since. But ...
Calling a government that enforces a limited monopoly on intellectual property an "authoritarian regime" is quite a stretch. Copyright is a foundation of liberal democracies all over the world.

Again, I hold heartedly agree that "it was never possible to control information represented as glyphs". So did the people who dreamed up copyright. That's the whole point!

What happened was many hundreds of years ago someone wrote something, and then someone else came along with a printing press and made 1000 copies and sold them for a profit, but they didn't give any money to the guy that wrote it. Someone pointed out that this didn't seem fair or just, and after a bunch of arguments and legislation, copyright was born.

The very same arguments about limiting people's freedoms with what they can or can't do with their own printing press have been going on for hundreds of years. It's really boring to keep having to prove the same points.
Feedly is is excellent.
If you're in your late 20s and coding is all you've ever done, be afraid. Domain knowledge is where it's at.

I am in a similar situation to the OP having started off with a ZX Spectrum, did CS, coded, but in my late 20s I was tempted into fixed income finance, and did that for 15 years at the highest level (unrelated to coding - I was a strategist and trader). Then in my late 30s I picked up Python, then R, and now know both really well (plus C and a bit of JS, Ocaml). What I find in my interactions is that the whizz-bang programmer guys, who are better than me at coding (though not by much - I picked up again pretty fast), are completely useless at mapping their skills to the finance domain, while my knowledge of both fields is where my value lies. I would strongly suggest to programmers that they ensure they know a non-CS domain too, preferably a niche one (we're such a big world now), and know it well - practise it as a primary activity for a few years. Climb the learning curve again even if it's hard at first. It is in the nexus between CS and other domains that opportunities are still plentiful.
> Being able to get work in this field without a fancy background is still possible, but only if you have the right connections. Like I said: it's no longer sufficient to be able to do the job

This sentiment regularly comes up on HN, and I find it a little exasperating. Human interaction has always been an important part of career.

There's a subtle (or not so subtle) contempt for soft skills in these laments. You can write code and have fun, but if you want to get paid for it that's a career. As part of this career, you will produce software as a byproduct. However, the primary purpose of this career is solving problems.

You work in the sales department of your own career. Sell your ability to solve problems. Do not sell bits.
Master, I have heard Scheme is a poor man's Javascript.
There are multiple problems we're talking about here.

One is the selection problem, that orgs have great difficulty in working out who is a good developer and who is not.

The other is that there are a lot of developers who have difficulty in getting work, and to a large extent a lot of them just aren't any good and would be better off in a different career (sorry but that's just the way it is).

Once you've removed the rubbish developers there are indeed far more jobs than developers.
I would love to see chronological data about how this has evolved over the past decade.

It would be especially interesting to see if the grey and red dots are gradually disappearing or if the alternative methods are just an addition to serve an increasing energy demand.

Additionally, it's heavenly to see that the single biggest dot on the map is Hydro, the Grand Coulee Dam in the state of Washington.
IMO your problem is not lack of degree (personally, this is the last thing I check on a resume). Nor your age (I am also 40ish and more productive than ever). Your problem is your debt.
being a playa.
Now, seriously, if a software engineer in his/her forties is unemployable in 2015, what the heck is an accountant, lawyer, a builder, a painter or a woodworker to just name a few?

Come on. We are so lucky we did choose technology as a way of living. Sorry but stop complaining and start learning back new stuff. Can't believe what someone has to read.

--
A developer in his forties.
I used to work here and think its an amazing API:
http://developers.artsy.net

The playground is very cool.
Most of the comments of pg were oneliners (not jokes): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
Facebook should also invest something in teaching these people "What is Internet?" and shouldn't limit the people to Facebook when they talk about Internet.org

Just investing in Internet.org with FB ads in mind is not at all good for the community. We go to internet for utilities not for seeing ads.
The whole 'do an open source' project is a crock. I single-handedly wrote a large Javascript plug-in module for a well-known editor. It's used by hundreds of people around the world but all the folks employing 'front-end' programmers seem to bin my CV as my current fulltime job is 100% Python. It baffles me that they want someone who is both a CSS3/LESS/SASS design guru and understands closures/promises/OO/etc.
Python and most JS module systems have namespace-based imports. The idea is that the entire content of a module is wrapped in a namespace (i.e. an object). This allows maintaining a clear separation between your local names and the imported names, you have full control over what names in your local namespace are touched when a module is imported.

I think using PHP as an example in defnese is misguided -- I don't think anyone here would argue that PHP is a good introduction to programming although it's certainly something that introduced a lot of "us" to programming ("us" being web developers who started with programming in the late 1990s or the turn of the millennium).

> Because that's not the case for Python or PHP on linux too? I bet it is,and it has nothing to do with the language itself.

It has everything to do with the language. There's no point learning any language if you won't be able to try it out. So availability is a major factor.

PHP is supported by nearly every a-buck-a-month webspace host out there, which is why it is so accessible to anyone who can figure out how to use FTP. JavaScript is supported by the browser itself -- something nearly everyone is likely to have already installed on their computer.

Python, Ruby and so on have to actually be installed locally. And even if your package manager for some reason doesn't have Python 3 available you can nearly always get a fairly recent version of Python 2 and PIP. But even so, Python is only marginally easier to set up than Ruby.

> Your opinion but some points aren't fair at all.

Sure. I didn't say there is a language that meets all of my requirements. But that's precisely the point: there is no perfect language, but IMO there are generally better choices than Ruby. Which choice is best for any given situation of course depends on how you weigh the different factors (e.g. Ruby is likely the best choice for parents who already are Ruby programmers).
You've got a few things working against you but I doubt you're actually unemployable. I don't want to say you're doing it wrong or that I have a better formula, but here are some things to think about.

Your age, the buzzwords ("skill sets") on your CV, lack of college degree, possibly lack of recent relevant experience -- all of those can be negatives and will keep you out of a lot of jobs. So don't try to get those. You can't fight prejudices or stupid hiring processes.

You have to present yourself as someone who can solve business problems, because that's what companies actually hire and pay for. No matter what the job posting says no company or client actually needs a PHP or Ruby programmer. What they need is someone who can translate business requirements into working software. Get the focus on your ability to deliver.

When I talk to a potential client I start by asking them to tell me their top handful of business problems or pains. I pick one that I think I can help with and talk about that. We almost never get into technology or languages because those are incidental to actual business requirements. Many business problems are not actually programming problems. Just because a client has 300,000 lines of Ruby code I don't need to write Ruby to help them with their PCI compliance audit (real client). Another client had an enterprise logistics system written in Java, but that had very little to do with shipping charges calculating wrong -- I don't have to be a Java guru to figure it out. The problem was fixed with almost no programming, just correcting some data that was formatted wrong between systems.

My point is that you need to present an appealing package with some obvious business value to the client or employer. You don't choose a car based on a list of the parts in it (CV), you choose it based on perceived value, appearance, and emotional appeal.

Instead of applying for every job and putting yourself on job sites and scraping the bottom of the freelancing barrel on Fiverr develop a few skills you are really good at and sell that expertise. Identify companies or business niches you want to work at and knock their door down. Make the deal low-risk: I don't charge clients if I can't fix their problems.

Meet more people. Most people get their jobs from contacts, friends, even casual acquaintances -- I got a job lead from a guy at a bar in LA after we started talking about bourbon. Get out in the world. Don't treat everyone you meet like another node in your network, though. People like to help friends and people they like, so be the guy people like. People don't like to help the constant network-builders.

I'm not saying it's easy, but you need to play a different game, because a programmer in his 40s without a lot of recent relevant experience with the latest toys is not going to stand out. Sorry, but no one cares about your startup experience or what you did five years ago. They care about what you can do for them right now, so focus on that and don't get bogged down trying to win the recruiting numbers game.
They simply want to become the storefront for the world. We all know that for most average people scratching the surface is all it takes to satiate them so they will never go beyond facebook. They will do all of their communicating and purchasing of goods through facebook. It is understandable but completely disgusts me.
yes of course, we´ve used this map zoom solution on a number of our own projects and for different clients. There´s a beautifully simple admin system behind it to add and edit points etc.
Who says anything about freelance work. People think experience = programming + being paid.

experience = programming
if you can show a active github profile with clean code that shows you are pro-active or a expert in stack or domain, why would "they" not atleast contact you back.

on the other side, if you have just been coding closed source, brain farts and clones that have no innovation or any overlapping area in what you are applying for, then why would they hire you.

if your looking to get hired by a Oracle or a HP, freelance experience wont cut and i doubt a github profile either, but besides huge corporate companies.
most small/medium sized startups are willing to hire programmers that can learn and supply added value.

value is the keyword here, having more then 1 trick in your bag is a must if your coming at it from the "no diploma" angle. Thats why i recommended people to write code for readabilities sake. if nothing else, someone can read it. even if its some crusty 10 year old code.
Not just museums do this, a lot of collectors I've read about do something like it: http://bit.ly/1N49UaR
I have really learnt a lot from this and the 'Let's Build an Interpreter' series. They're all very well done.
But then, isn't it better to have one high-level overview instead of 3 overlapping overviews? (3 overviews do not make it easier to get a quick grasp of the project.)

I don't have a quick solution - it's much matter of taste (and balance).

BTW:

- Any plans to add some external measures of interest? (E.g. GitHub stars, arXiv trackbacks, SciRate scites/# of comments?)
Are you using a front end web server for handling caches, TLS, etc. in front of the Hugo server or is the hugo server in the front line ?
> We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.”

Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these claims ?

> “Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.”

my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content producers survive the adblock revolution.
Better title: "Demonstration of Reversibility of Laminar Flow"
I don't think Facebook is separate from the Internet. I think people's purview changes and is different from one another.

For some people, "the Internet" is Facebook and maybe Netflix. That's it. They may not even understand that there's more out there, or what a web page even is. Facebook and Netflix are certainly closer to applications than they are websites. I imagine the Internet to them is an extension of the apps they use on their phone.

I would even go so far as to say for some people, Google is the only way they know of to find things. Which to me is more scary, since Google in a sense can control what X% of the population sees as the users aren't even aware of another means of accessing blocked content.
I realize "drama sells" but is this Zed fellow telling truths that people just don't speak about? This sort of thing has never happened to me - am I living in a weird bubble?
As someone who has taught several beginners (non-programmers) Ruby, I would say the uptake is good. Teaching at events like RailsGirls, I've had complete beginners start to "get it" and deploy their own websites using Rails and Heroku within a day.

My personal experience has been that it makes a great first language, It's very natural to write, and easy to type. You start with super-short examples that are easily understood, using a bare-bones editor. Explaining blocks and iterators is a challenge of course.

There's quite a lot of approachable and creative content about learning Ruby out there, which makes it helpful for beginners looking to self-study. Books like "Hello Ruby" are great for kids starting from zero, who need more motivation and fun compared to the "For Dummies" or "From Scratch" approaches.

That being said, I agree with your feelings about the language as intended for beginners. However, I tried to teach my 9-year-old daughter Java (using an online course for making Minecraft Mods). And although she was able to get through it, Java is still perplexing. The IDE, strictness and verbosity were overwhelming. Similarly, I tried to teach my nephew Javascript (we made a game together) in a browser. Trying to explain `.this` and dealing with input handling was pretty hard to get through. He didn't take it much further.

Re: learning to code... I believe it's not so much about what language you choose to teach. It's about the quality of the course materials, and how quickly the concepts can be understood. Ruby has a lot going for it there.
How to pick an open source licence for your code
https://www.inoreader.com/ is very much like Google Reader except better (e.g. detection of dead feeds)
I almost always get an interview, which almost always leads to an offer, and my resume is laid out so that open source takes up 2/3 of the page.

http://irc.sircmpwn.com/Drew-DeVault-CV.pdf
"Simple" doesn't mean correct.

In practice cutting out ads probably makes you a more valuable customer because you've spent 10x the time most people spend looking at ads inspecting them while cutting. (and don't give any BS about "oh I actively avoid brands that advertise" -- brand advertising works, deal with it)

The better analogy is, you cut out the ads, reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers. In the real world, this is not going to be legal.
For PHP you only need a run-of-the-mill sub-$1/month webspace provider and FTP. And that also gives you a way to share your projects with friends.

For JavaScript you only need a browser.
Duly changed. Not sure it will survive, because although it's accurate and informative, it's not the title on the page. The mods may change it.
Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.
For a museum like the MoMA, copyright is a tricky issue, and to publish online pictures requires long enquires about the right owner and getting him (or them) to accept (and they might not, or ask for money...). The cost of this kind of operation for a vast collection can range in the millions of dollars. I guess you can't blame the MoMA for using their money differently, and you'd rather blame it on the copyright mess.
I've tried most of the non-brass instruments: alto clef, not that hard to transpose to anybody that's able to read a piano's grand staff. Tenor clef does require work, and reading, say a Bach chorale in SATB, oof. But violists seem to have a high incidence of injury (i have never played one bigger than 15"

Cello and especially double bass do require buildup of strength in the left hand, and fingers start high and come flying down onto the string (composite winds have a lot less tension than steel tho).

French horn embouchure and intonation are hard, as you say.
Plain old apache but tuned very well on a massive server (32 cores, 96G of RAM), the server is actually the production server for a high traffic website and this is just piggy-backed onto the site as a 'servername' entry in the apache config. If I shut down the other site then blog will be quite a bit faster still but that seems counterproductive ;)
The two big ones I know about are sulfur dioxide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollu...) and fly ash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash).
Yes, there are many ways of doing this. Some of todays services like StreetView would have helped a lot. But do keep in mind that if you create the data from scratch yourself you´ll have much better control over things and a better understanding of how to portray the data in the best possible manner for each given project. We went the ultra detail-perverted way on this one :) By using our own data I also know for a fact I won´t run into any licensing or copyright issues, and apart from that I´m able to use the 3d models for all sorts of stuff. If you need some further tips you´re free to send me an email at borgarmynd@gmail.com
Is Abe Vigoda still alive?