skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That depends on the study and what kind of results it gives and what the numbers turn out to be. While you're now agreeing that you do get so-called "statistical significance," the probability that you've gotten a useful result can also be high, too. You can even get one with a sample size of 1 -- Eddington's solar eclipse experiment is an example of that.

edit: Also, the possibilities for statistical significance and real useful results can be much higher when you have a highly dimensional signal.
I would posit that Starbucks example is the exact reverse of what you're seeing in the tech industry.

Starbucks is hiring, but a lot of the workforce that is unemployed is overqualified with bachelor degrees that they thought would guarantee them a safe job on a nice career track. Upon graduation, they are finding that there is a shrinking pool of jobs for them, and that they'll either have to retrain (do a masters or do a crash coding course) or take a job well below what they expected with their degree.

Most of these people will have to rely on connections or networking to get a decent job, and the unlucky ones will join the services industry and work as a barista or a waiter, providing the infrastructure for the tech gold rush.
>this kind of silly american opinion is quite irritating.

I'm not sure accusing the other side of holding silly opinions is the best way to start a debate

>The people coming in on visa's (have you met any?) are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts.

This may be your experience, but it hasn't been mine. Sure the ones working at Google are exceptional, but in my experience, companies outside of the top tier are using H-1Bs to recruit indentured servants who are tied to the company under penalty of deportation.

>Come on. Really? All the young indian and chinese talent I meet is way above average.

There are plenty of other anecdotes to refute this. I've worked with (and went to school with) many very talented and exceptional young indian and chinese programmers, but they weren't above average as a category.
There will be a first star in any direction: photons will be very unlikely to pass throught that star.
Salaries are, in part, a way of reimbursing people for their educations. Sure, large companies can (or, more accurately, need to) train people. But, look at, say, my startup. I'm the only engineer. How am I supposed to find the time to train someone who can barely program? Things would get done significantly quicker if I just did everything myself.
And when you haven't worked on a project for a while, improving the test coverage is a great way to get back into it.
Goes hand-in-hand with his other quote: "I have made so many massive mistakes of ego, I can't tell you."
No Fedor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedor_Emelianenko#Mixed_martia...
And coming full circle with the original question, I'd add:

* Function parameters.

Re-assigning a variable used as a function parameter is frequently a mistake, and almost always makes code more confusing. I find the "this is defined only once in this function" philosophy to be useful in keeping complexity down in Java programs. Even if final doesn't make objects immutable.
Please explain how offering $200k will keep those incompetent guys from applying. I don't see how your "solution" changes anything
First, I don't know how this even started. Why did tech companies all of a sudden decide there was a shortage of knowledgeable and competent workers? I'm asking because throughout my career as a programmer I've worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds that have not had a traditional CS degree. They have come from fields like math, IT, physics, mechanical engineering, etc. Engineering disciplines but not really computer science.

The kind of work I've seen all those people do has also varied from things like control software for fields of heliostats to frameworks for server orchestrations to search and data mining. So how is it that I've managed to work with so many competent engineers and yet these giant corporations can't figure out how to hire semi-competent engineers to do some of the drudge work that I'm sure they need done? Maybe the problem is not with the workforce and the availability of knowledgeable and competent workers? Maybe the problem is their shitty hiring practices?
well, the example using gmail isn't practical, but instead if you own your own domain and setup a catchall, then it becomes very easy (since you only need to check one email to access all potential email)
In this question I saw one of the classic agnostic lines of thought which is "If there is a God, why would he care about us at all? Why would he care what we think, say and do? We can't be the center of the Universe. We can't be the focus of all creation. That's just hubris."

I love this question, because its humble, searching, sincere. Why does God want our praise? He, or any deity, is far far above it. Why go through all this trouble creating this elaborate mess just to talk to a bunch of specks of protein. None of it, none of Christianity made sense to me. The purpose behind it all. Its just stupid.

But there it was in Ephesians 2:7, God's reason. I was relieved because it is a selfish reason. I couldn't stand the idea that God is just love love love... it was just giving and getting nothing in return. And it didn't reflect the Jehova of the Old Testament. But Ephesians says he did it for the glory. Who's going to be the witness of that? What peer-group or other beings would God point to and say "There I did it, I'm amazing."? I have no clue. However, this is so refreshing to me, because it shows that God is possessive and jealous, and very much like us, who were "made in his image".

But, I have to agree with agnostics... humans are far from the center of the universe. God is. Its his game. His strange, fearsome, terrible, wonderful work.
> Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers.

Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?
I've always viewed these persistent and ridiculous claims of a tech-industry worker shortage through a lens of class. To a Harvard MBA, that we programmers earn six figures is prima facie evidence of a worker shortage, since there's no way that ugly nerds should be earning that kind of money for typing into a computer.

Programmers are workers, so investors and management should be able to siphon off their productive value the same way they siphon off the productive value of other works. That they can't right now is an aberration, a disease to be cured with massive immigration.

That we're not doctors or lawyers and make decent money is something that simply does not compute for these types.
Indian tea-seller who hawks his books on Amazon
oh, and my answer is always!
>The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it

Yes, and since the financial crisis their share of profits as GDP has never been higher yet they still refuse to invest in training themselves. Instead they demand that the immigration floodgates be opened.

They don't want to do it because they just don't see employees as people any more. They're resources, to be tapped until they run dry, at which point, they are discarded.

This is a marked cultural corporate change from the 50s-70s when the 'job for life' was still a thing, people got defined benefit pensions and CEOs would choose to make long term investments rather than engage in share repurchase shell games that boost next quarter's share price.

>Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.

This used to be much less of a problem when companies actually demonstrated loyalty to their employees. A natural side effect of lobbying hard to make it trivial to fire people and doing layoffs as a matter of course is that your employees won't be loyal. Tough shit.
How a group of grannies got their first holiday
This definitely gets at the problem, imo. There would be much less opposition to the H1B program if it were bringing in exclusively employees with, say, $150k+ compensation. It would be hard to argue those employees are undercutting salaries, except perhaps a few of the higher salaries. But there are a lot of $60k salaries on H1Bs, which seems a lot more suspicious. How scarce can a skill be if you're only paying $60k for it?

As far as I can tell, a lot of the misuse comes from the enterprise/consulting space. Companies like Google seem to be mostly using the program as intended, bringing in high-end and highly paid talent. But there's a weird corporate dance going on with "solutions" companies like IBM and Accenture, who subcontract through overseas outsourcing firms (sometimes derogatorily called "body shops"), who in turn use the H1B program to bring over some of their staff to the U.S. office to staff the contract. This use of the program looks more like undercutting wages than bringing in unusual, hard-to-find talent.

My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are. So e.g. any company willing to pay $200k+ salaries to a candidate gets in line first for this year's H1B slots, then $150k+ applications are processed, etc. I suspect companies would oppose this for fear that it would create a bidding war for H1B talent, though, which is the last thing they want.
Everyone deserves a defense.
No good developer applies for jobs

Ads can catch good people in transition, or looking for a change.

Anecdotally, I've hired truly great people, and interviewed ex-Googlers and other good pedigrees, from Stackoverflow Careers and HN posts.

1) I once hired a pre-Googler on StackOverflow even - a guy who was on his way to Google in the fall, but liked my project, and wanted a summer gig. He intended to spend a few months vacationing, but got bored.

2) Another guy I hired via HN originally just left for Facebook, this month :(

3) And our current, long term, best developer, I found on Careers StackOverflow. I credit him with much of the success of our company. He's a special combination of outdoorsy and amazing coder, but no college or professional pedigree. He was hurling dynamite at avalanche banks when I found him, coding amazing apps with little revenue potential.
As I stated below, woman starts rant, woman ends up saying "how hot I am"

anchalee above is the same anchalee who's blog we're talking about.

geez...and I lost three points on this thread!
So it's OK to pull a gun and shoot at a cop if you don't hit him?
Didn't come to mind, but absolutely Fedor.
Modern practice for things that undergo a D-A-D transition is to include a secondary (often lossy compressed) representation that can be used to validate that the data was correctly replicated.
$200k doesn't stop incompetents from applying. It does, however, tempt competent people to add themselves to the running.
> Tyler Cowen writes in the WSJ, “ It isn't clear that the estate tax raises much, if any, revenue. The very rich engage in tax-avoidance strategies. The apparent revenue raised is often offset by a lower intake from income and capital gains taxes. Furthermore, it has been estimated that the costs of implementing tax-avoidance strategies are roughly equal to the (gross) revenue raise.”

Cowen is merely repeating the talking points of the propaganda campaign against the estate tax planned in the mid-90s:

Yet in order to win over a specific audience to the issue,
conservative discourse began to shift toward another frame,[1]
as can be seen in important reports on the estate tax written by
conservative analyst Bill Beach. Beach had been specifically
brought to the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative
think tank, thanks to funds raised by Alabama estate planner
Harold Apolinsky, who formed the American Family Business
Institute (AFBI) in 1992 to lobby against the estate tax. ...

In a 1996 backgrounder ... [Beach] offered three main
arguments for repeal: the estate tax is a diminishing source of
revenue; it fails to achieve its purported goals of wealth
redistribution; and the tax does more harm than good in lost
productivity, lost jobs, and decreased revenue through other
taxation.[2]

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Beach was also the source of the myth that small businesses and family farms were suffering from the tax, and the same campaign carefully developed the term 'death tax', which they credit with much of their success. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the cited article will change forever how you read political commentary on any issue, as you realize that much of it, including by unwitting lay people, is parroting propaganda developed by special interests.

> ... even if this premise is not true (that there’d a positive net difference in the revenue raised), that’s assuming that the rich will maintain the same level of spending before they die, which may not be the case if they will get taxed on it when they die.

This seems very speculative. I've heard so many arguments with a similar argument: 'don't tax the wealthy or they will do X'. For example, the Reagan administration and others at the time argued that reducing taxes on the wealthy would increase their productive use of the funds, causing wealth to 'trickle down' to everyone else. As it turned out, cutting taxes on the wealthy (and thereby relatively increasing the burden on everyone else) made the wealthy wealthier (surprise!), and everyone else's income has been stagnent since then. The wealthy need to do their fair share and make the same sacrifice as everyone else; they are not a special case.

----

[1] "frame", as in a way to 'frame' an issue or debate

[2] "Death and Taxes: Issue Framing and Conservative Coalition Maintenance" by Richard Meagher:
https://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132
Wow, that's ridiculous and sounds painful! Again, I'm not a hardware guy, but I've absorbed a lot of knowledge and wisdom of it over past year trying to improve CPU designs and eliminate subversion possibilities. Studied their flows, synthesis, mask reduction, etc. Anyway, what your describing sounds behind even the free stuff. So, here's an amateur's attempt to help you out a bit with open-source alternatives:

gEDA's 10+ tools to assist the process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDA

KiCad is similar w/ bill of materials and artwork
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiCad

QUICS for simplified usage in schematic capture & simulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quite_Universal_Circuit_Simula...

Magic for those wanting old school (a recent SOC used it)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_%28software%29

You get used to something like gEDA or KiCAD then you can use it (even on your laptop) whenever the work tools suck. Not sure if it will help you since I understand just enough to know the tools exist and what they do but nothing further. And if you get bored with hand-made circuits, look up Qflow: from behavioral synthesis down to detail routing all in open source. Handles much of opencores.org's Verilog.

Have fun with that and please tell me if any of the CAD tools are solid replacements for commercial use in your field.
I can see why a brass trumpet can be expensive. Making one seems to involve a lot of manual work, at least as shown in this "How It's Made" segment [1]. Another interesting video is this one from Yamaha showing their factory [2], which is also mostly manual.

The actual cost of the brass in a trumpet is on the order of $3 at current brass prices, so it is clear most of the cost is labor and "what the market will bear".

I'm not very knowledgeable about manufacturing, but based on watching a lot of "How It's Made" and similar shows, I'd expect the plastic trumpet's manufacture is more automated. I'm not sure why brass trumpets could not be automated, though.

I do note that brass trumpets do not have to be expensive. Amazon has many many brass trumpets that are less than the Amazon price for the pTrumpet, and are higher rated [3]. Perhaps these are made using more automation than the trumpets in the above cited videos?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NAaRQUTp9g

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIqDhO1iddo

[3] I'm not sure that these are all brass. Some of the descriptions make it sound like some are using other materials for at least some of the metal parts.
Just a personal observation, the instruments that are typically identified as "endangered," are all ridiculously hard to learn as an adult, even if you've played another instrument. Bassoon has bizarre fingerings compared to the other woodwinds. Viola has that damned clef. Double bass is physically dangerous to play. French horn is just hard.
Joel is more eloquent at expressing the problems with hiring than I:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
Even in that case, you're working in a local maximum.

Train a team of people and they'll be more productive than you on your own.
Earlier discussion of original NY Times article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9983224
[edit]oops. obviously, i meant apples to apples :D
This paradox is explainable because there's a gap in the signal. It usually takes a considerable amount of time/experience to specialize in high skill labor markets (ex. Doctor, lawyer, etc.) ---- therre is a gap in the signal (present vs. future). So, today there may not be enough workers that are familiar with designing chips for wearables (subset of hardware engineers). Then, because of limited supply --- prices go up. Other people see this, and are incentivized to train for the role (takes time, investment, etc.). So, there is always going to be some mismatch between positions employers want to fill vs. the existing pool of labor.
Would guess the downward trend is due to more widespread use of body armor. I seldom if ever see a uniformed cop who's not wearing a vest.
I'm not in SF so I wouldn't know. Is the OneLogin ad par for the course? At least from the Venmo example it doesn't seem like these kinds of ads are particularly enjoyed by passers by.

Advertisements are designed to catch a person's attention and elicit a response. Most marketers don't care whether it's a good response or a bad response, just getting noticed is the goal. There's a lot of visual language tied up in ads which we're conditioned to interpret a certain way. Many ads mismatch these visual cues to attract a person's attention (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). I think a lot of the anger at the OneLogin ad comes from the mismatched messages in the same way the Venmo ad did, only because it's a woman in the ad the anger is directed at her instead of the concept/execution.
"throwing money at learn to code charities out of the goodness of their heart. They're very directly trying to lower the primary cost that their investments face"

Wow that's a unique level of cynicism even for this generally cynical forum. I'm speechless. So you see all these efforts to raise interest in computer science in younger generation of Americans and all you can think of is how all these new, enthusiastic programmers are going to compete with you?
> What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?

Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.
It's worth reading through at least some of the particulars. About half seem to involve people also shooting at the police. Assuming the police are at fault every other time, I don't know how else one would expect a shootout with police to end. For that matter, even if it happens to be a fake gun, waving it around and refusing to put it down is probably a bad idea.

And then there's murder suicides by people who happen to be cops, but I don't think killing your own family is something that comes up in the line of duty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
This is an interesting viewpoint about Starbucks that I have heard many times. So here is an article [1] talking about how 75% of Starbucks employees don't have a college degree. If you go up the Starbucks hierarchy

50% employees are baristas.

35% are shift supervisors

15% assistant store manager or higher in the hierarchy

Which means the odds are overwhelming that every employee you interact with in a normal Starbucks doesn't have a college degree. So why this view that college grads are flocking to Starbucks because they can't find jobs.

In fact, Starbucks has started the free college option to make sure that even non-degreed people will find Starbucks attractive enough to apply. [2]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-07/starbucks-is...

[2] https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-offers-full-tuitio...
Are we looking for some kind of parity in dead cops vs. dead civilians?

How many of the 385 people were killed as a consequence of criminal actions? Cop shooting unarmed civilian gets a lot of play in the media, but that describes a small percentage of police involved shootings.
I recognize that what you are saying sounds totally rational to you. But your position is one that is based on general ideas and (I strongly suspect) no practical experience. If you read the comments you will notice that people with direct experience are very clear on this matter. A woman like Rousey has no chance against a moderately skilled male fighter because strength does matter - a lot.
Well, they are, aren't they? Cynicism isn't somehow automatically wrong.
Nah, someone is just playing probabilities with someone else's life. But hey, you don't have to be a cop. Better to be a webdev and hangout on Hacker News all day.
I've done something like this on a production data base server before. Maybe not the same thing but I allocated a really big file because mysql would occasionally grow its ibdata file to full the disk before we could handle the alert. Deleting this file allowed room to maneuver after restarting the database and dealing with this run away journal file.

The other similar urban legend is the enterprise teams which have for(int i=0;i<10000000;++i); loops in code which they can remove a zero when performance boost is needed and they can quickly provide a fix.
No. It isn't just a 'contest of strength.' Leverage is very important which is why men can tap out other men. But a certain amount of strength can overcome mechanical advantage and men have that much more strength.
> The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.

How so? Nearly every tech company has extensive internship programs, which are undoubtably an investment in their future workforce.

Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.
The complaint "I can't differentiate competent applicants from incompetent ones" is a very different one than "I'm not getting any competent applicants". Offering a higher salary incentivizes more competent applicants to apply.
>Come on. Really? All the young indian and chinese talent I meet is way above average.

Not in my experience. Most of them are chair warmers. There are certainly exceptions, but "way above average" is far from the rule.
28+Interesting+Facts+about+Spain+++Highlights
Err...no. You don't actually. The reality of MMA and boxing is that you go up or down if the risk reward makes sense and you can physically handle the weight change.
Not at all, as the entire work force has felt the effect of immigrants tripling as a percentage of the population, so to will Engineers with the increase of immigrants via H1-B visas