skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re: Essay vs Blog -- I had the good fortune to come across "American Essays"[1] edited by Charles B. Shaw in a thrift shop some years ago. Shaw opens the book with, in-part:

"The Essay In America
(...)
There is no literary form that embraces so wide a variety of inclusions. Adjectives commonly used to describe the sorts of essays indicate this diversity: familiar, critical, didactic, informal, nature, expository, historical, reflective, travel, personal, descriptive, and humorous are a dozen of these qualifiers. The noun, too, is varied: article, character sketch, causerie, feuilleton, fantasy, anecdote, paper, satire, miscellany, ephemera, impressions, and reverie are another dozen terms applied to the multiformity of the essay. The composition that can be thus diversely denoted cannot be rigidly defined. The essay may be as personal as a toupee or as austere and sublime as a Himalayan peak; it may be as light as the foam on faery seas or erudite as the disquisitions of him whose

"... words of learned length and thundering sound amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around';

it may be fun or the prickliest sort of intellectual stimulation; its ideas may be straws which build bridges or rugged ores polished to the texture of satin. Its range of subject matter is infinite. One might substitute "essay" for "man" in the sentence from Terence's The Self-Tormentor: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns humanity do I deem a matter of indifference to me." In place of a sedate definition perhaps we may compromise on the analogy of the twentieth-century American essayist, Stuart Pratt Sherman: "The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a little river, now with 'bright speed', and now with reluctance and fond lingerings over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humours that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light."

Words from 1954 that I think are a fine lens with which to view both the "blogosphere" and our evolving social media in general.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B001...
Their reference manual is huge, yes, but the tutorial chapters serve as a nice introduction while giving roughly the same information as the site linked by OP:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/tutorial.html

The tutorial has the additional advantage that it links directly to more advanced chapters in the manual for people willing/needing to go deeper.

It's also kept up to date by the people working on the database itself, so it's bound to be more accurate as time progresses.
Mr. Teflon and the Failed Dream of Meritocracy
> I felt drastically out of place, but for years it was just too damn convenient to go with the flow.

That sums it up.
Jolken
"Boiled down - can people who are part of such a skewed system really produce unbiased studies and theories about the system?"

Those who are part of the 99% exhibit a bias as well. This is the nature of political economy arguments.
Since this is BBC international UK based readers cannot read the article.
"But they're not talking about people like me, they're talking about twenty-something Ivy League post docs with stellar CVs."

We're trying to recruit a devops with AWS experience. We really don't care about which uni you went to or didn't go to.

Probably no good for you as we're in Manchester, UK but I don't think we're that unique.
The 950+ results returned from searching HN for the term [0] would suggest that, contrary to your thesis, Hacker News readers do, in fact, appreciate one liners quite a bit -- just take a look at these examples:

- Also, awk has a fun way of parsing input, which makes for very enjoyable one liners [1]

- In Vim, configuration is a bunch of one-liners and I love that. [2]

(As for your other point, however, i.e. whether HN readers appreciate humorous comments, sadly, I'm not sure how we could go about determining that...)

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8894231

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7303266
[Spanish speaker here, to be more precise es-ar.]

I can read technical articles in probably in 5 languages, but I prefer that the posts are in English. (Sometimes the technical terms get mangled in the translations to Spanish, and the only way to read the article is to mentally untranslate it to English.)

I think that post in other languages are ok if they have some information that is not available in English, in particular if they are the original source and they don't have an official translation. (And they are interesting, of course.) [1]

I submitted one or two articles in Spanish without too much success, but I always add the Google autotranslation link as a comment.

I remember a few articles in other languages that got popular. An old article about drawing Homer Simpson in CSS (in Spanish), a recent article about a strange keyboard (in Japanese) and a few about government surveillance in German and ¿Norwegian?.

[1] For example, an article about the difference between the <br /> tag and the <p> </p> tag in another language is not a good candidate, because there is a lot of information about this in English. (Unless it discusses the low level details of the implementation in different browsers and how the vertical space interacts with the vertical space of other tags.)
Assembly 2015 final results
I disagree, i've worked for a few fortune 500 companies. The fact that I don't have a degree has never stopped me from getting a programming job. On the other hand, i've definitely had the feeling like there was a glass ceiling.
Isn't the entire 'one percent' debate (in America) centered around the fact that one party wants to institute a modest tax increase on that group, and the other party wants to, irrationally, keep cutting their taxes even when faced with deficits? Nobody reasonable is actually advocating for 'perfect economic equality'.

I'm generally a free market guy (in that I believe the free market should be the foundation of the economy but not dictate every aspect of it), but I just can't see a reasonable tax increase as being a problem.

I don't see a problem with a reasonable minimum wage either ($12-$15/hr), especially when tax dollars are subsidizing the working-poor with food stamps, students loans, public housing, health-care etc. As much as I'm disappointed with Wal-Mart for not being embarrassed their employees are on food stamps, I understand that they can't raise their wage unilaterally lest it puts them at a competitive disadvantage - which is why you need legislation! Make it fair for everybody.
Dotsql: A Golang library for using SQL
I'm talking more about the kind of web that we could have, not the kind that we actually got. There's nothing about the concept of "worldwide set of pages connected by hyperlinks" that stops non-programmers from contributing. Non-programmers can already create printed pages (pretty) and spreadsheets (computational), so with better tech they could create the web as well.
Try doing that on a touchpad(is that the word?). First when you click the circle, it moves a couple of cm, then you have to try to move your fingertip slooowly towards the time you want to start from. I mean, come on people... what are we doing here?
There is no over-supply of developers, there is a shortage of good developers (for various definitions of good).
I suggest TinyTinyRSS[0] (ttrss), a good and free rss-reader. It's open-source, so you can host it yourself (a short tutorial is on my blog[1]).
Since it's a web-application, you can run it on any device that has a browser, ttrss even has an offical android client[2].

There's even a hoster that provides ttrss as a service [3].

[0] https://tt-rss.org

[1] https://www.zufallsheld.de/2013/11/03/tiny-tiny-rss-centos-n...

[2] https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss-android

[3] https://tinytinyrss-servers.com/
I find that Python's indentation is actually useful for beginners. It forces them to format their code and as long as they use an editor which shows invisible characters and can be configured to convert tabs to spaces, they tend to get used to it very quickly.

I say that as someone who has repeatedly had to help JS beginners with what I like to call accidental indentation (basically the result of copy-paste and accidental programming -- throwing code at the compiler until it works). Consistent indentation can go a long way for making code parseable by humans.
This is why I love the Postgres range types so much (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/rangetypes.html). With those, you get to chose based on the value whether your ranges include the boundaries or not. Even better: you get to chose for both start and end.
“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...
The new hiring meta-game: complaining about being unemployable to become employed!
cocs. right.
Not free, sorry (although cheap), but as far as web-based alternatives go I recommend BazQux (bazqux.com). It's essentially like Google Reader, lets you auth with your Google account, and works with a bunch of RSS apps.

I was happy to pay for a lifetime account. It has a 30 day demo period if you want to check it out before deciding.
What makes you think the book is ready? We've been told (KS backers) that the book isn't shipping until October 2015. There is absolutely nothing that you've linked to to indicate that it's ready.

Incidentally the book costs less at retail, then even the lowest tier of it's Kickstarter campaign.
for users that have internet access beyond facebook. Internet.org and many mobile phone providers provide free access to facebook but not the rest of the internet.
I self host via a Tiny Tiny RSS install. It's got a good reader app for iOS (iPhone and iPad). It hasn't caused me any issues at all. I prefer it to NewsBlur too.
Universal skills every software developer can benefit from
> there is a shortage of good developers (for various definitions of good).

But couldn't that simply be a result of an inadequate selection process, instigated by a flood of applicants, and then worsened by an inability to judge who will be good in what role? It seems very easy to dismiss anyone looking for work on the grounds that they must not be very good to begin with. All we know is not enough long-term suitable applicants make it to the end of the hiring pipeline.
This article[1] implies that there's a lot of cross-pollination with regard to computer graphics research and technology within the movie/VFX industry. So my guess is a bit of friendly competition that keeps spurring new innovation (similar to the browser wars).

[1] http://www.fxguide.com/featured/disneys-new-production-rende...
I doubt they will open source AIX. I don't think they will see the benefits. Instead, open sourcing 50 odd projects that they don't really care about anymore or if there is a clear incentive to do so (such as community adoption to further the project) - makes more sense.
> I wonder if the time is ripe for a procedurally generated Zelda game?

The Binding of Isaac is a good attempt in that direction.
I found this library when scanning through Awesome-Go [0]. This is in response to my Ask HN submission [1].

Thanks to Thiago Avelino (avelino) for putting together this treasure trove of go libraries/tools!

[0] https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912650
What motivates me
I once found myself unemployable as well, maybe what I did can help someone. This was quite a few years ago when the ColdFusion job I had just ended and the job I had before that was in Visual FoxPro (and a few other even less known technologies). Talk about unemployable. Also I am not in a major city, so I was getting pretty much no responses to my resume.

After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out to change it. Being unemployed, I luckily had a lot of free time. I made a study of the programming job ads in my target market and if I didn't know what a technology was, I looked it up. I tried to figure out which language was the most asked for, and decided it was PHP (at the time). Also in my studies and in the job ads I noticed that most of the work involved these new-fangled Content Management Systems and so decided I needed to learn one of those, and I chose Joomla. It was a choice I would later come to regret but it got me a job.

To learn these, for both PHP and Joomla I ordered a book from Amazon.com. I limited my search to books published in the last few years and ranked them by customer satisfaction and chose one near the top. And then I made myself go through reading these books and doing the exercises at the end of the chapters. This was very very boring but I made myself do it. Then I created a few Joomla websites for local small businesses for free.

And then, after 6 months of unemployment, I had made myself employable again. I saw a job ad that I was now now barely qualified for, applied, and was hired to maintain a legacy Joomla website. Was it a glam job? No, but it was somewhere to start. And the rest is history. I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat the process and figure out what is being asked for these days and learn that.

I haven't done a study of it lately but I would guess almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily, as there are very few experts in this and many companies seem to want it. Also most developers don't want to do front-end/JavaScript stuff like that so there is less competition. That's where I'd start looking anyway.
Hacker News for App Ideas
This should come with a huge YMMV.

The demand for programming skills varies across locations, skills and age. Certainly you can be an unemployed programmer but adjusting locations/skills can greatly improve circumstances. ODesk/Freelancer gives you very little control over demand and hence, you are just a commodity. I've yet to see anyone doing well out of it from a contractor side but plenty of people doing well who need cheap contractors fast.

Understand the market or someone who does will take advantage of you...
[It might not seem so, but this is a constructive criticism]

You clearly have no idea whatsoever about what museums are, how do they work and what do they do.

No, museums don't sell heir works. Only some US museums do so, and they are harshly blamed by all other museums all over the world.

No, works in deposit aren't "works that the public won't see", but essential works to ensure the longest lasting to the pieces usually shown (but periodically put to rest through a planned turnover).
No, deposits aren't a trove of unexploited treasures: some important gems and a lot of rubbish.

A museum is not a shop, but a conservation institution: it works on a hundred years perspective. Sure, sell a couple works to grant gratis access for 100k people over 10 years. And what do we do for the 390 next years?

Do you know anything about the art market? Clearly not: there is no value, just trend and fancy.
Do you know something about economics? The simple fact that a work is kept in a museum (and thus is outside the market) changes the prices of similar works (if ever such thing existed: we are talking about unique pieces, no one is ever "similar" to another) available on the market. Thus you can't use the market prices of an artist to estimate the value of an artwork (putting another one on the market will dilute value of the other ones). But yet, you should know about history and how a provenance might affect the market price of an artwork.

Do you know something about art history? Because that would teach you one thing or two about how museums are for keeping works and transmit a legacy that outgrows small periods of time, like a lifespan. A museum isn't to sell works, because it isn't to follow present trends (you might want to find out how praised was Caravaggio in the XIXth Century, or Georges de La Tour around the same time).

And please, please, tell me: how would you evaluate museums? The one with most value is the best one? The one with the most items? Well, make an inventory of a museum, first, and then let me know if you changed your mind once you find out that "item" has absolutely no meaning.

Also: your latin purism is plain silly and clearly makes it a bit harder for your reader to understand you (I had to think it over a little bit before finding that it wasn't a typo). Neither Greeks nor Roman (Latins) had museums. The first one was established in Rome in the XVth century: the world "musea" was never a thing.
There seems to be some confusion amongst people who move from writing code for fun to writing code for money. Which is of course that they're not being paid to write code, but to solve problems. Writers and musicians usually don't get paid just to write or make music, they get paid to entertain. If you're confused about why you're being paid, you might start to think you're getting a raw deal.

Since I started writing software not because of any love for it, but to solve various problems I was having at the time, it's always sort of shocked me that some people manage to get so far into their careers without realizing what they're being paid for.

I quite enjoy it now, but rarely in the revel of pure creation. Usually it's from the satisfaction of a problem solved in a reasonable amount of time under well considered constraints.
Practical Extensibility with Object Algebras (2012, Pdf)
This is sickening - no other word to describe it.
Degrees only matter for "serious companies" and are used as a filter by often clueless HR employees without technical background. As long as you can prove practical experience, you should be fine.

Your network, on the other hand, becomes more important as you get older. Hiring an unknown person in his/her 40s or 50s has a much lower risk/reward ratio than hiring a random developer in his 20s who will a) do whatever you tell him without questioning anything b) work himself to death and c) work for almost no compensation.

Stay away from oDesk and online freelancing in general. Most of what's outsourced online is low skill, low risk and low reward work (landing pages, analytics integration, etc). Almost everyone can do it, so suddenly you're competing with everyone on the planet instead of just a couple of 100-1000 freelancers in your city. One of your biggest advantages over 2nd/3rd world freelancers is your location, language proficiency and cultural background. Use it to your advantage.

Also, hiring is really tricky. No one has really figured out how to do it right and so you have these hiring rituals with IQ tests, personality tests, weird screening procedures etc. In the end no one wins, because interviewees have gotten insanely good at playing the hiring game and employers have become overly careful just not to hire a random guy who will mess up their code base in 6 months and then leave for the next gig.

My personal advice to the OP: if there are tech/startup/... meetups in your region, go there. It's a good starting point and it's fun most of the time! You can get to know some interesting people and that might open some doors!

Best of luck, if you're reading this!
Don't do it. Start now, because what you'll find out if you're successful and rich is that what's standing in the way of a happy life have nothing to do with success or money.

People use the chase for success in various forms as a way of avoiding self-knowledge. In some ways the worst thing that will ever happen to you is if you make the big bucks. Then you won't have an excuse for not knowing yourself. So what do the super-motivated people do then? They pick another milestone to shoot for before they'll start living.

Start now. Don't wait for anything to happen. You are alive in every way that's meaningful, now.
I never liked Zelda. That is until I discovered the NES Zelda's. I grew up with the Super Nintendo. So when I came up RPGs and adventure games were unappealing, neverending, tedious chores that had nothing to do with the fun that was Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Super Metroid, StarFox etc.
Why Snabb?
Reading stories like these really, really scares me. I'm European, and next year my wife and I will most likely move to the US together (long story short: she is a US citizen, we have decided to move, and have already applied). I'm super excited about that. I currently work as a Rails developer, have a diverse background as a Linux sysadmin and developer, and have never had problems finding (or keeping) work where I live.

What I don't have is a college education. I'm also in my mid thirties, don't really have any US contacts, nor do I know very much about the job market there. Throw in some impostor syndrome and stuff like this creates a certain level of anxiety, to put it mildly.
It's always really disappointing for me when people see Kickstarting as a way of purchasing the end product. With economies of scale you should really expect prices to come down for retail. What you're getting for the money with a kickstarter campaign is the chance to help someone realise their product, which hopefully you believe in, without the creative inhibitions that come with strings-attached funding.
That's true. And approaches to each instrument, to avoid injury, have become a pretty mainstream part of teaching.

I actually suspect that bass isn't all that endangered, and that it has had somewhat of a resurgence. There were quite a few kids playing bass at the school string concerts that my kids play in.

Of course bass has the problem of being every parent's nightmare due to its size. ;-)

For me, the endangered-ness of the bass, at the time, was a blessing because it meant that I could serve a role in an ensemble without being a virtuoso.
I only got a empty screen with then name and logo, and the background changes from one variant of violet to another. Is there something interesting to see here?
"According to the Nobel Prize-winning research from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s, the brain may only have a short window of opportunity in which to develop binocular vision. These doors close early – at the end of childhood – after which people are locked into a two-dimensional world."

What factors would prevent someone from developing 3D vision? The article mentions overlapping images, but how would this manifest itself?
The way it is presented, object oriented programming languages sound like something different...as if when we lifted the covers on the code in which such languages are implemented, we would see homunculli operating the object mechanism instead of ordinary code. I remember marveling at the idea that objects are just dispatch and in one important sense no more clever than switching on a user keypress in some DOS .bat file menu.
The whole 'do an open source' project is a crock. I single-handedly wrote a large Javascript 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.