skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure there is tons of new cheap developers. More than ever. And that's because there is more demand for developers and software than ever. Years ago you could only sell software running on gigantic servers or desktop computers. Now there is tablets, smartphones, tvs, consoles, glasses, watches...

Of course there is demand for cheap workforce, and of course there is more demand than ever for skilled workforce. And salaries are going both ways, down and up. Certainly there is people demanding very cheap software engineers and so certainly never has been better paying software jobs.

So it's a matter of skilling oneself up, specialising or searching carefully. But I 100% believe there is no better industry to be job searching on our 40s.
That's why I wrote my Magna Carta For The Web: http://blog.higg.so/2015/07/31/a-magna-carta-for-the-web/ There is an emphasis on Advertising in this article but it overlooks the meta grand overview of the web which I go into. The topology, and the tendency towards centralized systems is not talked about here. Also if Advertising works for now, then I am going to milk it for all it is worth. Unless decent standards for publishers are put in place like Mozilla's Subscribe2Web, or hosting and domain renewals become free, then we are stuck with that business model. Also, we just got a digital Magna Carta voted in: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/15/magna-carta-d...

In terms of how the web is progressing, things like Ethereum look very exciting: https://www.ethereum.org/ And the IETF are in full force now with many protocols being redesigned from the ground up with security and privacy being baked in.
People in their 50s today were born in the late 1950s, early 1960s, which is not anywhere near growing up in the Great Depression. If you grew up during the Great Depression, you were born in the early 1920s. That'd make you 90+ years old today. 90+ year olds only account for about half a percent of the population (http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf). 99.4% of the population doesn't remember the Great Depression as a real thing.
Tragedy of the Commons just requires sufficient negative externality; depletable shared resource is an example of a source of such externality, but not the only form it can take.
You can't ask living, breathing humans to not defend their lives.

Yeah, ~500 people have been killed by police in America so far this year. That includes rightful and wrongful shootings. Some of them were innocent, sure, and some were in a grey area, sure, but plenty were warranted.

Contrast that with over 100 /homicides/ in New Orleans so far this year. NONE of those are warranted or just (by virtue of being homicides).

And just to do the math, there are approximately 750,000 officers with the authority to arrest in the USA (wikipedia). If each of them interacted with only one non-officer per day (rounding against the police, here), that's over 160 million police interactions so far this year, making a deadly outcome the result of only .0003% of all police interaction, and I'll bet a huge segment of those shootings are warranted.

Staying out of the USA because you're scared of cops isn't exactly a rational decision.
> Once Web 2.0 was a thing, everybody had comment sections. Now the dial is being turned back, and comments sections are beginning to be seen as tacky.

I suppose the 'Web 1.0' equivalent, if we persist in these ridiculous version numbers, would be Guestbooks.
Summit voting, technical committee highlights and more OpenStack news
Investing Sucks
Is it people yet?
> there are no browser extensions on mobile

Not on iOS. Firefox on Android has extensions.

> I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.

Lately I'm a big fan of Patreon, and an increasing number of the folks whose work I enjoy use it.

If there are sites, channels, or any regular content you enjoy, and they don't have a subscription mechanism, send them a mail and ask them about adding one.
This sentence gave me pause:

"The protein source is soy, which contains an ideal ratio of amino acids for excellent nutrition ..."

You can argue the merits of one protein source over another, but I think to declare any non-animal protein source as "ideal" in any way would require some evidence to be presented. Unfortunately, it shows that they are glossing over the hard decisions that have to be made in creating a product like this with so much empty marketing-speak.
The software industry has a fundamental problem in that we don't have a broad objective measure for what is "good" software. It is also a very young industry that is still in the crazy iteration/development phase. This leads to changing "best practices" and wheel reinvention to the extreme.

This causes software projects to be both extremely expensive, hard to estimate and with terrible success rates.

Because all of that, finding software developers that can regularly deliver business value is extremely difficult and it is usually priced too high for most businesses.

Personally, I don't view this as a hiring problem, I view this as an oddity of the times we live in. Give it another 25 or 30 years and maybe we will actually know something about how software projects should work.
I love the part about the software being able to "predict" trouble at Enron when fed a bunch of email from that era. Just like everyone and their brother has come up with an algorithm that can "predict" past movements in the stock market, but every single one of them has trouble predicting the actual future. Folks on Wall Street, of all places, should be wary of people who present such "evidence" of their algorithm's efficacy.
Phew. That's a market I wouldn't want to enter.

I wish them the best of luck - and I love some of Autodesk's tools - but I don't immediately see why I'd choose this over Unity or Unreal.

I hope they integrate the renderer into Motionbuilder, though. In 2015, the quality of render it's possible to pull from that tool is just embarassing.
There is, but I think all they'd have to do to get money is ask nicely. I have high hopes for Patreon as a platform for that. They could also ask nicely to whitelist the site in ad blocker, promising they won't abuse it. I've seen a site that does that and happily complied because hey, I get it, they need the money and I do get some value from their services.

The reason people block ads is not because they don't want publishers to get paid. It's because most ads are actively user-hostile, ranging from merely fucking annoying to malware vectors which can cost you a lot of money. Quoting 'jacquesm from other subthread, "Browsing the web without an adblocker is like sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.". [0].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995396
Sometime in the next 5 to 10 years, you'll be able to extend Emacs with Scheme:

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs

Hopefully, people will build IDE's comparable to IntelliJ with it.
The kind of ads is one thing, but to me the underlying issue is that I don't want to be tracked and online advertising is all about tracking people.
Scriptogram will discontinue operation on August 14th, 2015
I meant "specifically when," as in can you give an example? Part of the tongue in cheek aspect of "No Such Agency" was that everyone understood that that mysterious building in Ft. Meade was all about. We have had congressional inquiries (with mainstream media coverage) into things like MKULTRA and the phoenix program. The public was well aware of spy agencies long before snowden.

Did this ever happen to you or is this something that someone else told you abut the past?
This is beautifully written, but I'm unconvinced. Gamers of a certain age - not just computer gamers, I see this in roleplaying as well - seem wedded to the illusion of freedom or realism or risk, will sacrifice story or balance for their sake.

It never works. A game is ultimately never going to be able to outsmart its player; a determined player can always peek behind the curtain. Suspension of disbelief has to be willing - so why not embrace that?

And if the author wants to complain about games feeling like work, precise controller-use, meaningless deaths, or blind alleys are surely much bigger examples of that. The idea that you "actually become better" by getting better at videogame swordfights is laughable. That the original Legend of Zelda was harder doesn't make it any more heroic. Only less fun.
Do you know the Digital Humanities? 3 easy ways to learn more
>Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone notices the decline.

People point to old time complaints about decline as if they prove that decline was never real ("People also complained about the advent of books or the radio, so surely anyone complaining today is wrong").

The forget that there are other, also logically consistent, explanations:

1) Decline is a constant: e.g. people who complained about the radio bring some kind of decline were as correct as people complaining about Twitter now.

2) Decline is always present but not absolute: there's always something missed in sophistication, freedom, etc from previous technologies (e.g. the use of the imagination in radio-theatricals as opposed to being fed images in TV, or the freedom to be the fuck alone for a while as opposed to constantly obligated to be available with mobile phones), but there is also positive change, and what's the total balance depends on what you value.

3) Decline is sometimes true (a thing is totally worse than another it replaces), and othertimes not, and some people in the past were right about claiming decline in some transition, where others were wrong.
Digital Magna Carta vote demands free, open, uncensored web
Three points to that:

1. This differs more from workplace to workplace than industry to industry. Many dev workplaces will give developers a week or two of official "training time." Many other industries have workplaces that don't do that.

2. The reality is, training on new technologies has more value to you than it does to your employer. If your employer uses J2EE, Subversion, and Oracle, there's little benefit to them sending you off to learn Node, git, and Mongo. But there's a big benefit to you in knowing that, potentially. If the benefits of learning flow more to you than to your employer, you shouldn't be surprised if the burden of learning falls onto you.

3. But mostly, if you're a person who finds software development genuinely interesting (the hobbyist-type), you'll keep up on stuff basically recreationally. When you read about the latest whatever, you'll be curious and want to try it out and learn how it works because you're interested in that. You don't need any formal training to learn new technologies, just a little motivation and time. An hour spent not watching TV can get you a long way in understanding a new technology.
If you read the actual article, you'd see that financial firms are using this software to try and detect rogue traders and fraudulent activity.
load time is not a success factor in and of itself. Fast load times for bad content will not lead to success as little as really great content with horrible load times. But that being said, I am a proponent of significantly prioritizing load times over everything else. Load time should be a constant multiplier in decisions. If a "great feature" significantly taxes load time it needs to either die or be optimized.
So Zelda being almost impossibly hard wasn't just a ploy to sell more Nintendo Power magazines?
"sent 3 packets instead of 1 because the compiler translated each write of a bitfield member to a write of the whole register"

So the problem was the fact that the language gives the impression of having more control than what the hardware is actually offering. In this case bit access must have been better left to platform-dependent libraries (when it would present itself as something more than what masks usage can do).
I don't think there's a victim here at all. not me not them.

It's just the forces that be, my need versus their need, the economy, human nature, technological abilities. Nothing more.

Let them choose their business model, I really don't care. But don't go out crying if your business model isn't sustainable, taking into account that ad blocking (which is a my prerogative as you say) is not going away.
I suspect the marginal impact might be pretty high in certain cases.

For example, it looks to me as if on iOS you can only be identified down to (browser * iPhone model * iOS version * timezone).

I'd venture a big majority of iPhone users use Safari, most iOS users update their OS fairly quickly, and there aren't that many iPhone models. So battery life could make a big difference there.
Works with any industry. Sure, there is highly rewarded lawyer or accountant professionals. Just as there is highly rewarded developers. But all others tend to be pushed by younger and cheaper workforce. And Software is one of those blessed industries where one on his/her forties can refocus and get reskilled pretty quickly. Tell an accountant to reskill.

Damn it. Today, one, if willing, can just learn the latest new technology and not only become 1000% employable but also relevant. Can't think of any other sector like this. We're so lucky.
Scotland only has one pumped storage scheme (Cruachan). It's annual generation was only 705 Gwh (as at 2009), which is only 13% of total hydro generation. Sure there might be "green electron" washing going on, but it's probably not significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
It is really different, some people have variable pricing that changes monthly, and some have fixed pricing.

The cheapest fixed price I could find is $0.34 per kWh, on Elpristavlen[0] (lists of power prices)

DONG Energy[1] states a price of $0.27 per kWh.

Note that the price might not include power sources from renewable energy, and it excludes the subscription you pay to the power company.

[0] https://www.elpristavlen.dk/

[1] http://www.dongenergy-distribution.dk/erhverv/eldistribution...
I love what he has to say about the original's unmarked bombable spots, making each rock face a mystery, a potential secret place.

But there's a very hard game-design problem here: Completionism.

Modern gamers are obsessed with finding every last object, every achievement, 100%. If you play the original Zelda in this way, it becomes a tedious process of acquiring 12 bombs, running back to a particular screen, and bombing 12 blocks in a row checking to see if there's a secret cave... then, you're out of bombs and you have to commute back and do another round...

How do you preserve the mystery while avoiding the bomb-every-block tedium?
Here's a similar thing in Power Map (a tool made by MS) form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoeL3_5M2zA
I've been wondering what's happened to all the Perl devs. It seems like 5 years ago there was lots of solid web dev work happening in Perl still and now it seems like a sea of Rails and Scala/Java.
The Libor Trial in 12 Quotes
I don't believe in any larger things so I'm not sure I would find any benefit in that.

I mean, other than the whole universe I suppose, but I find the night sky in a remote location gives me the headspace I need to appreciate that.
There's a lot of misinformation about soy and estrogen levels. This[0] is required reading for soy

[0] http://examine.com/faq/is-soy-good-or-bad-for-me/

Ps thanks sol (the owner of examine)
Michelangelo on Struggle and Creative Integrity
I agree completely.

I'm using "Cha-Ching 2 beta" which was abandoned some 6 years ago when Intuit bought out the company working on it but the beta still works (I owned a copy of Cha-Ching 1 from some software bundle I picked up). The downside is (1) manual entry of every transaction, and (2) no analytics at all. The plus side is I wrote my own scripts to extract data from its Sqlite database so I can do analytics in a spreadsheet.

I definitely don't trust any one company. I don't want my bank or my credit card company to have 100% of my financial data.
Hitchhiking robot’s cross-country journey comes to tragic end in Philadelphia
It is human and environmental suicide to keep supporting the advertisement industry which is one of the main driving force behind our society of excess, one that is simply not sustainable.

No matter how much we like to think otherwise, advertisement is barely ethical (it's nothing less than coercion and manipulation). It's time we catch up to it and shut it down, it's a failed experiment that only resulted in bad things, enabling that world of abundance that nobody needed.

I agree with the original commenter, let the advertising sector burn.
Incredibly well written and I definitely didn't expect to learn so much.
Being bored.

And I'm perfectly happy deferring that as long as possible.

Currently my projects have a number of potential descriptors attached, but "boring" isn't one of them.

(If you haven't read it, the last chapter of Tim Ferriss' book "Four Hour Work Week" is a fascinating read. It details what it feels like to get to the point where you've achieved your goals, and no longer need to work. I don't want to go all Buzzfeed on you, but it's really not what you'd expect from a naive consideration of the situation.)
Posted on Medium.
Actually, when I was playing Dark Souls a few months ago, somebody asked me what it was like and after thinking for a few moments, I told them "It's like a hardcore Zelda game". At base, I think the Souls games and the Zelda games are made on the same template.
A Visual History of the iTunes Icon
The real answer to this is basically that the two companies aren't all that integrated, even today. At the same time, renderman was still using ray tracing as part of it's hybrid REYES architecture.

Even so, they could have made it with renderman. Presentations saying 'this wouldn't have been possible' are more marketing than reality. It was more likely to be a combination of the right time to pitch creating a new ray tracer to see how much could be gained through batching while also having a renderer they could control and make sure was modern.
Sounds like an offer I can't refuse! /i
why would there always be advertising? there wasn't any for about 400 000 years and we had it for a couple centuries ? a few milleniums at most.
Converting from Pivotal Tracker to Trello for Project Management
Norway uses mainly wind and hydro, Sweden mostly hydro and nuclear. When there's surplus wind energy, Sweden and Norway scales back on hydro and import from Denmark and Germany (through Denmark) instead.
> They learn the job in about 3-6 months and now repeat the same job for years without ever learning anything else. So on paper it shows 5-10 years experience, but in reality they still have about 3-6 months experience.

This is the most spot on thing I have read regarding this issue and is why interviewing is so challenging when it comes to developers. This is also why the interview process for developers is so grueling and long. You would be amazed how difficult it is to figure out how much ACTUAL learning experience a person has vs. someone that has done the same thing for 10 years.

I also feel this is why 20-somethings are popular, at least you know for certain how much experience one could possibly have.
Not all trust them. Some do, some don't. But services like Mint exist because there are enough who trust out there to keep the service going. 100% trust is impossible for any service. There are people who don't even trust themselves.
Wells Fargo lets you create a read-only account:

https://www.wellsfargo.com/help/faqs/profile/
I'm no electrical engineer (could be doing the math wrong), but I think there is a pretty glaring error in this page:

The author mentions a 400 MW wind farm, and then says that correlates to 400,000 homes. Unless homes in Denmark use only 3% of what homes in the US use on average[1], that number should be somewhere closer to 15,000 homes.

1. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3
> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs.

What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated constantly in this thread. Most of the world is a different story. Outside the Valley and a couple other metros, and outside the web and mobile fields in general: 1) degrees are usually required; 2) employers are much pickier.
I'd argue that this was a very, very different brand of republicans you had then compared to the current breed, which seems to lack any rationality, whatsoever.
You could set a bypass around the generators to the cooling tower to reduce energy production without reducing the rate of nuclear reactions. They don't do this for a number of reasons which basically boil down to nuclear fuel being cheap so they would much rather shut down just about everything else.

This does create a minor issue if the grid fails, but that’s a rare event and doing an actual shutdown is considered safer.
> I think all they'd have to do to get money is ask nicely.

Having been a part of a lot of media sites in the past, I can safely say that wouldn't have been true for any of them.
I could not finish reading this. The paper started with examples of entrepreneurial success that depend heavily upon government regulation; namely the artificial scarcity generated from copyright and patents.

Also the statement "These high earners have made significant economic contributions...", which is an axiom I am not willing to accept without some convincing argument.

I found it impossible to read a paper that started dense with immature postulations and grandiose assumptions. The author should have been aware of the political climate of such a paper and attempted some care of his argument: At the very least admit to the reader that he's making ridiculous assumptions, but the argument will reveal itself with more reading.
How I Gave Up Alternating Current
This article seems to argue "Taxing the rich leads to reduced growth and therefore all of society is worse off for it." That every extra $1 the rich makes leads to a economy wide increase in $1.10. If this were true we would want to reduce taxation levels of the rich considerably. And we would expect inequality to be associated with very strong growth.

Luckily we don't have to just speculate. The IMF has done in-depth research on this topic. And they found found that not only is growth not associated with inequality, but there is evidence inequality actually leads to lower growth rates.[0]

[0]https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf
Can anyone please tell me what developers use training budgets for? I feel like most things I have learned are from free resources such as blogs and StackOverflow. What do people spend money on? Books I suppose are the most likely candidate, but those can definitely be bought with $500...

Do people actually get value out of conferences? Those always seem more like cash grabs and marketing events than actual training value-adds.
WilliamChart is an Android Library to create charts
As other say: it is converging to Hawaii-prices, but most of that is Taxation. In Denmark, the policy has been to put taxes on resource usage in the later years and not only on income. In this case the resource usage is on fossil fuels.

The slight problem with that model is that in principle, it should be cheaper when the energy is green, and more expensive when it is not. But the state has come to rely on the tax, so now it is a bit murky what it is really for.