skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The domains where most of these programmers work are in ones where the problems are fairly well-defined. For example, what's the design of ffmpeg? It takes in a well-specified video codec and outputs a video stream. What's the design of protobufs, MapReduce, or GFS? In each case they had several motivating examples built using earlier technologies, and knew exactly what the key metrics are that they wanted to optimize and where the bottlenecks were likely to occur.

That doesn't mean there's no design work involved - far from it, I recall reading through the design notes for both GFS and MapReduce while I was at Google and being amazed at the possibilities they'd considered. But the design work is largely up-front: it's picking among alternative high-level architectures and figuring out what the consequences of that choice will be. Once the choice has been made, you don't need to make a whole lot of follow-on decisions; a lot of the code follows strictly from the choices you made up-front, and you aren't writing a line and thinking "Oh, was that a good idea? I better do it some other way". It also helps that these high-productivity programmers are highly experienced, and they specialize in a domain, so they've seen many of the low-level pitfalls before and avoid them instinctively.

It's a very different experience from writing end-user code. I'll work on a webapp, get some data on the screen, and then discover "No, the flow is wrong; we should present this and this widget independently on another screen and alter these other widgets based on the values there", and then that will have a cascading effect throughout the program that requires a bunch of other changes. By contrast, when I wrote an HTML parser, the behavior was already fully specified by the HTML5 spec. I had to make a few judgment calls regarding "What's the ideal API for client code? What are the boundaries of responsibility for this parser? What data representations should I use?", and I ended up having to revise them significantly, but that was largely because it was my first major C library, and a more experienced C programmer would know instinctively what the right choice was. Much of the time spent on the parser was straight-line implementing the spec and then tracking down bugs in the implementation.
Its not that there are a lot of analytics products out there, its that most places have a lot of analytics implementations. One of them could do the job, and probably do it well, yet we keep adding more of them. Lets break down why.

1. Product person A, adds your product into the stack and pushes RIGHT UP to the limit you have set.
2. Product person B needs "some new slice of data" but guess what... your 12k annual cost is way more than they want to or need to spend out of their P/L, and their data is going to push the organization over the cap, so they look at a new product.

1. Product person A adds in your product to whatever portion of the platform they are responsible for. it lives in a vacuum there.
2. Product person B comes along and lacks awareness or training on how to use your tool. They can implement another tool, get free training and not have to involved them selves with product person A.

1. Product person A adds your product into the stack, the engineers who implement it find issue with your API/documentation/support.
2. Product person B wants to add your product into the mix, and the ENGINEERS say "were not doing that again find another vendor".

All of the above situations create "fragmented" insights. As an example one of my employers used Mixpanel for mobile analytics. They were happy with "real time sales numbers" but the reality of "were not shipping a sub set of those orders" is where the rubber meets the road. Not only does fragmentation make it hard to get real insight but it makes it hard to troubleshoot things as well.

You want my data, take it, but take ALL of it. Don't just take the events I want to send you, take the logs, take it from mobile and web, take it from the backend systems, take it from my shippers. Take more than JSON over http, let me open up a socket and give you the fire hose, give me librarys in Go, java, php, python, C*. Give me a set of logging tools that gets you that data quickly. Give engineers a way to send you more context than just the user (process, session, transaction, response time). Give me a way to tell YOU what data to keep "hot" and what data to archive... Just take all the data. If you have it all in one place, your going to make the engineers life easy, the first time some product person runs up and says "conversions are up on our new launch" and wants to take credit for the UI changes, and I can lay a graph of response times over it and say, "well it might be cause the server is faster, and people aren't walking away" your going to not only have my business but everyone else I can convince to adopt your product.
It is not accurate. Your employer owns all intellectual property you create on or off work (meaning you technically can't contribute to Wikipedia or most open source projects) and even owns the bedtime stories you make up to tell your children, but ONLY if you sign a contract saying so.

By pointing out the above cases I have gotten an employer (not in NY) to alter the language of their IP contract.
Ok cool :) I was a bit worried there, great to hear you have e that under control.
IP assignment can be non-compete.

Had one company give me a non-compete and IP agreement that said they owned all the stuff I invent while working there or for 12 months after I stopped working there.
Sadly it's a much cheaper place to live.
I'm not the OP, but I think it's not that uncommon for people to apply for positions/opportunities that they're either ambivalent about, or outright have no intention of accepting. I know I've done it before.

Some feel this helps them to stay "well practiced" at going through recruitment/interviewing, gives them a good reason to keep their résumé up to date, expands their professional network, gives the potential confidence-boost of being offered a position then declining it, and so forth.
As I understand it, non-competes are very hard to enforce and are more of an intimidation tactic than anything else. You cannot be prevented from earning a living the only way you know how given the demand for your skills. If you're bound by a non-compete and the only (or the best) job available is with the competition, you shouldn't be afraid to take it, and the courts will side with you if someone goes after you (well, unless you're in Hawaii according to the article!).

An agreement is not enforceable if it is unreasonable, and denying someone the opportunity to make a living is pretty much unreasonable out of the box. Of course it's not true in every case, but it is mostly true for "techie jobs".

(I am not a laywer, the above is not legal advice).
Sandstorm[0] and projects like it are the future of the internet and the digitally connected world. Data silos, privacy, inability to interoperate, data ownership will all collude to bring down the wall. At the same time, virtual compute providers and software like sandstorm will become ubiquitous and intuitively easy to use. I, for one, am long term optimistic.

[0] https://sandstorm.io/
It's generating CSS, so it can't add (non-pseudo-)elements.
In general, but the more accurate picture is that they aren't upheld except in very specific circumstances.
The bad news on Apple’s stock is only beginning
"Educate"? Are you serious? Knowing famous people is education now?
Gender Bias in Publishing Revealed by One Writer's Clever Experiment
Small caps shouldn’t be used with a typeface/browsers that don’t properly support them and just shrink capital letters instead, they just look spindly and bad. Either find a real small caps font, or skip the idea. Likewise for italics: use a real italic font instead of a browser-generated oblique version of the roman font.

Totally agree. At least with italics, you can use CSS to instruct the browser to not create fake italics using the font-synthesis property: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-synthe....

Also, setting the document font size to 11px is a bad idea for a whole lot of accessibility reasons. The current best practice is to leave the global font size at 100%, which in most browsers is 16px by default.

This allows users to scale the type up (or down) as needed, unlike various versions of IE which won’t allow this if the base font-size is set in pixels. This allows the media queries to work correctly, since they always assume 1em = 16px. Resizing the fonts should be done in rems, with pixels as a fallback for non-supporting browsers.
It is not sarcarsm, it is sincere.
The font size _does_ scale, in ways I find quite annoying. Smaller scaling range would likely be better. Or stick to device/user defaults.
Interfaces and parametric polymorphism are not alternative approaches to solving the same problem, which is why many languages that feature parametric polymorphism also feature interfaces or similar constructs [0] (and why some languages that had interfaces for a long time later added parametric polymorphism [1].)

[0] e.g., Haskell typeclasses

[1] e.g., Java
Looks quite good on desktop, but even on my Note 3 -- the space used for sidebars take way too much horizontal space.

It will take some work, but with proper collapsing rules for narrow screens, this would be very nice.

One problem might be (as others have indicated) that what works in print doesn't have to be the best solution for digital -- especially where the page size/width (window size) can vary substantially. Personally I typically give my web browser 2/3 of the screen on my laptop, half on my desktop -- unless I'm using it for reference in which case my "work window(s)" -- terminal and/or editor get the 2/3 width slot.

This layout would therefore be useless in code documentation for my use-case -- the window would be ~50% padding, with an anemic main-column that'd be almost unreadable due to fitting only a single word per line.

[ed: At the very least tufte.css and/or latex.css should enable/use CSS3 hyphens in order to get word hyphenation that is a little more like LaTeX, and not completely broken! As is the ragged right is painful in narrow viewports.]
You could build the features for GitLab. We'll roll them out on GitLab.com that you can use for free. We can import repo's and issues already and are working on PR's and wiki's.
> But these people aren't hackers, they don't sound like one of us and their field isn't this one.

I was just wondering which "these people" you were referencing.
I posted this because I was looking for info on how to go about writing a game using Haskell, or FP for that matter.

I think this at least exposes how you can do it, and what kind of tools it uses to accomplish it.

After I also stumbled upon this: http://elm-lang.org/guide/reactivity

And then on this: https://github.com/evancz/elm-architecture-tutorial/
I think the reason some employers want them is because they don't want to put the effort into building up an employees skills just to have them move to a different company right when they become useful.

When you are an employee under these laws, you tend to put a lot more thought into choosing a company you would be willing to stay with as long as you are interested in that section of the industry.
Glad to hear that, our company and community tries to keep shipping!
Another responsive sidenote implementation, screenshots:

http://imgur.com/a/TXpis
I wonder if letsencrypt will allow that to become practical?
Git Rev News Edition 6
Experienced a similar situation with registering a new iPad Air in July 2015. Apple customer support was confused and unable to assist with the simple process of registering a new iPad. No matter how many customer service people they handed us off to on each phone call, the result was the same... "We're sorry, the Apple registration process doesn't work..."

When I grew up, Apple had no market share, yet it was the company we all turned to because their stuff just worked. Now Apple is a "big deal" and, yet, has become the same Microsoft-like company that we all tried to avoid growing up.
Based on the latest market data, the largest holder of AAL, DAL, LUV, and UAL is Vanguard which through various mutual funds owns 11.5% of the total market value of those four airlines. Second largest holder is T.Rowe Price with 6.8% of the total ownership. Concentration of ownership goes down rapidly from there. So it's hard to see this as a real problem.
Yes, a generative model of HTML+CSS is definitely a direction I'm nodding towards. (I discussed it briefly in the previous section about reinforcement learning in general.) I'm still hazy on the full architecture: you need an RNN to generate the CSS, you probably want to feed in a particular HTML page to target the CSS onto, the users' browsers generate the reward signal, and you can create images of the HTML+CSS combo as rendered in a web browser and bring in a convolutional network somehow... There doesn't seem to be anything quite like this in the literature that I've come across.

(Actually, there's a surprising dearth of reinforcement learning in general. Very few blog posts or demos or introductory materials. It makes it hard to understand what is new about DQN or how the whole system works on a concrete coding level.)
This article pairs nicely with How I Gave Up Alternating Current from a few days ago. The only place left to go in the bachelor lifehacking one upsmanship game is to stop changing clothes and showering altogether, live under a bridge, telecommuting and doing all your work with a prepaid Andro-- err Firefox OS phone that you charge with a hand crank. No parrots.
I write books and being able to reorganize a manuscript in a high level view of it would be really nice.
At the time, how much was really happening outside of AOL when it started to decline? My family and nearly everyone I knew had AOL in the beginning but what caused everyone to start moving away from AOL was always connected high speed internet. The keyword content at the time was still more interactive than a lot of websites, but the websites were good enough.
There is little federal movement on climate legislation, but there are a decent number of state-level campaigns to price carbon. The goal of many of these organizations is to establish a model that can then be replicated nationwide. (As the saying goes, "states are the laboratories of democracy.")

Economists [1] and climate scientists [2] agree that internalizing the "social cost" of climate change--in terms of ocean acidification, depleted crop yields, stronger storms and wildfires-- is the single most effective way to mitigate its worst effects.

I personally skipped out on the startup world to volunteer for one of these state campaigns, Oregon Climate [3]. We advocate a specific policy, the carbon fee and dividend, where a scientifically-set price is levied per ton of CO2 at point of source, and all resulting revenue is distributed as a yearly check to individuals. Naturally, a price on carbon means carbon-intensive goods cost more, which is the point: to alter consumer behavior at the point of purchase disfavoring carbon-intensive goods.

These campaigns, like Oregon Climate and Carbon WA, operate on shoestring budgets, so if anyone can throw coin our way, it would be greatly appreciated. We only have two poorly paid staffers and the rest of us volunteer in our free time.

1. https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/809307552415176?fref=... Robert Reich, Economist at Berkeley

2. http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/07/26/dr-james-hansen... - James Hansen, former director of NASA Goddard Institute

3. http://oregonclimate.org
Tufte-LaTeX link: " ... the style of Edward R. Tufte and Richard Feynman."

Woah! wait a minute. Style of Richard Feynman? When did Feynman get involved with typography/typesetting work?
I assume you didn't use the normal Dockerfile-based build system to build your super-small Docker images for the Go-based services. So how did you do it?
For a typography-centric project, it pains me to see that you're not including the proper italic version of the font used in the article, forcing my browser to do ugly guesswork [1].

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/CNBSMVH.png
I don't think that the explanation is so simple.

A different way to put it would be that it is based in the way that U.S. law allows you to sue anyone for any "damages," real or imaginary, only proving that you got hurt. Any potential employee can have an idea that is derived from trade secrets or other material not meant for people outside of an organization, and it's not possible to simply turn off this ability or create a distinction between ideas that are completely independent from that information or not. Because of this, it's possible to incur some level of damage to an employer with an idea that was technically had at any time of day.
This guy could do ok pretty much anywhere else. He wants to be in movies, and take pictures of celebrities, even if those industries aren't willing to compensate him properly for his time. That is a far cry from flipping burgers.
Tutorial: AWS API Gateway to Lambda to DynamoDB
i could see this going into docker itself... good job!
Set explicit, tangible goals every night. Make the time and space to work towards those goals with zero tolerance for distractions (waking up early and getting in 3 hours of quality work before your peers drink their coffee is a good strategy). When your goals for the day are complete, take some notes and set the goals for tomorrow. Then go play, eat well and rest. Rinse, repeat.
Born and grown up in Oklahoma, and living in Texas (Austin from '96-04, Houston for the past ten years) living somewhere without AC seems so bizarre. What if you like it cooler than the weather permits?

Heck, I have central AC in my house here, and I keep the house generally at 75, but have a window AC in my bedroom that lets me crank it down to 66-68 in there.
But Monaco is not. So NL is the most dense [macroscopic] EU state, and England is more dense than the second most dense such state, Belgium.
Medallia - Palo Alto, CA - http://engineering.medallia.com

Medallia is hiring engineers to build our next-generation analytics platform. World-class companies (Airbnb, Mercedes, Nordstrom to mention a few) use Medallia to create awesome customer experiences.

We are a fast-growing (70% per year), Sequoia-backed company that recently became a tech unicorn; our mission is no less than to transform the way the world's companies view and interact with their customers. We allow hundreds of thousands of employees to access, analyze and take action on large amounts of customer data in real time. We are still a small engineering team, only about 50 or so of us, thus everyone counts.

We are building the new platform based on the latest technologies and best practices: pure REST APIs, based on Swagger 2.0, on top of a state-of-the-art microservice architecture built by our awesome Systems Foundation team. Code is hosted on Github and we open source the components that are of general interest. We host hundreds of millions of records for our customers and run analytics in fractions of a second with no pre-computation thanks to our own in-memory analytics engine.

Please send me a note at kristian@medallia.com if any of the above sounds interesting to you.

Kristian Eide,
Software Architect
The hilarious part here is Wikipedia calling PBKDF2 modern. It's a 2000 minimal update (to generate more bits, to be kind of UTF-8 aware) of a 1993 standard.

At the time of the RFC publication it was already obvious its security was way behind bcrypt that was used in OpenBSD since 2.1 (June 1997), which did its best to be ASIC hostile, which isn't the case for PBKDF2.

In retrospect, NIST choosing PBKDF2 over bcrypt in NIST SP800-132 could be seen as part of the effort to weaken standards for NSA profit.
Reddit Expands Ban on Offensive Content
We -will- discuss climate change here. I will make that a life goal if I have to. However, I also realize my errors today, and I won't repeat them.

HN is going to learn how to talk about this issue, one way or another.
that's a kind of flimsy excuse for saying you own someone's intellectual output 24/7
How do I get help for an open source project?
Does anyone have a link so I can read the article in China? Or post a pastebin with the text? It would be greatly appreciated.
From the Black Hat Keynote Stage: Jennifer Granick
I think there needs to be some middle ground. What is completely ignored by such an "all or nothing" law is the trade-offs required in order to create a high quality of life for individuals while also thinking of our society overall.

It is in society's interest for some industries to be protected - in order to avoid low-cost competitors and worse employers. We are over-reacting.
I have a pretty cool project I'm working on I think people will like and will be useful.

How does one find technical rails help for an open source project? (I want to kick monologues ass)

I needz rails help. Plz.
Leaked Uber financials from 2012 to 2014
Use Chrome with Vim-like controls
Pretty annoying that your website will be completely down for 6 hours a day.

Huginn can no longer be hosted on Heroku, which is making it harder for new users to try it out.
Netflix's year-long parental leave raises bar for U.S. employers
It should be 170h per day over the last week, so more like 6 minutes each visitor.
I am proudly noticed that it is developed in China.
> Hawaii's High-Tech industry collapses.

That would require that we actually have a functioning high-tech industry to begin with.

>if a company can choose which state to operate in, Hawaii is going to lose out to all the others that allow unfair (IMO) employer protections.

If a company is based in Hawai‘i, the only reason is that they don't have any other choice to begin with. We have terribly high costs of living and a crazy low talent pool. Vast majority of development work here is DoD related and for on-site contracts.
Ben and I started at Google on the same day. I was pretty psyched to meet him because I'd followed his website (http://vterrain.org/) for years. He's a fairly loud, outgoing guy. Among a bunch of quirky nerds he sticks out with his 10" ponytail. When he first told me he was living out of the parking lot, I thought he was joking.
Why is this limited to just the high-tech industry?
Yes, and it seems he is smart enough to understand sarcasm...
CA has relatively weak laws in this regard and it hasn't hurt their high tech industry one bit. On the other hand, it makes it much easier to start new companies. Strict non-compete laws are a legal barrier that large, lawyer-rich corporations built to limit competition.
Housing maybe, although not the stuff I have imagined in my head. Everything else is really expensive in hawaii though because of shipping costs and lack of scale.
Your problem is when someone you have a good relationship with is seduced by something hotter and sexier.
This is a really good move on Microsoft's part & affects about 60,000 people - so not an insignificant number.

What is sad and pathetic is that in the US people are actually shocked by how good this is!!
Everyone is programmed to go into "Oh but this will be a huge burden on the company" mode.

What about the fact that currently the US has some of the shittiest laws on the books when it comes to Time-off for new parents?

What about the burden on society when New Moms are forced into their workplace way too soon because of the crappy support from the govt.?
So companies do not have to bear this burden but the new moms & babies can bear the hardship easily?

Free enterprise does not mean a license to shirk some of the most basic responsibilities. We should be pushing our elected peeps to take stornger action on this
I guess it depends on your perspective. Zero commute, low living expenses, zero? crime. You can probably go to your RV to take an afternoon nap.
It doesn't now. But Lightning Network will probably be your answer
Part 15 says (amongst many other things) that if a service causes (or suffers) interference it must go of the air.

Nothing to do with Amateur Radio.