skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back in the day I worked with a project manager who would edit a spec in Word and save it, not tell anyone she'd done it, then be angry the next day when she launched the software and it hadn't changed. Because that's how plain English programming works: magic elves.
from right near the end:

"Six months after Price's announcement, Gravity has defied doubters. Revenue is growing at double the previous rate. Profits have also doubled. Gravity did lose a few customers: Some objected to what seemed like a political statement that put pressure on them to raise their own wages; others feared price hikes or service cutbacks. But media reports suggesting that panicked customers were fleeing have proved false. In fact, Gravity's customer retention rate rose from 91 to 95 percent in the second quarter."
Some approach the issue from a Kantian perspective, and ask 'what right does A have to take B's money and give it to C?'[1]

Others (of a more utilitarian leaning) wonder whether redistribution will 'kill the engine of prosperity'. The USA has overtaken Britain in per capita GDP by growing 1% (point) faster per year for 100 years, and many believe that redistribution reduces growth.

What part of this is "absolutely ridiculous"?

[1] http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Sumner.For...
You would have to create a new contract, and broadcast to people that they should use the other contract. All these systems heavily rely on decentralised reputation - not just for users but for contracts as well.
How to sort ratings
Finding UI crashes by fuzzing input events with american fuzzy lop
None of this precludes the capacity to alter the program's behavior, except the willingness of the developers.
Uber seeks another $1b in funding at valuation of $60-70b
Opium (afeem) is something that is very prevalent in rural parts Iran, Pakistan. Cannabis (ganja) is something that is available easily too. It about time it is legalized and controlled.
I don't think you would say any of this if you were an indie dev.

Actually I don't think anyone has said it yet, but the truth is 90% of the value of Steam is in marketing. Steam gives you millions upon millions of impressions from people actively looking to buy a game right now.

Steam also does a lot to reduce piracy by providing a seamless way to patch your game. This allows you to release tons of patches which make it very hard to torrent the current version of your game.
Certainly is an echo chamber in this whole thread.

Count the motivations to resist alterations that would doubtless improve Chromium's respect for privacy.
Putting your kettle on the IoT makes your wifi passwords an open secret
but what about bob?
IMO the mind is not seperate from the body and the body is not separate from the rest of the universe. Different living things in the same universe are akin to different flowers on the same tree, or as the article in your second link suggests, like different neurons in the same brain. The author is insistent on seeing all things on a materialistic level, but scripture makes a lot more sense when you equate God == universe; God == totality. That way, the Christian logic whereby God is Jesus's father and Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit that is the cosmic process that drives the universe from one moment to the next makes complete sense. As Moses once said 'Ye are Gods' and it can be the literal truth.
That describes my situation too... But I'm not sure I'd label it "social anxiety" in the same sense as an "anxiety attack" -- it's not a flight/fight response.

Rather, it's like a pervasive pessimism. A more-cerebral problem, where you tell yourself that social interaction requires a safe reason (classes, work) and avoidance due to fear of some future hypothetical failure.
While I agree with you on visual programming, I think another issue raises itself: we are used to linear text editors - write one line after another - because they fit the way the computer works. Even breaking code down hierarchically as we do (functions, modules) still breaks a linear process into many linear processes. Yet increasingly as problems become more asynchronous / parallel, I sometimes wish for a more sophisticated code-creation paradigm, one where, for example, there would be some kind of two dimensional or even multidimensional visual representation of the logic of the program (even if those were each composed of linear text blocks). It's always possible to represent multiple dimensions in a lower-dimensional medium, but it becomes harder to conceptualize. So we have code folding tools, we have NERDTree etc to help us manage all the blocks, but sometimes I wonder if I could have some kind of multidimensional VIM that would allow the visual structure of my code more directly to map to the logic flow.

I have taken to coding on a 4k 40 inch monitor (highly recommended - the BDM4065UC from Philips is so good I bought two) because it allows to me see so much more of my code and the way the flow will jump around, to have it all in front of my eyes kinda thing, and I wonder if it would be even better to add some visual tools in there to do conditional flow control.
That's an example of lexical ambiguity. You can have a lot of fun with lexical ambiguity, especially with polysemous words, e.g. "John and his driver's license expired last week." (This particular kind is an example of a zeugma.)
There's one confounding factor I wonder about.

If a company, at some point, has a great long serving CEO or founder, that person will have great influence on choosing their successor. They will also have influence on who is on the board of that company. So there may be a virtuous circle called "culture" at that company.

Could that not make it look like the CEO statistically doesn't matter?
I like to think programming is about being creative...but reality has stared at me too long. The large majority of it IS mundane and boring.

I just looked at the commit log for my current project, https://github.com/bjwbell/gensimd/commits/master (SIMD in Go), and ~90% of the commits are boring. I still feel very excited about it, perhaps I'm unbalanced.
Drug Goes back from $750 a Tablet to $1, after 5000% increase
Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat
Can you subscribe me to spam, for science?
I'm trying to study spam by collecting spam.

I can't do this alone.

Can the HN crowd help sign me up for the most questionable and shady subscriptions? Spread me like some genetically engineered doomsday STD!

The sacrificial email: ifyouemailmeyoureadumbass@gmail.com

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sign up to meet singles in my area, for science.
I like this joke, hahahah
Do you have a source for this? Also, what primates exactly do you mean? There are huge differences of smart within the primate category, e.g. monkeys vs humans.
Zuckerberg believes internet access a human right yes it is
MS Office 2013 Product Key Generator Working Crack
Raspberry Pi VPN Router
Consider agriculture. It used to employ over 80% of the workforce, now less than 2%. But now, with over 98% unemployment, we're not starving. Instead, we're wasting 40% of our food, exporting food, and reading articles about obesity epidemics and how the grocery store is reducing its 57 varieties of ketchup so that we won't have so much difficulty choosing.

Manufacturing is going that way. We're well into the disposable junk and cheaper to replace than repair era. Relatively few people work in industry now.

That only leaves services. But how many people does it take to hand you your burger or bag your new cellphone? Repairmen have less to do now that most everything is disposable. Even in the more professional level services, salaries have been stagnant for decades, moreso than minimum wage in some cases. Sure companies complain that they can't find good talent, but they're not willing to pay for it, so they don't really need it.

The traditionalists say "people will just go do something else, like they always have" but what? Well, for now, some could become Uber drivers or such...until the automated cars come online in a few years. Then what? And how many Uber drivers do we need? Can they make a good living doing that if everyone else is too?

People moved from the farms to the cities to do industrial work, then commuted from the suburbs to do commercial and services work. Where do they go when none of the farms, cities, and suburbs need workers anymore (and they can't afford to live in any of those places)?
>I dont understand how they get that power.

Connections. Yale/Harvard network, Ex-McKinsey network, We're-on-the-board-of-five-public-companies network, Family, etc.

>I mean, if all the science is true, how does someone with so much money (say a board of directors) ever decide to pay someone that much?

Mutual back scratching, favor exchange and membership of the in-crowd.
Hiya. One of the authors of the article here. We also reported this week that Azure alone likely did about $400m in revenue for Microsoft in June quarter, versus for Amazon on $1.8 billion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/microsoft-...
If you have to keep welfare, medicare, social security, etc... then what's the point? Just another bureaucratic money sink?
+1 on the idea that you may never use something but you will at least have heard about it, know it exists and know where to look, in the future if/when you suspect you might need it.

Wasn't a huge fan of applied maths during my CS degree more than a decade ago, but am very thankful these days that I had an inkling of an idea about FFTs, PCA, and stochastic calculus, all of which I have had to brush up on and use in recent years.
For everything except multiplayer infrastructure, you could shove that on a $20/month server. Maybe the multiplayer servers too. Whether it's worth 30% is not arguable. It's flatly not worth it. Steam's value outside of just existing in front of people (aka network effects) is almost entirely in being a reliable payment transmitter and CDN. It's not in the bonus things you listed.
I agree that there are a limited number of people that are excited about the types of thinking and problem solving that comprise typical coding. But not all of those people are already coders. 9 weeks of intensive training can get someone with the right mindset in shape to make useful contributions as part of a team.

You can self teach (I did), but having structured guidance and someone to answer your questions can get you there faster. I watched my cousin move from novice to gainfully employed via boot camp in a tenth of the time that it took me drilling with a friend nights and weekends.

Even if we take the author's dubious claim that the skills have a shelf life, it's going to be years at minimum before the demand slacks. Plenty of time to earn back the cost of admission with a significantly higher salary.
Everything he says about programmers is also applicable to lawyers.

* Would I like to type text files for hours a day? Check.

* Do I enjoy decomposing problems into detailed lists of instructions? Lines of reasoning, but check.

* Am I good at abstract conceptual thinking? Check.

The pool of potential programmers is a lot larger than we might think.
More importantly, a platform with tens of millions of active users. A platform that actively puts new content in front of its users for the express purpose of getting them to buy it no less.

Is access to tens of millions of active users worth 30%? Fuck yes it is. And if you don't agree then sell your game direct and on your own. It is a free market after all.
I don't think there is any creative endeavour in life that does not contain very large proportions of mundane work. What gets you through the mundanity is the creative spirit - the idea that the final product will be amazing / different / inspiring, that makes all the work worthwhile.

"Unbalanced" is often a description of someone who is inordinately passionate about a project, and inevitably is applied to creative types without whom such projects would never come to fruition.
The majority of any creative endeavour is mundane and boring, we do it for those small moments of inspiration and insight that break up the periods of drudgery.
Couldn't agree more. Code is highly dimensional while our text editors are two dimensional at best. In case you don't know these talks I think you will enjoy The Future of Programming and Inventing on Principle both by Bret Victor.
Incredibly intelligent and they have long memories. If memory serves me well, there was an example of an octopus remembering a person after 12 years of not seeing them.

They escape their aquariums. They squirt water at people they don't like. They need to be given their food in puzzle boxes to keep them from getting bored. And finally there is over that could apparently determine which team would won world cup football matches. OK the last one is a home, but you get my drift!

https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/
Patent filling reveals the Samsung Galaxy S7 iris scanner
So why doesn't he provide the "Internet" to people then, and not just a shitty Internet.org version of it?
BSD license as opposed to commercial pay-only license key required for building in RoboVM. It's a pretty clear choice for anybody wanting to use this well into the future..
The real problem with iMessage is that public keys are unverifiable. The apparent lack of PFS is also a negative. And the iCloud backups in plaintext (although optional).

Signal have none of those particular problems.
My accounting professor explicitly compared auditing to this kind of primitive religion.

Think of the "rainmaker" who brings the much needed rain for the tribes crops. You need to sacrifice an animal (that he eats) and do a big song and dance (to make it feel like you're doing something).

If the ritual succeeds, then the rainmaker has done his job!

If the ritual fails, then the sacrfice wasn't big enough, the dance wasn't long enough, people didn't believe enough. There's no allowance in the framework for the rainmaker to be blamed for being bad at his job.

And even if there was, he'd just be replaced with someone who was equaly powerless. But who wants to admit that their entire existance is outside of their own control?

I think of that lecture often, as a series of large companies collapses and no-one sees it coming.
Even in high level graphical "magical" interface like Tableau software visual BI tools, the real power come with the small scripting part you can put on some specific places.

When I show my work people go crazy like "wohooo I need this magical too so I can do it too!". Then they ask to modify a pretty straigforward measurement, so I open the calculation script in front of them... they got scared as hell and suddenly think I'm some sort of wizard.

Being allergic to code is a pathology for someone who work in IT, don't get it wrong kids!
i think its a joke... if not then its just a stab at theocracy.
Australia along with Canada have the highest wealth per person of any countries in the world. Much of the wealth comes from a large land area divided by a tiny population. I remember reading in an Australian magazine about 15 yrs ago (but forget the details) that Australia is the country with the largest proportion of "made-up jobs", i.e. jobs in finance, law, IT, etc which don't actually contribute to the production and distribution of goods and services. By making laws which businesses must comply with by creating "made-up jobs", the government is ensuring there's enough work for everyone, a form of basic income.
I had a (male) colleague once argue with me that men and women had no differences in mentality due to testosterone. The desire to believe in equality is weird sometimes.

To be clear, I don't think there is any difference in generic mental abilities due to gender / sex, but it seems clear that brains would be affected by hormonal differences - for instance I have a thyroid deficiency, and I can really feel it when I'm low.
German language partners for the refugees
Vic Gundotra's ego resulted in G+. If G+ is innovation, I don't want innovation.
And that $20/month server also requires a $4000/month devop to maintain it.

And adds to development time. And doesn't scale beyond ~1000 users online at a given time.

I managed to get steam achievements working in an hour of developing and zero servers. There's no way I could get that in two weeks of development time on a server.

If you actually try making the sorta thing steam provides (all those things are distributed/scale, managed by other people, backed by support, etc) you'll find your costs instantly go higher than most indie games will make in their lifetime.

And, well, the discovery bit is something you just can't replicate. However slick your site is, you won't reach steam users unless you're on steam, and steam has wholly won in this area.
You might want to read this: http://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need-...
Also: spreadsheets. The world's most popular (zero-th order) functional programming language.

Legions of `normal' people wrestle spreadsheets every day. It's a brilliant model to get people started. Even better than PHP. (Only partially joking.)
In some scenarios, it makes sense to program in hooks for upgrading functionality. Since contracts can call other contracts, you can just write a new contract and point the old contract at the new functionality if the architecture is suited for it.

Other than that, you basically write smaller, well-tested programs that don't irrevocably lock up people's assets.
Radio says, "Take your meds, terry, you are halucinating". So I run-over the CIA Agent dressed as a UFO alien and shove a pencil in the eye of the pedophile bait kid at the store. And body slam the agent who is getting in my way as I go in the door. I throw into traffic, the agent who is passing me on the sidewalk at the narrow part with a post.
My first real interaction with dolphins was sailing around the UK on a tall ship (STS Malcolm Miller) about 25 years ago.

As we sailed around Land's End, a pod of dolphins started playing around the boat. I want on watch, so I lay face down in the net below the bowsprit and watched them play for over an hour.

They were like surfers lining up at a breach break. There were rules. Each took their turn to ride the waves coming off the front of the ship. They were having fun. They had the time to just enjoy themselves. You could imagine one saying to the other, "gnarly dude. That drop in was sweet! You owned that wave".

At that point I saw the similarity between humans and dolphins. They are at the top of their food chain and food is plentiful. They don't have to spend the entire day hunting and eating like so many other animals. So this gives them time. Time to learn, time to play and time to socialise.

Awesome animals.
I agree with the premise you won't be a great programmer in week or even months. This is a truth for any skill, job, passion.

I think there is a common wrong way of considering programming among non-programmers: customers and people thinks programming is easy, extremely easy but the truth is the opposite.
Just try to think how much time does it require to build a simple mobile app or a webapp and how many different knowledges you have to master to do that (front vs server programming languages and frameworks, persistence technologies, deploy tools and so on). And i'm not talking about the complexity of an "enterprise application".

I think this common and misleading sense of easiness is due to the fact that people thinks that you have a lot of work already done thanks to all those opensource libraries, thanks to the ready-to-go tools like wordpress, thanks to all those beautiful and simple programming languages that every child can learn...come on, there is always an easy "build a twitter like app tutorial" so it obviously can't be that complicated thing :D

The truth is that like any other job, you must love programming to do it very well, because programming requires a lot of thinking, designing, studying, patience and perseverance and all these skills are not for everybody.
No. Please read the amendment.
What odds are you offering? And do you mean `can't program' or `is not a professional developer'?

(And where do we draw the line. Is FizzBuzz enough?)
He said it once. He also said that downvoting for disagreement is a problem - that's why comment scores are no longer shown.
One may ask for a license to sell own crafted things about something we like. It is legitimate that the initial creator has a control over use of his product image and a cut on the profits. Copyright is not broken. It would not be smart for the initial creator to strictly forbid any third party to contribute in the promotion and potential return of its product. But in any case it is up to him to decide and that is legitimate.
Palantir Technologies $554.83M Financing
It turns out the "sensible alternative" has been tested against the "just give people money" thing and it consistently has higher costs and worse outcomes.

It shouldn't be surprising that bureaucracies are inefficient.

If justice and democracy prevail I predict the participatory budget will approach 100%.
That sounds like a non-sequitur. http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html come to mind.
Just start contributing. There's no better way to learn than reading and understanding code. For me the most important item is a project that you personally connect with.

In my experience most projects are very kind to new contributors and someone will usually step up and gently guide. Quality code reviews have been most the effective mentorship I've had in Open Source and out.
Kickstarter: Your own perfect watch
I know plenty of stoned neonazis in Germany.
Trademark covers something that is "likely to cause confusion".

Eevee is not arguing for removing all the controls; there's not a word about removing trademark law
How much? What odds do you offer?
Often people want things to be 'equal', and often they don't really think about where that equality applies and what it really represents. I suspect many of them only want fairness but the inability to articulate that means they contort many statements into metaphysical absurdities to avoid having to be empathetic.
Sunder Pichai is boring.
Since this doesn't cause a system panic... multiple userland utilities have MAXPATHLEN problems? Is this reproducible with longer filenames and less depth? (If not: what cares about depth?)
If you want to respond to mediumdeviation's remarks, please reply to him, not add a new top-level comment.

It's more readable to do so.
Is that in 2000 dollars?
Exactly. But money is easy to create: we can just print it. Creating utility is real. Money is nominal.
Actually, people have tried. Giving cash seems to work better in general than more restricted forms of charity.

See eg http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-...
Work on packaging up FreeBSD base is ongoing: https://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/563.en.html
Rainforest QA (YC S12) is hiring sales and eng team members (eng: remote or SF)
The author neglects to mention the wonderful feeling of having your code successfully compile and come to life. For some it is a special kind of high that makes all the 'construction work' worth while.

There's also no mention of the thrill of the hunt for the right abstractions - which can be both intellectually and emotionally stimulating.

The less these two factors come into play, the less motivated one would be to sit in front of a computer and click those keys all day long.

If you're set on finding out, and if you require the structure that an academy provides, and you understand the financial implicatios, then don't let this article dissuade you from trying.

Discslaimer: I'm co-founder of http://kitchentablecoders.com and http://sfpc.io
What about gold?

(I don't like gold as a currency, but it doesn't seem to require even the modicum of central planning that bitcoin does.)
>What you're saying doesn't make sense. Why would anyone invest without expecting more consumption?

Exactly. That bit was dumb. Hence why industrial machinery didn't shoot up in price like the cost of a 2 bedroom semi in San Fran did.