skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The tech bubble bursting doesn't mean there won't be anymore software. Software isn't going anywhere. I plan to keep right on working in tech. I've worked for farmers. It kind of sucks. I like sitting in a chair and looking at code all day.

On that topic let me tell you about farms and farmers. Most farmers are millionaires and were born that way and have only gotten richer in the last decade or so. You have to know what you are doing to turn a profit. Farms are worth a lot of money. Millions. Do you have millions? If not, you get to be some millionaire's little peon. You get to make $9 an hour. You don't get overtime. You work really hard at certain times of year... 12 hours or more a day. You have to know how to drive a tractor straight. Do you know how to drive a tractor straight? Do you know how to keep a machine maintained? Where the grease fittings are? You better grease it good before you start. Otherwise some overweight red faced drunk with 15 million dollars in assets who considers you a little peon will come out and yell at you. Heck, he might come out and yell at you anyway just for fun. Cause he thinks you are a smarty pants who thinks you are just so smart. He almost certainly isn't going to help you along. In fact, if you don't have a certain look he almost certainly isn't going to hire you in the first place.

Oh... that wasn't the type of farm you were thinking of? Maybe you were thinking of a hippie type organic farm where you could hang out and smoke weed while casually picking a few tomatoes. Well... say goodbye to your $9 an hour because you won't even be making that.

If you want to try farming go get on a crew picking chilies or something for a day. They will hire just about anybody. I've done it before. Piece-rate. Cash at the end of the day. $50 if you are lucky and you will barely be able to walk.

In short... put down the pipe. Get a grip on reality and sharpen your tech skills. The field may shrink, it definitely will change, but it isn't going anywhere. You are better off staying competitive than having dreams of getting into farming.
How else do you get to 'too big to fail'?
What? You can post parents as well as children?

(Sorry, couldn't resist..)
IMO, the biggest thing you want from a front-end developer that a back-end one is missing is HTML/CSS skills and design chops. If you can hire for that skill-set in particular, polyglot programmers can make the UIs come alive in a pretty efficient manner.
The worse something is for the citizens, the more governments seem to want it.

Government: "Oh it's REALLY bad for the people? Well we certainly need that."

The more complaints, the more valuable it must be to the government.
I personally had shopify sit on the 'approval' process for my app for a month.

The day before they rejected it, they added similar functionality to my own.

I think they were waiting for their own update to drop. I don't believe they 'stole my idea' but its still kinda shitty.
Tesorio (YC S15) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineer
If I go to lisp for day to day work, I plan on using the syntax from SRFI-110 to encourage other people to work with me: http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html

Even if the code at rest is in S-expression syntax, editing it in this syntax would be slick.
Inside the one startup accelerator that only works with nonprofits
I wouldn't be so down on vocational training for software...It is a field that has an unusually high requirement for ongoing learning. And when you have to learn some new tech, usually you have to do it now, and in-place, not next September, in the nearest college town. Given the high ongoing learning requirements that software has, I think there is a pretty clear need for training that's delivered where you are and when you need it, and traditional schools won't be able to do that.
> "Who is the transparent group? How are they held accountable? Aren't they a de facto part of the government by virtue of being able to govern the flow of money, whether or not they're a de jure part of the government?
What is the incentive structure and how does it penalize gamesmanship? How is the group ruled and why can't 51% of it say that we want to create all of the money for ourselves?"

The group may be appointed in a number of different ways, though I suspect it'd be mostly down to standard job hiring, with some key positions appointed by government. If it helps, I imagine it'd be similar process to how judges are appointed.

However, it's important that the money creation group not be part of government. Furthermore, they do not dictate the flow of money, but rather the amount of new money. Any attempt for a non-elected body to control how money is spent opens up a whole host of potential problems. Instead, it is the government that would decide how new money would flow into the economy, i.e. what that new money was spent on.

In terms of gaming the system, there's always a risk of gaming any system, but it's important to be clear that the decisions on how much new money is available and how that money is spent are being made by two different groups of people. Let's put it like this, if you wanted to game this particular system, how would you do it?
really? Companies pay _sooooo_ much money for employee training. a billion for this makes a hell of a lot more sense than billion dollar valuations for companies in races to the bottom.
Already posted multiple times today; one with comments here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546333
I'd rather not be monitored while shopping.

It's the same thing as an annoying Best Buy employee walking around while you shop in the store even if you have zero questions. Except in this case they then follow you around the rest of the internet. There is no reason for it and I'll pass.
If the tech bubble bursts in any meaningful way it's going to take a massive amount of the economy out with it. Zounds of unemployed while collar workers, tons of mortgages with unreasonable principals, and a massive amount of money on the stock market going up in smoke.
Shopify's app platform is pretty crowded compared to other ecommerce platforms. This is good for shopify users and bad for shopify app developers.

An ecommerce platform that has very little support by developers but a ton of uptake by users is Magento. They desperately need functionality that is given away as free apps for shopify users.

Of course, Magento is a php platform so it's not nearly as sexy to developers (me included).
> What AI isn't doing well yet

isn't this guy's bias. he's, in part, interested in how the AI works, because he's interested in understanding how people think.

i'm also totally sick of the buzzword.

to reveal my bias, here's another thing AI doesn't do but we do all the time: have feelings.
"In fact, before DANE arrived on the scene, there was hardly a good reason to deploy it [DNSSEC]."

As I recall, the problem DNSSEC aimed to solve when it was re-proposed (it failed mutiple times previously), circa 2008, was cache poisoning. That problem can be solved other ways besides using DNSSEC under the control of third parties. Of course, today we rarely hear much about cache poisoning when DNSSEC is brought up. Instead the discussion usually revolves around other problems such as the CA system or spam. What's funny about this is that the proposed use of DNSSEC only enforces another system where potentially untrustworthy third parties are in control.

Is it a coincidence this blog post was written by someone employed by Cloudflare? Another company tied to the DNS "business". This is the third post pushing DNSSEC from Cloudflare to reach the HN front page in the last month.

Will there be a fourth?
I think there used to be a balanced trade - like exists in many small banks and credit unions now. For holding your money with FDIC insurance and whatnot, the banks got fractional reserve and the right to lend your money at a particular interest rate - which they then shared a small piece of.

Now, banks are predatory. They charge you fees for everything (including having a deposit account!!), barely if at all share revenues derived from your money, and routinely flirt with disastrous insolvency, propped up only by the largest government on Earth.

That's why people feel like they've gone from customer to Matrix-style energy plant.
blogging pro tip: if your blog doesn't include a publication date (which includes year, month, and day, in iso standard format of 20YY-MM-DD, or an unambiguous format like 12 Nov[ember] YYYY or Nov[ember] 12 yyyy) on every post, you're doing it wrong.
Oh. To be clear. I think on-going training is great especially given the pace of change. And things like automated evaluation of code is something that actually works pretty well in MOOCs in my experience. (Unlike peer grading.) However, the argument for platforms like Udacity hasn't in general been that they're a great advancement for vocational training but that they disrupt higher ed generally. And that's probably a different valuation metric.
I think you mean when the VC bubble bursts, again. Tech jobs have been around for forty or so years. That is jobs building software to solve business problems in a profitable way.

Would some of these small companies (aka startups) survive without VC funding? Look for companies that would survive regardless of the venture capital. They will be around because they have a profitable business model. These may be hard to find in SV.
The thing I try to keep in mind is that nobody can make perfect decisions. We all have heuristics that work pretty well for us generally, and sufficiently clever/prepared people can abuse that.

For example, think back to Google Glass. There was a time when it was an amazing revolution about to happen. There are pictures of generally smart, experienced people wearing Google Glass and trying hard to look like the future. [1] How much got spent there? On the glasses alone, figure it was something like 100,000 units at $1500 each for a total of $150m. Google presumably spent a fair bit more on R&D and marketing, and plenty of other companies spent time and money on the platform.

Were all those people dumb? I never understood the appeal of Google Glass, so you'd think I'd be inclined to say so. But my take is that the people who gave that a go were just working with different heuristics than I am. Lord knows I've bought plenty of disappointing gadgets over the years. As long as we're write more often than we're wrong, the heuristics aren't bad, just not perfect.

So here I figure that most of the people who put in money weren't idiots; they just had different ways of judging. E.g., a lot of deals happen partly because of trust. But we all know that con men are people who are extremely good at manipulating trust-related heuristics.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/04/10/google-lau...
Udacity has also partnered with Georgia Tech and AT&T to offer the OMSCS program. If this program continues to scale effectively on Udacity's platform, I imagine that more large-scale partnership opportunities will emerge. I would think that at least some of this funding is earmarked for smoothing out the platform's integration points and addressing insufficiencies revealed by this relatively new context.
Whatever that is.
Alas, her name is pronounced ~Good-en-know, not Good-en-nuff.
What's your point? The U.S. government does bad things so no one should care if researchers at a major university collude with them to do bad things?

P.S. The tone of your comment ("you really need to bone up...") is really insulting. There's nothing in your parent's comment that indicates they are ignorant to any of the links you provided. That's your assumption. Best to leave the insults until after you've assesed someone's ignorance, at the very least. And frankly I don't think that kind of insult is very productive even if it is accurate.
Love the disclaimer at the start.
7 Tips for Faster HTTP/2 Performance
It's for AAA studios because for past versions of engine cost was something like 1 mio per project. There was several more like indie developers that has won license on contests, but it's just exceptions.
Do you have a cite for that? :) I know that CoDel doesn't bias for small packets; it treats all flows equally and tracks traffic on a bytes-transferred (rather than packets-transferred) basis.
How do you determine the value of a private company?
This sentiment is totally untrue and is why the password resets in PHP apps are the subjects of security conference presentations.

It can be surprisingly tricky to predict which random values an application uses will end up being security-critical.
Throwaway for obvious reasons, but my current company has a very high public valuation, but they're based on a round where the most recent investor has 4x prefs. The valuation was just marketing.
If these kind of valuations were based on company training budgets, I'd be happily convinced. I haven't heard that argument being made but maybe it's the basis.
That's not enough. Government is a service for you - it should be naked by default, while you're clothed by default.
Analyzing Twitter part 2
I feel that the ongoing learning requirements that software has lead to developers becoming VERY good at learning new software.... which means they don't need training, because they can self-teach. At least that has been my experience.
The depiction of humans in the movie WALL-E was one of the scariest and most poignant bits of storytelling I have ever seen, and seems to become more true as apathy grows.
A lot of people are going to dump on this billion dollar valuation, but we don't have the terms. Presumably there is liquidation preference. According to Crunchbase [1], the total capital raised is about $160 million after this money, so the investors don't need this company to be worth $1 billion to come out fine. Sam Altman made the point a few days ago that a lot of these late-stage private financings are kind of debt-like [2, about paragraph 8-9 and footnote #2], with the result that the valuations aren't really meaningful.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity#/entity

[2] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-tech-bust-of-2015
"Not going to pass on his wealth" is pretty relative. He gave his kids millions of dollars, he just didn't give them billions.
It can't be serious. :-)
Psssst

WhatsApp still doesn't have the new fancy encryption on iPhones, and you don't have to turn off SMS completely for iMessage; you just disable SMS fallback for users who are registered for iMessage
I had no trouble finding a programming job when the last tech bubble burst. I don't expect to have a problem this time. That said, I'm doing a lot of teaching at vocational colleges.
The JavaScript Design Patterns course[1] kickstarted by web dev knowledge. Not sure how the rest of the catalog is, but that course was useful for a newbie.

[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/javascript-design-patterns--u...
It'd be great if it was more than rants on facebook.
You can run OSX in a VM on a Mac :)

It seems like a somewhat useless feature, but I found it super useful for putting together scripts for prepping developer machines. Snapshot a clean install, run the script, fix things that aren't quite right, revert back to the snapshot and re-verify.
It is very, very unlikely any major architectural tweak will happen with Bitcoin ever again. The only thing that will ever happen is maybe a few additional opcodes (to enable lightning networks perhaps) but even that will take many years.

(This isn't necessarily a bad thing... although I'm certainly not a fan of this approach)
I don’t say I disagree, really, but you really ought to dial down the nutty-rant factor just a tad.
CloudKit doesn't do syncing, or conflict resolution like Core Data iCloud Syncing does.

So I guess you have to do those things yourself. Perhaps this is why CloudKit is more reliable -- because it doesn't do the tough parts that Core Data syncing attempted to do?
Couching this as a mysterious and shocking challenge to our belief in the certainty of math is silly. It doesn't prove that probability problems can "many different answers, all apparently equally valid" -- it just proves that humans can create questions that seem well-formed when in fact they are not.
> The main thing to understand about L.A.'s growing crop of no-expense-spared spec homes is that they are not actually homes, in the usual sense of the word. Most buyers live on other continents and visit these properties for only a week or two each year, using them mainly as places to park their wealth.

No one is going to live in it. Like the most expensive art, the one-of-a-kind nature of this property is what makes it attractive (for investment purposes).
I know this betrays my ignorance but it just seems that dark matter is a rather implausible explanation for the apparent evidence of additional gravitational force being exerted.

"must outweigh familiar, atomic, matter by about six to one" but despite our best efforts it cannot be detected but there's vast amounts of it.

It seems to me there must be a better explanation because so far this one (i.e. it's there but we just can't detect it at all) just doesn't make sense.
just stupid
The question is, what part of that $650k per month is profit? If it is revenue and no profit is there, then that is unsustainable without VC funding, right? It's simple math.

If there is some model where they need X customers and funding to get there before it is profitable, does that sound like a sound business?
Awesome, Udacity is awesome! Any time my friends ask me how I learned coding I always refer them to Udacity. The quality is just as good as University courses, and you don't have to wait months to finish because you can go on a 2x speed binge watch and crush it in days/weeks.
At what point are we willing to entertain a fine large enough to bankrupt an enterprise?

Should we consider the economic impact to the neighborhood, city, state, or nation when levying fines?

Do you think VW shareholders are angry? I think not. They know management did what it had to do. I'm just mad that they threw the programmers under the bus.
> The issue starts when you publicly "out" organizations or people in your research findings, or take money from authorities with the understanding that you'll report back data on people and organizations.

But that's probably in the contract.
That's still not competitive to ACH or viable.

If 10 million people today used off-chain, their transactions wouldn't complete until 16 days later. If 10 million people then used off chain tomorrow, their transactions wouldn't go through until 32 days later.

t+22 days and you're already waiting a year to get paid in some instances.
> [I]f you configure [jumbo] frames on your uplink you are going to kill your network stack...

I can't agree with that statement. If upstream devices support larger than 1500 byte MTU, OR PTMU works correctly, then you are absolutely not going to "kill your network stack". At worst, (in the PMTU discovery phase) you'll see poor performance for a few moments while the MTU for the path is worked out, and then nothing but smooth sailing from then on.

> The point being is that for transferring data especially when responsiveness is important if not paramount utilizing the maximum potential frame size you can push without fragmentation would generally yield a poorer result in real world applications.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying:

"If you configure your networking equipment to always wait to fill up a full L2 frame before sending it off, you'll harm perf on latency-sensitive applications."?

If you're not, would you be so kind as to rephrase your statement? I may be particularly dense today. :)

However, if you are, then that statement is pretty obvious. I expect that few people configure their networks to do that. However, I don't see what that has to do with the link's MTU. Just because you have a 9k+ MTU, doesn't mean that you have to transmit 9k of data at a time. :)
Why scientists and engineers don't make billions of dollar as businessmen do?
Exploiting the type system to handle nulls is attractive (when that sort of thing is not “native” to the type system) but boy that’s verbose.
The comment I replied to said developers should only welcome white hat attackers. We seem vaguely agreed that black hats won't stop attacking because they are unwelcome, so what change is effected by only welcoming white hats?
Um, no. That's not at ALL clear to a beginner.

If you pick up just about any book on Lisp, it's all about recursion and lists. I don't remember SICP talking about native vectors or hash tables. I don't remember Touretzky talking about those either (maybe it was just that I had an early edition (1988-ish?) or my memory was faulty). Certainly The Little Lisper/Schemer never talks about them.

The first book I remember talking about other primitives in Lisp was Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp".

There are quite a few pernicious fallacies the swim around the "everything is a list", "S-exprs are easy to parse because they're uniform" (oh, really? Try identifying a list in the presence of dotted pairs), etc.
Posted 5 times in the last 4 days.
First is here, with lots of comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526729
Why do you believe this? Were you around in 2000? Being a consultant was bad, but otherwise, there were still plenty of jobs for experienced folks. It's mostly the new grads and people working at unsustainable startups who got screwed,
Although I'm also not very familiar with the history of such schemes, I do recognize the (not quite) 12-bit one, which I believe was the first scheme proposed, by Claude Shannon in his 1950 article "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" [1]. Perhaps because it's naturally the first scheme anyone would come up with, but nonetheless, here's what he had to say about it:

> A move (apart from castling and pawn promotion) can be specified by giving the original and final squares occupied by the moved piece. each of these squares is a choice from 64, thus 6 binary digits each is sufficient, a total of 12 for the move. Thus the initial move P-K4 would be represented
by 1, 4; 3, 4. To represent pawn promotion on a set of three binary digits can be added specifying the pieces that the pawn becomes. Castling is described by the king move (this being the only way the king can move two squares). Thus, a move is represented by (a, b, c) where a and b are squares and c specifies a piece in case of promotion.

I'm actually slightly surprised Shannon didn't propose a more compact scheme using the lower entropy of legal chess moves, but I guess his purpose in this article was more to do a ballpark estimate of the feasibility of computer chess playing in general.

[1] http://www.pi.infn.it/~carosi/chess/shannon.txt
But, there were plenty of tech jobs last time around. Why do you think there weren't any?
Wow. What a great article. How tantalizing to be only inches away from reading lost ancient literature, but unable to unroll it to read it.
Show HN: A lightweight static blog generator written in Go
> I don't think that bitcoin deanonymization research is a bad thing.

I never said it was; but care should be taken to avoid harming people. It's unlikely that someone will take that care to mitigate harm if they are of the view that they have no obligation to mitigate to begin with.
Yes, the cash doesn't go directly from you to the company, but you're creating a market by which a company can raise funds through a stock offering.

Take away the market and the company wouldn't get any money.
Udacity is great for picking up specific skills but if a nanodegree is all you got on your resume, I doubt you would be taken seriously by employers.
As someone who's briefly worked on Magento themes and plugins, there's a reason it has little developer support.