skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This whole post is basically ridiculous, and the reason is because there isn't any science in it:

There's no attempt to balance it with a control group of people who are always successful but never attract any real notoriety, or people who are rarely successful but have a giant hit that catapults them forward, and there's no methodology for defining what these antecedent success markers actually are.

This part however illustrates the biggest problem:

> Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success.

Most people don't have "track records" until they are notable, at which point they have the ability to retrospectively define themselves however they please, since they most likely haven't been under journalistic surveillance the entire time.
Summary: Capitalism corrupted software engineering, because you get rewarded for getting to market quickly and selling maintenance contracts, not for making quality software, free of defects and security vulnerabilities.
I don't doubt that if you look hard enough you can find both good contractors and good clients. I think it's the rare exception and not the rule though. The last time I looked at Upwork was when it was called Odesk so I was curious if anything had changed so I went back and looked this afternoon. Here is a sampling of job postings that came up searching for Python jobs...

1) "Image Viewer - Python: In search of a python developer to build an application which cleanly display and organizes many images (200+) as thumbnails on one interface. The interface will display approx 6 data fields contained in two tables."

Budget: $50 (This client has previously hired 7 other people and spent $477 in total on Upwork)

2) "Python Help: I am looking for help in my python code, searching feature and fixing. Its a assignment if you can do this quickly let me know. Coding is almost completed, you need to correct logic and searching features. Hardly 35-50 line code, small assignment."

Budget: $10 (This client has previously hired 9 people and spent $284 in total on Upwork)

3) "Parse Fields from HTML file: Parse fields from HTML document Required language: Python (Python package BeautifulSoup is allowed/preferred.) Input: Python function that accepts file name (2 HTML files) Output: Python dictionary. All listed fields should be a separate key. Addresses should also be a dictionary so that city, state, and zip are separate Fields to pull out: First Name, Last Name, City, State, ETC ETC roughly 20 fields between two different HTML document types/formats."

Budget: $60 (This client has previously hired 23 people and spent $3,791 on Upwork, they pay an average of $10.10 per hour)

So based on those I don't think it has improved at all.
Thanks. You make some good points. I built it more with the idea that I could use it personally and, talking with some friends, realized that other people would probably find it useful too. The industries on the homepage were more me fishing for use cases than anything else. My hobbies / jobs are kind of all over the map so I wanted a simple tool I could use to manage anything I was working on. Thanks for the feedback and taking the time to check it out!
Apple designs iPhones. They manage the fabrication of parts very closely and manage their assembly and QA more closely than most of their competitors (like, big enough to make demands of Foxconn or cause them to build specialized factories). Then they sell the phones directly to consumers. They are (literally) on the Wikipedia page as an example of a vertically integrated company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration

I'm not saying you're wrong... but it doesn't look like you're right.
> Windows XP still has 4-5% usage share on the web, which is 1 in 20 people.

Chrome and FF together have a market share of about 70%, so roughly speaking, only 30% of those XP users can be expected to still be using IE or safari. The percentage might be a touch higher as users left on XP might be less likely to use a different browser, but it's certainly not like all of today's XP users are on IE + Safari.
It's hard to create believable AI in a first-person shooter.
See: http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?botprize2012

It's actually really hard to create well-performing AI in a first person shooter, unless you give it explicit access to the internal state of the game.
See: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=612949...
Benchmarking Tools for Rails Application
An alternative (or maybe complimentary) theory is in Clayton M. Christensen's innovator's dilemma. Big companies build enormous revenue bases on certain types of technologies. Then they struggle to innovate because, by transitioning, they eat away at their existing revenue streams.
It's minor, but in the 'Who is...'section, 'Team Clerk' should be title case since it's your brand name instead of 'Team clerk.'

Nice work!
Are we attempting to wash away history? It seems like this article and a lot of comments are insinuating women's rights have only decreased in the last 40 years. WHAT.

My mother, born in 1955, was told by her father there was no reason for her to take algebra or any type of math in high school because she wouldn't need it.

Maybe the upper class women of yesterday are just lamenting the death of chivalry. I don't know.

I often wonder why bro-ish types are chastised for being who they want to be. I get why it's bad when it becomes overbearing and crowds out diversity. Yet it seems bro = stupid, terrible, provide no value, and a bigot. I know some great, intelligent guys that are pretty bro-y.

It gets old when we have to constantly champion weakness, meekness, and discourage confidence. While a complete bro culture can be toxic, I've worked in majority-woman departments where the gossiping and backstabbing is just as toxic.
This technique can be used to operate a speech synthesis device. It would then but possible to more completely evaluate the patients.
>It's like HR and technical recruiters are making designs to pay you less ...

This is not an accurate description of the primary reason the term "front end developer" exists, and moreover is an unfortunate example of the unhelpful us-vs-them conspiracy theorizing that seems so prevalent lately.

The term "front end developer" exists, like the term "backend developer" to denote a particular specialization. If I need to improve the look and feel of my web app, someone with a strong design sensibility and a lot of experience in the latest web development technologies (i.e., a front end developer) is who I want -- not someone with a lot of experience doing low-level memory management in C for a graphics engine. The latter might be a great programmer, but won't be as helpful, as quickly, as the former.

In any case, frontend developers, as a class, bear no less "responsibility" than others (after all, the frontend is how the user experiences the product), and I think most frontend developers would tell you there are plenty of challenging problems to be solved there, rivaling anything else you'll find elsewhere in the stack.

What sets the price of frontend dev expertise is the same thing that sets the price of every other good and service in the known universe, barring weird regulatory interference: supply and demand. The calculus for a hiring manager is not "how can I pay X class of people less than others", it's "how can I minimize the amount of $$ I have to pay while maximizing the value I obtain?" In an individual case, it's "what's the least I can pay this particular individual in order to get him/her to do what I want"?
I never did well in interviews wherein someone asked me to solve a problem while they watch. Too conscious of their presence, I suppose. Give me time to think without someone breathing down my neck and I can demonstrate my aptitude.

So, seems to me a better approach for some candidates is to allow them to do some of the work from home or otherwise unattended. It's a more realistic work scenario anyway.

But, these types of interviews are de rigueur. Am I that unusual in finding this challenging?
No, you are incorrect. At the moment, their certs are cross-signed, and I have tested my site with multiple browsers. It works.
So how exactly would we go about to make sure that no-one does research on AI? Which particular kinds of research would we ban? And how would we enforce it?
1. If you think a pc + keyboard + mouse is in any way a substitute then an Apple TV is not for you.

2. "Besides Netflix and YouTube I barely use it." What fraction of video minutes do those two represent?

3. The tvOS ecosystem is new, give it time. Apple has the clout to build it out (vs Amazon, Samsung, etc.).
Capitalists like Lula? Uh huh.
You're totally right! Thanks! Fixed!
FPS games are a great playground for learning, regardless of the killing. If you can teach an AI to hunt, kill, and avoid being killed, then you've got something interesting on your hands. Once you have the system in place that can learn how to do those things, you don't have to keep it training on a violent game. You can switch it to Minecraft. We don't care if AI kills zombies.
I don't think that's correct per https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/

Our intermediate is signed by ISRG Root X1. However, since we are a very new certificate authority, ISRG Root X1 is not yet trusted in most browsers. In order to be broadly trusted right away, our intermediate is also cross-signed by another certificate authority, IdenTrust, whose root is already trusted in all major browsers. Specifically, IdenTrust has cross-signed our intermediate using their DST Root CA X3.
I agree. We have a come a long way already, and I would personally prefer that we do our best to not screw up what we already have. That includes global warming, unleashing Strong AI, and so on.

It might suck to actually have to work, even as much as 40 hours a week or more in this day and age and with the productivity increases we've seen. But I don't think work itself is that horrible that I would bet my leisure on some AI that consumes the known Universe making and collecting stamps.
I did those slides for a talk at school at the very last minute and I did not expect it to be republished.
I requested the edit rights on the document and I'll fix this asap.
hindsight is 20/20. It would be quite easy for a team of developers and product managers to get together to discuss "how we take what we have and extend it to cover the new use case" rather than "what is the best approach for the new use case".
This is a neat project, but with all due respect: I don't think the output can be convincingly called a "face". It would be interesting to see this attempted in a higher resolution.
"Apart from single instances like sel and python's sort" ...
Well, physically, yes. But as far as subjective experience goes, repeating states would not contribute to the total length of the subjective experiences. There is no way to distinguish whether the period of time between 5 and 10 seconds ago repeated exactly the same way a billion times before continuing or not. One assumes it didn't, but if it did, it wouldn't really matter that it did.

So for other things, it might be relevant that it continues to exist and repeats states, and it might even be worthwhile for it to make decisions while keeping in mind the fact that its decision might be at many different times (due to repeated states). But the length of its life internally viewed would still be finite, just with parts of it possibly having expression in infinitely many times of the external world.

As an absurd thought experiment, suppose that an entity arrives from the future, over the course of a year, builds a time machine, and then uses it to go back in time to become when it originally arrived. (as a bootstrap paradox sort of thing.) Would you say that the extent of the entities life is ~1 year, or infinite? There isn't any point in the cycle where it ends, but one wouldn't say that circles are infinitely long line segments, just because they don't have an end.
Thanks for the suggestion. Looks very cool. I'm definitely going to take a deeper look into this.
Hmmm.... If you're doing 48 or 72(!) weeks, I wouldn't call it a bootcamp so much as an unaccredited master's program...
Don't try to sell yourself as unconventional to conventional places. Make your resume seem normal by inventing titles and job descriptions that explain what you did in a more narrow way. Did you write all the code for your own startup from 2010-2013? Put down "Software Developer" as your title and describe the programming work you did. It doesn't matter that you also did a bunch of other stuff, because you were actually a programmer during that time.
Like the guts to ask for money. More people should.
Follow-up, this post getting love on HN seems to have helped us get their attention. We had a conference call with them where we were able to work through a lot of the issues we were facing:

http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/the-certification-saga-problem...
Yeah, this is a bit like saying we don't need to go to Mars because we should solve poverty first. Solving the problems of going to Mars will solve a lot of other problems and create a lot of industries along the way.

Solving AI will solve a lot of other problems and create a lot of industries along the way.

A great deal of poverty is a mismatch between bodies and skills needed in the workforce. We haven't needed ditch diggers since some son of a gun invented the backhoe. Stay in school kids. Stay in school.
why would I buy [Apple TV] with the remote, subscriptions, dongles, etc. when I could buy an HDMI cable and use my laptop's "apps" instead?

Constantly plugging/unplugging your laptop is annoying. Especially if there are other people in the household watching TV or using the laptop.

Apple TV has no mandatory subscription beyond what you already have (Netflix, Hulu, etc).

The remote is easy to use (4 buttons, a touchpad, and a "mouse button"). With HDMI-CEC, you don't have to worry about TV or AV modes - they switch themselves on and to the correct settings every time. And it's over Bluetooth, so no holding the Harmony at just the right angle to get everything switched.

There is no dongle - just a power cord and an HDMI cord. Same as you have with your laptop or other device.

The Siri remote is just like the trackpad on your laptop. It's not a "new" interface - it's just new to the TV.
> Is it really possible to have a casual Oculus Rift
> gamer, though

... me? I've pre-ordered it, and will buy a gaming PC to run it when it shows up. It'll be the first non-Apple device in my house for a while, other than my Kindle. My gaming is currently limited to playing Red Alert on my laptop when bored on flights, and the odd iPhone game here and there. Really hope I can get a laptop that will support it, but I suspect it'll have to be a tower.

I'm buying it because I think the VR will be awesome, and because I think VR is the future, and because I'm curious.
I think you're missing the distinction between what is legal and what is right. I will cheerfully agree that the "expert" attempt to marginalize those who disagree with them politically is legal, and any attempt to legally prohibit it would have worse consequences (not least of which, the experts would use new laws as a weapon against their enemies rather than the other way around.) I will not, however, grant that it is right.

> Well, as any form of full or partial freedom-restriction works both ways, the thinking is that social groups with less power deserve more protection. Obviously, no one like to be marginalized in any way -- even the more powerful members of society -- but if someone must be hurt, we prefer it to be a group that will suffer less real damage.

Bit of a tangent, but if you deliberately wanted to create furious opposition to your policies there's no better way than to put unequal protection front and center. "Everybody should be protected from X" is a winning policy. "These strangers over here should be protected from X, but not you" is, to put it charitably, not.
Thanks! I actually started with a free bootstrap theme for the lander and then took out all the sections it came with and built my own in their place. Kinda silly, I know, but it saved me some time instead of building it from scratch and I didn't decide not to use the stock sections until the end... :)
How would it not? Instead of AI, think of building a digital brain. This brain will think everything a human brain can think but leveraging ALL the power of computers! It could easily solve world's most difficult problems in a matter of days, just by networking with copies of itself and working tirelessly because it will not need sleep.
Google has a standard interview process for all software engineers and afterwards you can end up either on in front-end development or back-end development. So they at least think specific knowledge of front-end development isn't necessary coming in.
Nice. Can you do the same trick for us, but for NGINX?
Whether you should learn another language really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to be a better programmer and gain a better understanding of how to write maintainable code? Definitely learn a new language! I've really enjoyed working with TypeScript, which is the only language with good static typing that also has a large, widespread community (via JavaScript).
FPS's is only one genre. Not to mention, they are already being used by the military with exactly that purpose, so we've already failed at this. Whatever our true nature of humans is, an AGI will just help us get their quicker.
Adults aren't wiser and more experienced children. They're children with the creative and vital burnt out of their souls and replaced with a respectable act that gets put on for other adults.

Defiance, disrespect, and disconnection are absolutely the correct way to interact with those who insist on destroying a fundamental part of who you are.
Secretaries are the nurses of an office. Any doctor will tell you it's nurses, not doctors, that make a hospital work.
> Lets Encrypt certs are equivalent to self-signed certs.

This is entirely false.
Salvador Allende in Chile comes to mind. I think the head of Congo/Zaire before Mobutu met a similar fate. Sukarno in Indonesia, but I don't know if the U.S. played as big a role there.

Of course an American might not have actually pulled the trigger, but the U.S. was a/the primary mover in many of these situations. IIRC, President Carter issued an executive order banning the assassination of foreign leaders.
You're making some valid points, however I do not agree with some of them.

For me Facebook is only useful for my personal life. Should I want to post about some programming stuff? Doesn't belong on FB. The reason is because FB ends up being a disaster if you combine your friends and personal interests with your professional network. It just doesn't work as it doesn't give you the tools to separate the two. And yes, I ended up silencing or unfriending folks for that reason as well, as an alternative to deleting the account altogether. And I have no acquaintances that use FB for non-personal stuff, unless they sell social media bullshit of course.

You're talking about circles being complicated. Not sure what it has to do with OOP, though those circles do represent a taxonomy. And they are complicated, but at least Google attempted solving the problem. The problem being that at home I'm a totally different person. And when I follow people I don't know, I follow them only to get stories on certain topics of interest and I don't really care about their personal life.

You're saying that G+ was tech heavy. I disagree because that's currently Twitter and G+ would have won if that were true. I don't know the reason, but my guess is that it had to do with shitty things like the real name policy. Or in other words, having FB's creepy restrictions without the network effect.
Right the services cost money but retrieval is free. Going by the cost of the harddrives amortized out, it'll probably be the same or less. You get far more durability and less complexity with universal web access.

I believe there are other similar services for Linux or you can just use browser to upload files with Amazon.
This is exactly what I (writer of the article) wanted to communicate. I wish I had said it as clearly.

I agree with you on the problem with moving up.

Not so sure about the gradual move up. Another path is to acquire and let them lead. Another is to appreciate the nuance and hire great product people.

You need to find customer problems that you understand and can solve, not chase markets up the stack because they are bigger and "look easy".
This article is funny - twisting together the ideas that a company specializes in a product in a specific market and that other companies can use the products / tools of other companies to develop their own unique products for a specific market and market development and competition. The "up-the-stack" company building something using products from "down-the-stack" has already entered a market, gained market share, and specialized in a market in which the "down-the-stack" company has no presence. Now, the "down-the-stack" company sees an example of a successful product that uses their technology that they know so well, but their company is not specialized for this product, so it hubristically does low-hanging-fruit-snatching to try to enter the new market. "Big companies keep failing" because they are not being innovative based upon what's mentioned in this article; they see an easy out and enter a market that already has an incumbent(s).
Spend Your Money Like You Have to Pay It Back
"Do you want some free money? That would be great. All you need is a venture capitalist or an angel investor to swoop the fuck down and make you rich with a $3,000,000 cash injection. You can blow the money on X-box consoles, office perks and supporting a burn-rate that would make Emperor Nero’s pyromania look harmless."
Learning how to alter a big Postgres table
I can't believe he omitted a film where computer hacking played a key role: the original "The Italian Job".

The getaway is made using three (original) Mini Coopers, which evade a chase by jamming the city's computer-controlled traffic signals and using their small size to drive on walkways and off-road. The "hacker" (played by Benny Hill!) concocts a 9-track tape with his own instructions and loads his tape (to replace the real master) by breaking into the computer center. You can see a bank of 9-track tape drives in action.
At the moment each adult owns one car. (all the adults I know have at least one car each)

I'd say at rush hour 2/3 of those cars are being used. I'd imagine Uber would just buy thousands of cars. Why not? What's to stop them? I'd just scrap my car and have an Uber car parked somewhere close to my house. I don't care, just so long as I can get to work. I imagine that utilities will soon provide automatic Uber car docks and cars will cluster around them at night. There must be a lot of Tesco car parks that are 99% empty at the moment (at night) rent this space to Uber and in the day, the car park would empty as those Uber cars would be driving around.

Also, I don't mind car sharing so long as I don't have to wait. Uber could easily plan trips that pick up and drop off without having to wait like you do for more traditional public transport such as trains and buses...
Very interesting read, and I always knew about this being an avid gamer since as far as I can remember. It always intrigued me how a computer can play against a human, and as games got more sophisticated, interacting with AI's got more and more human-like.

Aside from using them as benchmarks, they way games are capable of simulating a world will probably be key in creating a true AGI. In the comment section of the article, we're already seeing some theories that involve video games not just a tests, but as a primary component of the intelligence architecture. Very exciting times!