skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the archetype of magical thinking. You could just as well have said god will do those things with the amount of support you offered.

But it seems there is such an unquestioning faith in "the invisible hand" that the mere suggestion that misrembered high school economics may be an oversimplification, let alone in error, is viewed as unspeakable blasphemy.

Particularly ludicrous is:

>4. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.

But I'd ask the prophet of the invisible hand these questions:

Isn't the current state necessarily exactly correct given the panglossian invisble hand?

How is it other's using the same hand waving also claim the bay area economy is a permanent feature? Heretics I presume?

If the invisible hand is going to correct the situation, when will it happen? Next week? A hundred years? Or "soon, my son, soon"
This is interesting and a good example where credit scores fail.
My wife switched to a SP3 from a macbook, because it looked like a very compelling device.

It lost all bluetooth and wifi - 4 months out of warranty (hardware issue). From googling - this was not a completely uncommon occurrence.

Yes - we should have gotten the extended warranty, but this was an expensive device, and we expected quality hardware that would last.

From a usability perspective, it is a device that is in-between. It is not a stellar tablet nor a stellar laptop.
> The package system for the rust language actually relies on github, as many found out during outage.

This is not quite correct (although close to it). Cargo doesn't rely on GitHub, but it expects that there is some publicly-accessible git repository from which it can pull the source for any crate, and most crates use GitHub. So it's not a particular choice of Cargo, but a side-effect of GitHub's popularity in the community, and the fact that Cargo does not host source code itself.
What the Hell YouTube?
WSJ journalist John Carreyrou shares year-long Theranos investigation [video]
Keep in mind the extra you pay for contractors isn't actually going to contractors in question. It goes to office rental, accountant, sales team, internal HR and other crap. Not to mention the contractors in question will be hassled to spend time estimating future project scopes and sometimes help out on other projects and etc. So yeah, if tech is important to you and you don't need specialized skill-sets that's rare, contracting out is always pretty fucking stupid.
It's a pebkac issue. The software is fully capable of having multiple remotes, but it's rarely used that way.
Makes sense. I'm quite interested in seeing where it goes over time. I think it will depend a lot on the nature of the company. If it's VC-funded & aiming for acquisition, then there's a decent chance of Sourceforge history repeating. Otherwise, it might stick around as a beneficial ecosystem. Time will tell.
I agree with everything you said but this:

> then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning.

Made me lol. As if any Government has ever changed it's offerings based on the market. They'll just keep paying public workers absurd wages to continue to suck because status quo is way more important than customer satisfaction when it comes to public entities.
H1-B and Outsourcing to offshore are two completely different things. As outsourcing means hand part of a job to contactor firm which could either be local or foreign. Foreign contracting firm don't need visas, and local contracting firm can either hire Americans or sponsor visas.

The real problem is that a foreign worker should not get paid less doing the same job American do. That will kill the incentive and it's also very inhumane and racist to pay less for the same work based just on citizenship.
Less competition in the mobile space is not a good thing.
Do you have a citation of some sort for this? Seems a bit far-fetched unless it's a person that specializes in typing language very fast. I've used computers for >8 hours a day for two decades, writing a lot of long texts in that time, and I'm nowhere near being able to type as fast as I can talk. Certainly not when it comes to a sustained pace for more than a few minutes.
Why Are So Many Middle-Aged White Americans Dying?
LibreOffice is also nowhere near as good as Office.
LOL, you can tell this article touches on something sensitive from the reaction to it on HackerNews. Its a pretty accurate description of SF, I just doubt NY is any different.
A couple quick notes from a longtime (20 year) San Franciscan:

Everything is too expensive

Things are expensive, yes, but more so in neighborhoods with high concentrations of new residents, namely SOMA and most of the Mission. You can get an IPA at nearly any of the bars in my neighborhood for $4, and coffee for $2.

There are thousands of dumb startups

I agree 100%. I've had the (figurative) banana hammock recruiter call me, too, and it's shocking to me how many people are repeating the mistakes of the 90's boom.

People are spoiled

Don't confuse a small yet vocal minority with the City as a whole. There are still plenty of starving artists, passionate musicians and dedicated activists; they just live in different neighborhoods than they did 5 or 10 years ago.

There cannot be these many quality engineers

Again, I agree 100%. During the 90's dotcom boom I worked with a web developer who literally didn't know how to write HTML; all his code was copied from other parts of the project. It's not surprising that it's happening again this time around, but as mbesto wrote, they'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.

All in all, most of these are things long-time San Franciscans dislike about our city, too. What's left to be seen is whether or not enough of the people who made San Francisco a desirable place to live can afford to live here once the tech market cools off.
While we are all going off-topic, I'd like to see a "collapse thread" feature on HN. Quite often the comments page is dominated by a tangential discussion as seen here.
Amazon does this all the time, and yet their stock is doing ok.

An investor who's looking beyond the next quarter will look more at a company than just ROI.
The leading "The" and the trailing period need to be edited out of the title. Neither is appropriate.
$7 for craft beer FROM the brewery is madness. $3-$5 is typical here in Portland and we have some of the best beer in the world.
Inside Autodesk Pier 9
Lol. Nicely put.
Agreed that Excel is real programming and that data belongs in a database - so why not give it a real programming language with a sufficiently expressive query language?

This was my reasoning behind a spreadsheet prototype backed by kdb+ and the q language (which is a superset of SQL): https://github.com/srpeck/kxl

There is value in this simple combination, but tons of work required to gain feature parity and market share from Excel. I think the latter is why research in this space is lacking.
Depends if the people running the press sides with Government A or Government B.
The first part of your statement doesn't really agree with your last.
You can thank companies giving out VP or Director titles to their first technical hires for that.

At my last company, my boss was the first technical hire. His title was Director of Software Engineering. He got that title and the responsibilities that came with it solely because he was the first technical hire.

He had no management experience at all. He was a great engineer, but he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag. He had the double whammy of both not knowing a thing about process and not understanding people. He didn't think having a process was necessary because his own code was amazing, he wrote the initial versions of our software all by himself in what actually is a solid example of a well-engineered project, and he couldn't fathom how anyone's code could be less than amazing. He also couldn't handle stress, and he had a habit of screaming at his subordinates and treating us like children whenever he got stressed.

His management was the biggest reason I quit.
If you personally run software for which reliability is important, absolutely you should maintain your own vendor repos. Open source projects are not in that position, and following your advice would lead to much harmful coupling and repetition.
Just verified this on the 1st gen Surface Pro I've got here at work. Hit the Win key, type "pen", open "pen settings" and the three basic options are "choose which hand you write with", "show visual effects", and "show cursor".

I'm not left handed so I can't comment on efficacy but the option is indeed there.
Improving the Clasp programming experience
Many products succeed with zero advertising.
Does it really compare to Parse tho? Like one of the amazing things about Parse was how easy it was for a nub to pick up. (I know from first hand exp)
So in essence the Devil.
God forbid someone exchange money for software instead of offering it for free and making money through ulterior motives.
Whether they have broken up their apps into microservices doesn't seem to matter to me. That's just a matter of how they have organised their code, whether the actual app is monolithic or microlithic doesn't seem to matter.

They have a focussed business with relatively little variation in how they make money - all their customers simply pay for a streaming service.

Most large companies, certainly banks anyway, have thousands of apps because there's also thousands of different parts of the business making money in their own unique ways that have their own unique needs.

What works for netflix therefore can't work for other businesses, because the actual business is much more heterogenous than that of netflix and the technology will reflect that whether it is organised in microservices or monolithically - that's totally irrelevant.
I think this is more important than just diversity in tech (and that is important) - and I'm a relatively recent convert to caring.

We all, even founders, benefit from diversity of founders. If start-ups predominantly get started by similar types of people you're missing out on competition and innovative ideas. I think this applies not only to general business concepts but especially to domain areas.
One of the things that infrequently crops up on here is how much money there is to be made in Spanish language Christian apps, as a WASP I'm less likely to have the domain knowledge to break into that market. So it does seem rather odd that VCs might be missing out on being able to profit from a market of ~23m.

Then there are more social good focused start-ups that might emerge. Given all the problems the US has with racism and sexism I'd posit that a black female founder might be a good bet if they had an idea to try and improve things.

I was interviewing a white university student the other day who had managed to get through 2.5 years of a Computing degree before realising she was capable of being just a good developer as a man. Not that she was as good, just that she actually could be a developer, rather than being assumed to be the management / documentation type. I'm nowhere near Jon Skeet on the feminist scale but it really made me think about how under represented groups can be put off.

And that is the point of the article. The top thread on here can be arguing about whether 0.1% is "statistically zero" because what matters is perception. If a potential black female founder perceives an industry as being unwelcoming they're less likely to enter it. There is a massive opportunity cost to get to the point where you look for VC funding, it isn't an experiment you can just run on a whim. It is quite possible that the calibre of black women who could be founders are looking at the startup world and heading in another direction where there are much stronger social signals that they are likely to be accepted.
You mentioned above that you were planning to check out SaltStack, this tutorial will give you working understanding of it.

Development machines setups:
The tutorial walks you through running your app on virtualbox machines the run locally, so that is an option. However, it doesn't cover how to set up a development environment outside of a virtual machine.

Installation of deps and packages:
This it covers thoroughly.

Staging and production releases:
It does not walk you through this explicitly, but once you go through the tutorial, using the tools it teaches to do this is fairly straightforward.
This is because most people are browsing and not buying, so the caching advantages of unsecured catalogue pages is likely quite large.

At least for most of those the login is a separate protected page rather than a https iframe.
H-1B explicitly does.
would have been a great opportunity for gunzip.
We would need a proper definition from the source. I would assume it's a mixture of both.
>Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true.

This is why a product I was working on almost got killed. The senior engineer working on it wanted perfection before delivery. The project was already one year overdue. He suddenly came in one day and rushed me to finish up something and he wrapped up a couple things and we launched at the end of the week.

Found out that the project was going to be axed if we didn't deliver very soon.
What does any of that have to do with 'dotcom stuff' or bubbles? People apply to jobs they're unqualified for in every field all the time.
Look into their employee turnover. Five people quit in a single quarter in a company of 30~ people. That doesn't require sniffing. It would choke you.
I think a lot of engineers make more money then the value they provide. Last year I worked for 3 different places. I worked at one startup, and one large company on a new product in a new market. Both products were purely speculative plays They did make money, but not enough to support the staff. My pay was not based on how much value I provided, but how much value I could have provided if the products took off (they didn't, thus the 3rd job).

All i'm saying is you should look at other markets that have been propped up by speculation... and see what happens when the market corrects. Most of the time they over-correct before finding a new better more stable price.
1) Sure, eventually.
2) Sure, eventually.
3) Sure because you are so averse to being taxed that you will deliberately destroy your own potential to get to work rather than acknowledge the idea that this could be a shared problem solveable by shared funds.
4) Sure, eventually.

So your argument is that this is really bad at the moment, but over an unspecified amount of time, 'the market' will sort it out. No worries. No need to think about things. No need to consider things. Just the market. Isn't the market great.
I know... My original reply mentioned two scenarios with one having replacement fish. Then, I thought people would think I'm overly paranoid or negative. I just couldn't help wonder if they'd blow the fish for fun then avoid liability with similar looking ones. Then, I edited the comment for sake of presumption of innocence.

But, yeah, I hear you... Great movie as well. One of few that brings my favorite mad scientist into eye of mainstream audience as well. I doubt I must name him. :)

EDIT to add: I'm guessing you think the geeks were too sadistic to pass up the opportunity, eh?
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7457-predicting_crime_in_a_big_d...

If you're still interested, this talk on "predicting crime" specifically cites supposedly "unbiased" policing as a benefit of their new machine learning products.

It all sounds like snake-oil, subconscious prejudices made into models, and confirmation bias. /sigh/
I've written scripts that do this. Any request for a repo is polled against the local repo server that makes sure it has the repo, and then quickly checks to see if the repo's out of date, caching the resulting file if the repo can be reached. If the repo can't be reached, just have the proxy deliver the old fileset. So the local repo gets updated, or at least attempts to update, with every hit against it. I had some other logic in the script to only check freshness every 10-15 minutes, so that during times when a lot of machines were pulling, they were essentially guaranteed to all get the same version.
The median household income in the US is $51,939 (2013).

You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary isn't rich?

And where exactly are all your caterers and cleaners and gardeners and nannies and baristas and tavern workers and shop people living and buying their food with their minimum wage in the bay area? Obviously they aren't remote working.

Perspective is a bitch.
Why is it that when MS makes a "new" product and category, you put it in quotations, yet when Apple does it, you don't?

Your approach to these companies is hypocritical at best.

At least MS is trying to invent a new category these days.

>>> had huge market share out of the gate

That's just wrong.
Reading about the number of cowork spaces along the author's short walk reminds me of working for an ecommerce startup during the last dotcom bubble. Our main office was in the NYC Financial District, so every morning I would hop off the 4 train and walk down Wall St. (as mobs of people sped past on their Razor scooters - this was 2001, yo!). One morning, I noticed something odd with a hot dog stand that was set up right across the street from the Stock Exchange. On closer inspection, I realized that the stand had an umbrella that was made up of 8 or 10 colorful segments, and each segment had an advertisement for a different dotcom (which of course was amplified by the numerous billboards, stickers, sidewalk chalk drawings, etc. along Wall St. at the time).
Here in states 23 year old fresh graduates list themselves as "software engineers" on linkedin so they can demand 'senior' level salaries.

We do it because it works...
An article someone linked to me a few days ago made a distinction that I think is critical to understand. People don't buy what they need, they only buy what they want. If you want to sell them something they need, you have to make it look like something they want.

Nobody wants Excel programming workflow management. But they definitely need it.

I can tell you why they don't want it. Most people do not think in terms of infrastructure. Their job is a series of one-off tasks and they see little commonality between these tasks. Constantly fighting fires, never thinking to design a fire-proof building or procedures for preventing fires.

You ask them why and the answer's always the same. No time. They're too busy. It's wrong, but they don't have the skill set they need to understand why it's wrong.
Umm, no it doesn't. http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio...
t-mobile does the same with spotify in germany. really bad for competing services.
I could do without 90% of those websites, i suppose
now that is an answer
Based on when you joined HN, I think it is safe to conclude that you have been here long enough to know the high signal-to-noise ratio that the community strives for here. I think that there are more eloquent and meaningful ways to express your opinion and disagree [1][2].

Just a friendly reminder:

1. There is another human being on the other side of the conversation.

2. Practice compassion when responding.

----

[1] http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_o...
What a great article. Takes up a problem which everyone is familiar with and then describes how one will go about solving it in Nim.

I have been writing software for close to 15 years. When a new programming language comes out, I am looking to find out what it does better compared to the languages I already know. And generally, you never find material like that. After looking at this article, I realized that solving a familiar problem in a new language step by step is a PERFECT way to introduce me to your language.

Coming from C#, I learned that Nim language has the notion of a channel and how it makes cross thread communication easy.
You don't use apps, but most people do. Instagram, Snapchat, Lyft/Uber to name a few.
The Yoga Guru Making Colgate Sweat
I didn't think about the image angle. Yeah, you'd think a marketing person would be like, "Wait, this could lead to a PETA lawsuit and lower sales. Not to mention our segment that likes fish."
Starting a Django Project – Real Python
Cross-site scripting vulnerability allow hackers to take over Facebook accounts
CouchDB is so underrated in this space.

I get it: CouchDB was a very early (the first real?) document-based database, and it got some things wrong, or at least weird early on (e.g. map/reduce queries, a reduce step to the map/reduce query that is actually one-to-many (on purpose! there are concrete reasons in real life you want this!), etc.).

But they also got so much right:

- The database is all HTTP, all the time. Connecting up your
choice language takes about an hour.
- Offline replication and database streaming, standardized at the
protocol level, which allows you to use various combinations of
CouchDB, Couchbase, Coucbase Lite, and PouchDB without interop
problems. Plus, it means in the early part of an app (like the 0.X
bit), I can trivially replicate the prod DB down when I'm trying
to repro something.
- You can store your HTTP assets right alongside the DB for
Firebase-like asset hosting. Throw it behind a caching service
for prod if you want.
- You can store full-blown files, which is great for lots of practical
app these days.
- Trivial replication. The scaling of CouchDB itself is honestly a
bit crappy, but Couchbase has great scaling, and since they speak
the same protocol, you can easily scale from CouchDB to Couchbase
without missing a beat.

CouchDB is actually my favorite "I just wanna hack something" database for the above reasons. No, I have not and do not know if I'd seriously recommend using CouchDB 1.6 in prod for something you expected to grow huge, but it's a great "get it done" platform like Parse or Firebase, and you can really trivially move to Couchbase as you scale up if you need to.
I'm not sure I follow here. Is your firm getting access to pentest reports from the consultancies it matches to clients? That seems untenable; clients tend to be very possessive about those reports.

Is your firm instead relying on self-assessment by clients? Then, like Ferruh Mavitunah said, I'm not clear how this system can work: most clients aren't qualified to evaluate the effectiveness of a pentest, and will instead evaluate based on soft-skills.

I have another business question. The most lucrative clients across the board are "house accounts" that source repeated tests from a single firm. When one of these companies sources a consultancy through your market, what prevents them from bypassing you for all future engagements?

This is a race-to-the-bottom problem that plagues freelancer programming markets.
What's the Couch ecosystem look like these days?

I poked around with CouchDB over the Christmas holiday but it seemed kinda dead. Is Couchbase still going strong?
I just got the cheap Lumia 532 to replace my Android phone, it is so smooth and fast, I wonder why is not a hit, is miles better then Android and iOS.
> - Non intervention by governments

except to define property rights and enforce them, which is kind of significant 'intervention'.
I have experience with android, iOs and Windows phone, and I find that windows phone work very well as a phone and are unbeatable on construction for the price.

The only problem I see is the low quantity of applications, like for example the lack of Snapchat.
> I used to also use append-only storage for changes in potentially buggy or malicious services. Sounds like that might be a good idea, too, to prevent some issues.

In a certain sense, git is "append-only". If you change a commit in history, every ancestor commit will have its SHA hash changed. Naturally this will conflict with other copies of the repository.

For backups you should do a "git clone --bare" which checks out the internal git structure with data and history, but not the actual files.