skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't learn through reading a book, I can't apply it to a scenario in my mind. I've tried.

I do learn through playing around with code and deconstructing existing code. There's a crucial second step to this bit though - working out why it works. Without that, you've not really learned anything at all, you just know that if you poke it for a bit, it will eventually work.

People can get negative effects from tutorials, documentation, stack overflow too. Mainly where they see a piece of code that works, copy-paste it, tweak it a little and then leave it there.

I think the article is based around the wrong argument. The most important thing is working out how it works, not how you get to the stage of having code.

Edit: Not running code before committing and seeing that it works sounds horrible, is this a done thing? I feel it really shouldn't be.
At some point in history Newton had just made up gravity, and Einstein made up the concept of awful metaphors about driving away from clocks really, really fast.

The Schumpeter curve warrants some serious investigation.
...I had so much I wanted to do :-(
> maybe there's much better technology to be discovered

Obviously we don't have much to draw on, but it seems like our technological growth looks a bit exponential. I'd imagine a civilization that has been around for a million years would have discovered a hell of a lot of technology - but a million years is a blip in 13.82 billion years, the age of the Universe. It's like 0.001% if I've got my maths right.
I doubt it. Has access to capital changed? If anything, the trend is towards more concentration.

Cronyism is just a given when it comes to finance and business dealings.
Hey!

Also working on math education. I am targeting middle schoolers, and my approach is to build a system based on symbolic math and AI to help the students. I have things that could be used in primary schools as well, maybe we could partner somehow?
skip paywall:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
Gates also made a significant mathematical discovery that wasn’t bested for 30 years[1], and he published a paper on it while he was a sophomore at Harvard.

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...
That's because his argument is orthogonal to the performance and security arguments. His argument is basically even if unikernels are faster and even if they are just as secure, they are still operationally broken because you cannot debug them.

He doesn't need to present a great argument against security or performance. There doesn't even need to be such an argument. If you've ever spent six months trying to find out why a content management system blows up under the strangest of conditions, even when you have a full debug stack, you understand why that argument may be able to stand alone.

The place where his argument falls down, IMO, is, like others have said, in assuming that everything is binary: everything is unikernel or it is not. And that's just silly.
It doesn't surprise me at all. Being in tech usually means starting earlier than medicine, finance or law and if you're poor you likely had less opportunities to own or use computers. Access might be provided through school or libraries but you won't generally have access to installing programming languages or anything.

While it didn't surprise me I'd still like more surveys and insight to exactly how hard it is for the lower class to join the tech and start up booms.
Anecdotes have value. Stories have value. Opinions can have value. Evidence is not a condition that necessarily drives change. Your total dismissal of the piece seems misguided.
And then there are people who like reading and learning about coding more than actually coding. We don't get stuff done because it isn't perfect.
How public is your age? I found myself having a very difficult time getting interviews being an 18 year old (I was applying for above my age's average skill level). I stopped mentioning my age as well as removed my birth year from my online profiles. After that, interviews started coming in.
I suspect the patterns would be strongly similar. I've not posted raw data, though they're somewhat in line with the overall trends. A few exceptions -- forums or publications who cater strongly to a specific name. Richard Dawkins is hugely popular, and NY Times is grossly skewed (for obvious reasons) to mentions of Paul Krugman.
I think it is paradoxically a lot harder now to start than it used to be, way back you had basic on your computer (if you started when I did) or maybe turbo pascal (some years later), and that was it, you wanted something you started to write.

Now say you want to put together a web application, you're going to google and immediately you'll get a billion stack options with very opinionated people in each camp, it's hard to choose what to do.

Having some guidance to start is good, otherwise you end up like I did in my teens, where the second program I started writing was a text adventure game where every room was a separate block of code with if/equals text parsing where I eventually ran out of memory due (64k wasn't much) if I had found that article talking about text parsers and data structures it would have saved me a lot of time :)

Nowadays though it's hard to get only some guidance if you want to start on something, and so analysis-paralysis is a significant risk.
I'm 29, and I'm not a hiring manager, but here's where my ageism lies: People in their 60s tend to be less open to new experiences.

My ~50 year old guitar teacher told me a story about how he refused to even try guitar hero. I agree that, as an accomplished musicians, it would be kind of insulting to be asked to play guitar hero by your student. But it's such a good opportunity to learn where the student is coming from, and understand how it could teach timing and patterns, even if it doesn't teach fingering or picking.

My ~65 year old dad is still working as a consultant and actively gives paid speeches, and he plays a lot of solitaire and minesweeper on the computer. I've tried to get him to try a few videos game-- I even pitched Kerbal Space Program, from the educational aspect of understand our own space program better. (When I was in D.C. at the National Air and Space Museum, I was recognizing parts that KSP had copied the models of.) He has no interest in it.

My mom, and my aunts on both side of the family are extremely stubborn about their political beliefs, and phrase their responses as: "oh, well, I believe that ____". Not trying to seek a consensus, not trying to crack an argument. Just laying out their own belief. (Their political beliefs range from: common Democrat, pro-choice conservative, global-focused liberal.)

I get the idea that, as we grow older, we've kind of discovered what we like and what we don't like. I usually just have Cookies & Cream ice cream, because it's my favorite. I don't try rocky road again because the nuts give it a bad texture. But if a young person strongly recommended Rocky Road Version 5, I hope I would try it for the sake of trying it.

So that's where my ageism comes from. I've told my younger brother to call me out on not being open to new experiences, if that's something that happens to me in my old age. At the very least, it'll be a good source of brotherly humor.
I appreciate knowing that I can read the NY Times anywhere and not have to view some video or (worse) have a video start blaring out at me.
That would be true if applications ran on only one computer at a time. But nowadays applications run across many computers - sometimes tens of thousands of them. These applications don't need the operating system to protect processes from each other, because they are not running on the same computer.

Now that hypervisors are a mature commodity, this model is practical at smaller scale too: instead of running in separate physical computers, process run in separate virtual computers.

In short: unikernels make way more sense if you zoom out and think of your entire swarm of computers as a single computer.
The R8M has integrated flash and DRAM...$16 is the high quantity price.

That was the original CPU CHIP was going to use. They switched to the R8 (no flash/dram) for some reason. The R8 is $5 in high quantities, but of course, they would now need to add the flash and dram, neither of which is cheap.
"More than 90 percent of the entrepreneurs came from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds"

I'd like to offer a potential explanation of this: Middle and upper-lower-class individuals have the most to gain by doing things on their own.

* An upper-lower-class or middle class child will not have the same burdens and problems as a lower-class individual as describes in this post. They likely have just enough of a support system to be able to make it on their own.

* An upper-lower-class or middle class child will NOT be able to get into a great college with scholarships. They will likely choose a safer route, like a cheaper state school. This makes them less desirable to employers, so the "safe" route doesn't exist.
Then perhaps Ms. Johnson should take that up with 90% of the people who use the word "privilege" in arguments nowadays, because they're not using it the way she thinks they're using it.
Boo Hoo is hilarious. Never quite sure if the author realises how badly he comes across. Highly recommended.
Angel list is a good place to start. Look for angels that you have connections to (or connections of connections).

Don't ask for money - ask for advice. You'll learn a lot and if you are ready, you might start to get offers.
My biggest shock was during my first internship during college making $30 / hour at an enterprise software company. For background: I went the community college / go-get-a-degree-in-your-late-20s-route in life, living off nearly minimum wage for many years before going to CC.

The first paycheck comes after two weeks, $1800 after taxes and withholding. I am in awe of how much money I suddenly have in my bank account. My fellow students who were interning instantly started complaining about the tax rate and how they wouldn't be able to afford SF rent and the lease payment on a sports car.
"Struggling" is not the same as "no longer able to justify a highly optimistic valuation". Many unicorns could actually be profitable and still never justify a $1B+ valuation.
> simple economic analysis of our future tells us that we will tear them down in favor of more efficient arrangements of matter and energy?

What tells us this is the case?

How do we know there isn't an upper limit on the amount of computing resources a civilization desires, even if it's an absurdly high limit like "disassemble all the inner planets"? How do we know there is an incentive to build interstellar civilizations, versus independent civilizations? Is computronium even worth spreading?

Analogous to r/K selection, is there more incentive to replicate a particular way of life (eg civilizations uploaded to a particular computronium implementation), or is it more beneficial to simply shotgun probs with very primitive seeds capable of bootstrapping new implementations of life? Is the interstellar competition between civilizations, or is the competition between different fundamental forms of life where civilizations simply mark a system developing to the point it can reproduce?

Given the distances between solar systems, why would a civilization span multiple systems? Wouldn't each system become culturally and economically isolated, evolving independent from the parent civilization? If that's the case, why invest in cloning the parent civilization when they could bootstrap native life from-scratch?
Indeed, in Agincourt, the mud was probably a much more decisive factor than the longbow.
BLIT: a short story by David Langford
To quote Ender's Game: "I am not a happy man, Ender. Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it."

It doesn't really answer why we commit suicide. But it does give an answer to why we aren't happy.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8623643&cid=5131565...

It's really pretty damn easy.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8623643&cid=5131356...

Win 7, 8 and 10 are done. OSX has spotlight upload to microsoft in plain sight. What else does OSX have under the hood? Phones are pretty much a foregone conclusion in my estimation, with the exception of cyanogen mod or something.
Age isn't mentioned in my CV. Probably dates in the CV give age away.
> It's sickening, but that's what we've become.

What we've become? You think if armed drones were in the inventory during Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, or WWII they wouldn't have been used because of some lost sense of nobility?
You're comparing apples and oranges when you compare Uber with Facebook. A better comparison would be with Craigslist.
That assumes that knowledge is available from some extra-textual source (e.g. other developers.) I think the author means to say that great developers will, when handed an arbitrary undocumented mess, seek to use the code build a mental model of the intent of its designer—whereas regular developers will stop after building a mental model of the code itself.
It goes by another name as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis
As somebody who has been writing an Angular2 app in ES6, it kind of saddens me that Google has gone all-in on Typescript despite it's glaring departure from future web standards.

Specifically, the parameter annotation syntax they use is much different from that proposed in the future ES7 spec.

I really like Angular2 but it's hard not to feel like it was created as a promotional tool for Typescript adoption.

Types in JS are mostly 'window dressing' to protect devs from themselves and allow for better autocomplete support. They come with a performance overhead so they'll be disabled in production anyway.

Anyway, it's very interesting that Op went with Redux. Redux is pretty game changing in terms of reducing the feedback cycle between changes. Hopefully, better Redux support in NG2 is forthcoming.
Uh... I'm relatively new to JS but why the heck are you mixing Redux and angular?
That's like saying "The fastest human can run at 27mph. That means it can't be that hard and most people should be able to do it. They just aren't trying hard enough."

You're missing the point. Privilege/inequality isn't about something being possible/impossible, it's about something being systemically harder for a whole section of the population. That this exists in Silicon Valley is a fact.

Whether this is good or bad, something to be fixed or not, is a matter of opinion.
Do you think there used to be dragons roaming the earth?
To be more specific: the current active fleet of hypervisors (xen, vmware..) is much younger on average than the current active fleet of traditional operating systems (bsd/linux/solaris).

By "younger" I mean the source code was written, and the interfaces defined, much more recently.
Oh, he made it clear that I was able to go wherever I wanted, in the middle of nowhere, I just couldn't get in my car, let alone drive it anywhere.
I've been enjoying Craft CMS lately. Almost went static but changed my mind...
If we had millions of venture dollars, I might agree with you. When you're a small team with a small budget, those costs add up. We absolutely spend money on the things that matter, but as CEO I also have to worry about minimizing the costs that don't.
That sounds like a ridiculous waste of expensive time. I'm interested in more (and I haven't been able to find out how to direct message)
I think this is a very opinionated and one-sided article. Prejudices exist everywhere and ageism definitely exist. You're most likely to complain about a particular prejudice when: it directly affects you, you think it directly affects you, or it affects someone you know. As far as ageism I definitely understand the point of view the author has. I think the other side of the story here is in the workplace the "more experienced" engineers "may" dismiss the ideas and contributions of a younger engineer even if they are completely valid and logical. This is the kind of social prejudice I have witnessed in the workplace. There are most certainly even more prejudices that exist in the workplace regarding age. I think it's unfortunate that the author decided to rant about an issue and not present all the facts as if a particular group of people have it easier than a different group.
On the contrary, you could argue that there is _more_ isolation, insofar as the multiple applications will be separate unikernels on the same hypervisor, and that the hypervisor will enforce a stricter separation between VMs/unikernels than your OS will between processes.
And they'll be paying the appropriate UK taxes going forward.
Excellent post. We like to think sometimes the underdog wins but sadly, success is typically given to those that were born with it. The unfortunate part to me is the credit they were given as if they were amazing, not born lucky.
I should have thought of this.
This is an article I read on the topic.

If you are born to parents in the lowest quartile you have ~10% chance of making it into the highest by age 26. For people born in the highest the probability is ~30%.

(and if it was random it would, obviously, be 1/4 = 25%)

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...
That! but with a grain of salt. Unopenness and the self proclaimed belief in one's abiltities/thoughts/notions all based on "I'm older, I've been there" is the root of friction between young and older employees causing valuable loss of productivity in such homogenous groups.

Even more important tho and less of a subjective statement, I think most jobs today are menial in that technology offers a lot and the humans powering those jobs are really only doing a lot of rote stuff that can easily be taught. In such an environment, is it a surprise to anybody that an employer would always wanted to dump seniority over a junior employee that costs less and is just as trainable?

Also in jobs requiring more than just rote menial production from the employee, quality of the service given has been lowered to a very low baseline. With that again, experience is tossed out of the window and with it the costs that are associated paying for it.
> No one teaches you the basics

Room for a startup/free service that does that!
Operations may not wind up being all that different in spirit than startups that build open source products. There's a free platform and then services, features and tools for sale that serve the needs of professionals. For example, an API probably isn't an ideal product for a typical law firm. Something that runs on Windows and iPhones might offer a better value proposition in that market segment. The analogy can be extended, of course until it breaks.

I didn't use a copyleft software example by intent. Copyleft doesn't fit because the law itself is in the public domain [IANAL] and that is why The texts can be put under license by Harvard.

Anyway, it looks like an improvement over the current state of affairs. YMMV.
Seems to be autonomous transportation. Hence auto and tech. Google, Apple, and GM are the only companies named in the article.

Google says they'll be ready in 2020. Apple TV has the biggest share of the streaming TV hardware market [1] and Watch almost brought in $2B last year [2]... but iPhone and iPod sales are sagging [3]. GM just put $500M into Lyft. Ford is pivoting to software and services. And so on.

"Driverless" has the potential to be more like horse shoes or "iron horses" or "horseless carriages" than, say, western saddles or dieselification or automatic transmissions. Historically, dramatic changes in ground transportation seem connected with dramatic changes in how people spend time, where they live, and what they work on and value and eat.

As for pharma, maybe the patent cliff? By 2020, patents on Plavix, Singulair, Diovan, Lipitor, Rituxan, Humira, Novolog, and Avastin will be expired.

1. http://advanced-television.com/2015/11/06/apple-tv-31-of-str...
2. http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-watch-sales-topped-17b-apple-in...
3. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/20/iphone-sales-worse-than-expec...
I spent a summer regularly exercising with a group of friends who were all in the 50-80 age range (and they kicked my butt). One day there was a conversation like this:

"You know who I saw the other day? Nancy!"

"How's she doing?"

"Well, she's OLD"

"Yeah, that happens"

"How does that happen anyway? One day they're your friend, the next they're old and only complain about their health"

"It's because they stop hanging out with young people".
I plan on working until my mind doesn't work anymore. If nobody will pay me, I'll just work on open source projects. I'm really not interested in retiring.
It's probably not simple enough to just look at unemployment-- we should look at workforce participation. The economist had a good chart on the breakdown of: working, unemployed, long-term unemployed, disabled, and retired: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/10/21/what-we-know-about... (It confirms what you said--- young people have the hardest problems with unemployment.)

I also found this graph: http://www.economist.com/node/21610975 People over 54 are doing great! It's the 24-54 cohort that is getting kicked to the curb.
You are correct... for now. But the way I see it all going down is only the top marketplace will survive and the rest will shut down. Sure, they may even generate revenue, but I think those that don't manage to become the top will fade away for the same reason most acquired companies die off. When that happens, there won't be any Lyft. Lyft knows this and that's why they took investment from GM, and this is why Sidecar shut down recently.
It's just a vague recollection now. I wouldn't be able to do it justice. It's one of those things that doesn't translate well into words anyway. The best thing you can do is download Pharo Smalltalk and start playing: http://pharo.org/.
Finally someone who talks about the consequences of economic inequality. PG seemed to think all that mattered is the causes.
I'm sorry if this comes across as rude, but that all sounds entirely speculative.
The article isn't quite what the title implies. The author does, in fact, seem to be convinced he knows exactly what he's doing, all the time :)
(BIM) Azure Blob Storage Integrity Monitoring Tool
Check it out, a simple small tool, but it allows integrity monitoring for azure blob storage.

https://github.com/tsangtmc/BlobIM
A script type could work too. Either way, there would be some indicator of how the JS VM could parse the code. It's true you could get other languages into HTML this way as well, but the trick is that the browser needs to support the VM, which can be done natively or through a browser plugin/extension. Google tried this for a Dart VM (sidenote: there is no TypeScript VM from Microsoft that I'm aware of) into Chrome but discussions led away from that idea, and now Dart compiles to JS instead. A <meta> tag in <head> would eliminate <script type="application/sjavascript"></script>, <script type="application/sjavascript"></script>, etc. Though providing an either/or situation would be optimal too to allow a mixed script types for older libraries.
I feel your pain. I make a lot of my money maintaining legacy PHP projects, but I'm hoping to entirely get away from PHP in 2016.

It's incredibly difficult to fight the "just rewrite it in [some better language]!" reaction whenever I first look at a code base like the one you're describing.

> trigger_error as a debug mechanism as well

Yeah... unfortunately that sounds very familiar. "Abuses" is a good word for it.

At least with Xdebug, you can use breakpoints instead of "var_dump($whatever); exit;" and you can navigate through your stack trace. No, definitely not as good as Java tooling, though.