skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, software has been nothing more than a tool to get myself the lifestyle I want. I enjoy the creativity associated with writing solid software of course but it's not a hobby, it's certainly not a religion for me, it's a tool, nothing more. I enjoy the creativity associated with developing a solution that people use and pay me for, but at the end of the day, I am a business-guy who uses software to get what I want, unlike a lot of programmers who are techies who happen to be in business. The difference in these two attitudes are night/day.

I feel the writer is looking at his past as though he was somehow entitled to succeed since he could develop software when the industry was young, and many fortunes were made by the industry pioneers. This is a dangerous attitude as the world really doesn't care about anyone. Anyone is replaceable.

Around 1990, I started a business selling a Clipper-based (anyone remember that?) real estate program where I sold it to about 300 firms at $299 a pop. I couldn't believe the leverage and excitement of selling a product of my own mind to others. Sold yearly upgrades for $199 which worked out to around $60K annually sitting in my bedroom. Had to pinch myself. Got into telephony when the deregulation happened, created switching software for dumb switches (Dialogic, Redcom) for long distance resellers and at one time had 120 exchanges using my software to switch calls. Sold the IP for around $0.5M. 10 years later, created software for the mortgage industry and sold that company for 7 digits in 2010. Must say that I failed more times than I succeeded but that doesn't matter (for example, developing Call-Me functionality for web-sites when the industry was just too young - should have stuck with it). Last/this year, I'm working on software for the another industry which I feel is unserviced wrt software.

My reason for writing all this is that I never thought of software as a career. I saw the businesses that I could create using software as the career. I think the article writer labelled himself as a programmer early-on and never really understood what that role meant to him.
>> The true roots of liberal arts (which used to include everything from astronomy to mathematics to botany) lie in creating a well-rounded, educated, sophisticated person.

That's fine so long as you actually want to become the person that liberal arts education strives to create. That archetype is a lovely justification for four years and the student loan equivalent of a 2016 Porsche 911.

The instance or the archetype, on the other hand, is not so nice. If somebody ever called me "sophisticated", I would assume that they were being sarcastic or condescending. If I called someone else "unsophisticated", that would make me look like an elitist jerk.

As for being "well-rounded", liberal arts college education is both redundant and contradictory. It's redundant because we already have K-12 education to "broaden horizons beyond one's comfort zone". It's contradictory because the whole idea of college majors pushes students to be LESS well-rounded in favor of a specialization.
Of course the questions are important. My only point is that the idea itself seems to resonate really well with the voters on HN, since the questions jump to execution related questions and bypass idea validation questions.

> first experience the team has with building or maintaining data stores then I would definitely not invest.

To that point, while admittedly I don't know enough about building and maintaining data stores, I think it is a mistake to pass on founders because they lack the experience needed to know what they are up against. Often it is that very quality of being too naive to know what they are up against that allows them to take on a massive project and completely change the world or disrupt an industry.

I think the questions are fair and important to answer, I just think that great things are done all the time by people who have no clue what they are doing or up against going into the challenge...as long as they have the perseverance and resourcefulness to deal with whatever gets thrown at them, I would bet on them.
Ah yes, prognostication. Such a rare word that it's only uttered multiple times in one of the most popular Bill Murray movies made which is guaranteed to be on TV at least once a year. Seriously, that's not even nearly one of the best words.
Can you provide more information about how fraud prevention would work? One specific example, a fraudster using a stolen credit card.
My thought: They're trying to be Red Hat, except intentionally making their CentOS easy and inevitable.
One of those doesn't belong before the /:

Pheasant: from Old French fesan.
(the current french is faisan).
Just give it a bit longer... :-P
No, GP is saying that the value (societal or individual) of higher education may be orthogonal to the change in job pay of the person educated. The framing of the conversation as being around job pay rates has consequences.

There are real economic effects that happen when new frames of reference / paradigms / conventional wisdom take hold. Think about the ridiculous 2003-2008 house price run-up and how it was concomitant with a mass change from seeing housing as a cost to seeing it as "investment". Positive feedback loop, that. Maybe the same idea here with higher ed.
Conjoined Twins, a Trip to Saudi Arabia and a Risky Operation
It would be nice if there was a link up top to filter the submissions similar to show/ask links.

Here is my submission:
PaySQR - the new secure way to pay!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444053
Chasing unicorns: How healthcare VCs can use data to identify the next big thing
This is a paper CPU, right? You can't actually buy an IC. Even though there's a Linux port for it and four annual conferences so far.

There seem to be too many CPU options. Multiply and divide as an option belongs down at the 50 cent 8-bit CPU that runs a microwave oven, not on something that runs Linux. Optional floating point is maybe OK, although you should be able to trap if it's not implemented and do it in software. You don't want to have zillions of builds with different option combinations. That drove MIPS users nuts.

The protection levels are still undefined; "User" mode is designed, but what happens at Supervisor, Hypervisor, and Machine mode?

If this were well-defined and cheap tablets were coming out of Shentzen using it, it would be important.
Franze is a good friend an partner on this project. I've done a lot of the Android front-end and another friend, Lucas has built the iOS version. It has been a labor of love.

As an example, my family and friends are using EventCast this weekend at the USA Disabled Hockey Festival in Detroit. You can subscribe to #USADHFPatriotC, #USADHFAmericanC, or #USADHFYouthSledC for live examples.

If nothing else, I hope it helps someone have a wonderful event. We're also talking to some tourism folks to have a perpetual event. You could setup #VisitPhillly and the owner could continually update new items. Think of it as a "fun things to do feed".
Six prizes? Should have just done it once and then laid low (if he wanted to get away with it, not saying it was ethical). Seems like he got greedy.
Change DataSet Without Rebuilding Entire DataSet and Improved Rows/Columns Format
TextExpander has been around for a long time. I'm using version 5, i.e., the fourth major version upgrade. There's little or nothing else that needs to be added to the product at this point.

They charged an upgrade fee for new major versions. IIRC, it was $19.95 to upgrade from v4 to v5. I didn't mind paying that, even if the new features were minor (I can't even remember what they were -- and I think I actually upgraded only because v4 wouldn't work anymore on a newer version of OS X, though my recollection could be wrong).

That's the life-cycle of software products sold on the traditional model. At some point you need to realize you've wrung all the money you can out of upgrades, and if the revenue from new sales and (increasingly rare) major upgrades isn't enough to live on, well, you better develop some new and different products. Of course it's better for you as a developer if you can convince people to pay you $60 per year in perpetuity for your small utility app, rather than just collecting a one-time $30 sale and occasional upgrade fees, but just because that's your super-dream-fantasy business model doesn't mean it makes any sense for customers.
I can see a text compression scheme coming up. Convert a string to a list of numbers, use a lookup table, done.
Ubuntu Bash, Cortana cross-device come to latest Windows 10
My girlfriend's company in Capitol Hill is super big on diversity. It's a huge part of their hiring process. They're about 50 to 60 people large. I asked her how many conservatives work there. Answer: zero.

Along some axes Seattle is very diverse. But along others not so much.
Here's a good intro:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7r-Vd2...

Mitigation? Effectively none for end-users. You can always monitor your connection and if you go down to 2G, run. But no one does that. You can also test each and every app on your phone to ensure:

a) It's using HTTPS for every request / response which is rendered in the app &
b) It's validating the server public. This one's easier said than done and well beyond the capabilities of most pen-testers. They might think they have it covered but rarely test for all man in the middle conditions.

I've not looked at it in detail, but someone I know tried out Network Signal Info on Android claiming it could help detect a femtocell attack:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.android.tel...

However, they didn't really know what the app was telling them and kept accusing me of running a femtocell so I wasn't impressed. As far as I'm concerned it's an interesting app to use in attempting to get a confession out of someone you are pretty sure is running a femtocell but likely if that person is running a femtocell they wouldn't "fall for it."
What is a toroidal snark?
But what if the minimum payment is 0, and you pay it regularly?
Copyright law makes absolutely zero sense these days.
Is it really? I see this written on HN all the time, but of everyone I know who tried to find a remote job failed.

The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer. Then when the family moved (usually due to a spouse changing jobs) the employer decided to let them work remotely rather than letting them go, at least in the near term.
Well, I just gave it a try and this is how it looks like in my browser: http://postimg.org/image/kazxyotab/
What's your business model?

Will you be open sourcing the backend server?

Why would anyone want to us this over the plethora of other choices for a persistent storage layer?

Honestly, your example syntax doesn't look that appealing. I'm not saying SQL doesn't have its warts but if you're going to replace it, doing it at the language level integrated with a 4GL makes more sense (ex: like how rethinkdb rolls queries).

Who's the target user for a new system like this, why would they use it, and why would they pay you?
That's a disturbing, but interesting, thought. I wonder how often this has played out. Might be worth considering explicitly in a risk assessment of OSS-centric startups.
Powershell Summit Day 3
4 miles North is definitely not downtown Austin and to me might as well be in Oklahoma, haha. I enjoy being directly in the middle of everything, not having to commute, and no car. I'd much rather pay double, live in a smaller area, in the middle of everything. The last thing I want is a yard, again. Different strokes or something like that, right?
insightful analogy.

so then "Expert Beginner phase" = local minima, which might be reached quickly compared to a more systematic search (practice informed/infused with theory) and once in that local state, the "expert beginner" might be unable to escape because of over-reliance on small, poorly guided, step size; the real prize anyway is the global minima.
Interesting take on social networking

How will you prevent abuse?

How will you make money? Buy the app? Pay for catchy hashtags?

Hashtags probably won't be unique, how do you control who gets what? What happens if user A and user B both use #soccer for their neighborhood game, but they aren't in the same neighborhood?

Must people use your app to subscribe? If not, how will you grow your userbase? If so, why would people bother?
"... software bloat almost always comes from smart, often the smartest, devs who are technically the most competent."

I am quite happy with software written by people who who do not view themselves as "devs" who are "smart", "the smartest", or the "most technically competent".

I'm also happy with software written by telephone company employees in the 1970's, a grad student in the 1980's and a university maths teacher in the 1990's. Software written by "security researchers" is usually not bad either.

I like the small programs that win the IOCC; if I were asked to name a test for "competence" (my definition), the IOCC would be high on my list.

I have no reason to question that the "devs" writing the bloat, e.g., at Microsoft in the 2000's or any number of companies today, are _brilliant_.

However I have little interest in that class of software. I think bloat is stupid. Not to mention unnecessary for my purposes. If I cannot pick the code apart and recompile it myself, then the software is nothing but a liability to me, not an asset.
For fun I wanted to see what it would look like http://i.imgur.com/IiLVfU5.png

There is often a bit of truth in a joke. I wonder if the "medium" would change the reception of a story.
Show HN: HTML5 and Canvas demo written in Go
We run it at Wikimedia for our Tool Labs setup, and are migrating more things to it over time.
Seems the classy thing to do would have been for Blizzard to ask politely instead of sending in the dogs.
I get so much use out of pinboard (and laughing at your tweet snark) that I would gladly pay $5/month instead of the one-time fee of whatever I paid when I signed up.

It Just Works, and that's all it does, and that's all I need it to do.
Correct, the sheer quantity of rain that falls is not as great as other cities. But this past week has been the first in a long time (dare I say months) that it's not been cloudy, damp, and 45F.
In all seriousness, I've only run into two groups that (in my personal experience) still use LJ: Eastern Europeans, especially Russians, and pop-culture related "creators" (which is the broad brush that I'm painting fan art, fanfiction, etc with). It's a really weird mix.
have you looked at cockroachDB ?
A word of caution, not all pipelines are created equal(wrt to stencil/z-test/etc).

One other downside is this technique requires two drawcalls which can be pretty painful on some platforms.

Unless you really need large ranges of scale a glyph atlas based solution will probably be the fastest on a wide range of hardware.
The app to cure your loneliness: swipe right for your new BFF
I noticed that, particularly about the New York Times. Periodically they'll have a piece about something in the South and it's always about the stereotypical slack-jawed yokel who's trying to marry his sister, or is living in a dirt hut but has 5000 guns, or a preacher who preaches black people are the descendants of Cain, or some such. It's like people in New York can't start their day without feeling superior to someone else.
Does this integrate with the existing loyalty card networks?

How are you better than FiveStars?

> download our tablet app, purchase a stand

Does this mean any merchant using Square can't use you?

Why would I choose you instead of a competitor?

How do you make money?
Apply HN: ChargeGuard – Simple Fraud Prevention for Stripe
ChargeGuard is a simple fraud detection and prevention service that wraps around Stripe's client JavaScript tokenization.

It is entirely based on heuristics not including card data (for example referrer, user agent, geo ip, browser details, cookies). Users have full control of the heuristics and rules and can interactively create and modify them in real-time.

Want to block all tokenization's from China? No problem.
Want to block all tokenization's without a referrer. Got it!
Want to block all tokenization's matching a user agent regex. Presto!

Pricing is pay for what you use... A small fixed amount per API call.
Show HN: Xjs – Elixir syntax, JavaScript semantics (or transpilers made easy)
Does it really though? Those are trivial problems to solve: dont show users tools they dont use via roles/permissions; dont execute code that is unrelated to the current purpose.
Ioport: writing device drivers in shell script
I think one way to prevent the use of stolen credit cards in the system is through validating the card with two small test transactions on account creation. You could also allow the linking of checking accounts as a secondary method of verification and to reduce per transaction fee's through the use ach deposits i.e put $20 in your paysqr account for vending machine use.
Slack Teams Do Amazing Things – “Animals” TV Commercial (60 Second with Bloopers)
I like the idea of crowd editing. Getting the crowd involved in development.
Interesting. Can you expand on "hero call"? What does that entail?
We are running it in production

AWS with kubernetes 1.2.1 and calico as the overlay network. We have all our web apps in kubernetes and working on our background job apps next.
One could argue that the Lich King was the last "good" patch for WoW. What I've never understood though was there is clearly some residual demand for "down rev" versions of the game where the mechanics favored a more engaged play style, why not facilitate it? How much does it really cost to run a single realm at the Vanilla, TBC, and LK levels? So many new players where their first experience with Onxyia was soloing her with a Paladin. Just not the same as 40 people trying to bring her down without falling to the whelp adds.

Sure I don't think you could get $15/month for it but certainly $5/month or $10 a month. And they already let you "play for free up to level 20" why not just let you play for free on a vanilla server up to level 60?
Wonder if the popularity of Nostalrius will cause Blizzard to do a Jagex inspired re-release of vanilla or the burning crusade? Not sure if I have the commitment but it would certainly be nostalgic.
I wonder if it makes sense to charge the monthly subscription for the client, rather than the server. That way you could play on whatever server you want, but still had to pay a monthly fee.
Seems like work has died down a bit on the Souper repo[0], last commit was in January.

Anyone know what the current state of super optimization compilers is?

[0] https://github.com/google/souper
Guided busways are in no way comparable to light rail. In practice they are much less comfortable that unguided buses - all the same design issues as before but with huge levels of judder. I would avoid any route which used these for more than about a mile
No seal?
Sandstorm founder here. Thanks for your feedback -- I definitely understand the concern, and it's something I've thought about a lot.

To be clear, we've always been upfront about our intent to sell "enterprise add-ons" to the self-hosted solution. See this post, from January 2015:

https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-seed-rou...

It is our intent that any feature which is broadly useful to someone running a personal server should be in the free version. There is a gray area, of course: some people actually run LDAP servers in their homes. But we're pretty sure that the vast majority of personal users won't be interested in these business-oriented features. And we have a lot of potential features to implement that businesses need but individuals absolutely don't (examples: legal discovery tools; HIPAA compliance; cluster management), so there's really no need for us to hold back the more broadly-useful features for leverage.

I'd actually argue that it would be very much against our interest to "hamstring" the personal version of the product, not just morally but strategically. Strategically speaking, we aren't going to make much money off personal users no matter what pricing we impose. Business is where the money is. Personal users are incredibly important, though, because the kinds of enthusiasts who would run their own Sandstorm server are also the kinds of people likely to develop apps and/or advocate for Sandstorm to their employer. It would be shooting ourselves in the foot to do anything to turn off those users.

Of course, strategy isn't the only thing holding me back. Morally speaking, I personally started Sandstorm to make open source web apps viable, not to get rich. See:

https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-re...

To be honest, I would actually argue that our hosting service is a bigger conflict of interest than Sandstorm for Work. It could make us inclined to make it hard to set up and maintain Sandstorm -- why spend time making installation painless and updates automatic if it only benefits the people who aren't paying us? Sandstorm for Work is actually the exact same build as the free version, with the same installation process, so now we're incentivized to keep it really easy -- and indeed, last night we shipped an overhaul of our first-time setup UX, which we did for the Sandstorm for Work launch, but it applies to the free version too.

All in all, of all the options we've considered, I think this approach actually gives us the best alignment of incentives.
HOWTO: Ubuntu on Windows
I guess I passed the first few screening stages at MIT. They wanted to setup an interview and all that. My father had just gotten a programming job so suddenly, on paper, we were far too high income to qualify for any aid. I never bothered to schedule the interview.

I don't know if it worked out for the best or not but it seems insane that university is so money driven here in the US.
I think this is a cool project. I appreciate that the creator has shared this with the world. I think its sad that people are (appear to be?) criticizing him simply for making it and sharing it. However....

"If you find yourself on the receiving end of a message that is too hard to figure out, do everyone a favor and insist on a simpler version.

Do _everyone_ a favor? Presumptive.

If I am on the receiving end of a message that is too hard for me to understand due to my ignorance of certain terms, or due to difficulties I have parsing grammatically correct writing, then the best way for me to do everyone a favor is to work on improving my own vocabulary and/or thinking ability.

Then I will be better equipped to communicate well with a larger set of the population, and better equipped to reason well. Improving your own thinking skills is good citizenship. Improving your ability to communicate well with a wider swath of the population can help you to build bridges between communities.

If I were instead to insist that the message achieves 'clarity' by accommodating my ignorance, then I may be helping some but certainly not everyone.

"Maybe one that only uses the 1,000 most common words."

Asking others to accommodate limitations to my vocabulary is likely to increase their cognitive load; most often I'd rather them apply themselves more fully to other tasks. I can just use a dictionary! Also, this runs the risk of resulting in text that is _harder_ to understand, if they trade precise terms for needlessly convoluted grammar.
I would argue that it's orders of magnitude more difficult by way of comparison to simply injecting naughty bits into an HTTP response.
Have you ever actually tried to write code in Modula-2?

Has there ever been an efficient, portable implementation of Cyclone or Popcorn? Does anyone seriously consider either to be easy to implement?

And, if you just randomly picked three examples, why are they all bad? What does that mean about the other examples, statistically?
Sounds useful wouldn't limit it to just stripe though