skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a about a day of building with gradle, I could have manually downloaded and verified myself every jar my project will need, as compared to say, ant. The amount of time I lose to it is criminal especially considering it is supposed to improve our productivity.

Gradle is a horrible thing that lets people do whatever they want - and people who think freedom == productivity flock to it for that reason only. History of course teaches otherwise.
Why Pinterest forces you off its mobile site and into its app
I always ask my go-to "red flag" question to all my interviewers. Remember that you are the one that determines what red flags even mean. This works on everyone but the CEO:

"If you could change one thing without veto, what would it be?"

If the person describes a technical problem, that's usually a good sign. Long silence is usually good (but can also be a very bad sign if they just can't pick one thing). Trivial nitpicks are a good sign. Any complaints about communication are a very big red flag. Also any complaints about leadership. Obviously, if the problem your interviewer describes is repeated by any other interviewers, that is a big, red flag.

Piece of advice when firing this atomic weapon at your interviewer: Do not fill the silence while they think with any talk. Let them think. Let the silence hang. That makes people more likely to dig deep for something they really don't like.
given that they must disburse their income eventually

Must they?
This chart is comparing dollars (CD sales) to units (digital singles, which probably avg less than $1.29 each). So at their peak CD sales were worth >10x what digital singles sales are now. It's not even close, and if this chart were inflation-adjusted the difference would be much larger.

Forgetting about the Musician's share, all the streaming/satellite radio revenue collectively wouldn't cover the shortfall (terrestrial radio doesn't pay).

I can't comment on public performance but it's certainly become the definitive way musicians make money now and their share has always been high in this category.
Adding to what most of people said:
1) look how hard the technical part of the interview is, if you don’t get any challenging questions (technical and to some extend behavioral); you are most likely not going to learn and grow that much if you get the job.

2) how the interviewers treat you when you are trying hard to answer tough questions? If you see sympathy, it is a good sign; if they play bad cop and good cop, run.

3) if they don’t ask you any personal questions it means they will not care about you.
Well, a mansion should be able to house more people than a shack, so it would increase supply more, and pressure prices down more.

New housing would start off being expensive because all housing in SF is expensive. Not the other way around.

Maybe the root of this fallacy is that it assumes prices are constant. If you build something today and charge $5k/month for it, that's how it will somehow remain forever. But in reality prices are set by supply and demand, for both new and old housing.
I built an electron app that allows you to design, generate, and share Mongoose Schemas if anyone finds it useful:
http://mongomulch.com
Wow, really? That shouldn't happen, lots of people do that! I do it with every synth that allows me to loop back into the filter.

I don't think it's the MS-20 as it does come close but the MS-20 is slightly more nasal. Lots of moments I play with it and I think "this sounds ALMOST like The Funk" because with a big resonance on two filters it distorts pretty bad/good :). But perhaps if I try it with the same feedback technique it might get fuller.
Agreed. That list is definitely surface level and should be taken on a case by case basis.

My recent employment adventure turned me cynical. My then-soon-to-be boss seemed great during the interview. He was technical, his questions were interesting and deep and the team seemed happy. Turns out he was a complete sociopath who made everyone's life living hell. The unhappy weren't invited to the interview.

The first clue from the second day at drinks should've been, "I voted no in hiring you, but [his boss/my previous company's CTO] convinced me to change my mind." in front of the other senior admin. Kinda downhill from there.

What makes these situations so difficult is that leaving a job early has such a strong negative effect on your future work prospects. Even worse, being unhappy at a job affects your work prospects, too. There really isn't a win in those situations.
Most obvious reason is that corporations are taxed to fund the government. Beyond that, if they weren't tax, you could just build a massive corporation, never take any cash out, and use it to make smaller businesses more profitable.
> the healthcare act fiasco

The Affordable Care Act was based on RomneyCare, which in turn was based on model legeslation from ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Counsel). They're a conservative organization that writes bills and gives them to republicans to propose.

The republican reaction was just showmanship; a cry of indignation for the sake of the cameras.
Didn't we have an article on HN talking about Home Depot and how Japan's houses are basically disposable? Still tied to the land, but torn down and new build instead of home improvement.

[edit:] yep, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303455
"... MathML is effectively preventing mathematics from aligning with today’s and tomorrow’s web."

I'm probably one of the few that still likes to print things out or buy a physical copy of a book, but I also like reading/producing math for the internet and I often wish there were a better standard out there. I really appreciate how you've laid out several points that demonstrate the situation clearly.
I'm no expert, but it's interesting enough to note that League of Legends was born out of a Warcraft 3 map/mod.

Had Blizzard stifled their freedom to create (they used to provide a map editor with earlier games), the worlds most popular video game may not exist.
People move to specific neighborhoods for many, many reasons other than available train lines.
I have hired two to three dozen developers over the last 15 years for a fairly boring developer job (finance) in a very big city (Atlanta). Here are a few tips I had for making candidates feel comfortable.

1. Find out as much about them as possible before they show up. Look them up on Github, LinkedIn, etc.

2. Target questions that are appropriate and related to the job. If the candidate offers any sort personal info about interests follow-up with questions and find out what they are really interested in, you should already have a clue from point 1. If their primary love is talking about airplanes or something else then writing code is not their first love.

3. Make the candidate feel at ease as much as possible. Offer Water, coffee, comfortable chair, etc.

4. Have someone on their level take them to lunch. They can find out what their potential future co-workers think of you and you can get some valuable feed back from your devs.

If the person interviewing you doesn't do most of these things then you probably want to run the other way. Remember your managers job is partially to help you be successful and if he can't help you have a successful interview then he most likely can't help you have a successful career. When you leave the interview you should feel that this person has your back and will help you out if you ever need it.
The construction is cheap because people want cheap homes and building with wallboard and dimensional lumber is fast. If you want better construction; it's out there, you just have to pay for it. In any case, it will last a lifetime which is generally long enough for most people.

Houses out in the country are indeed pretty cheap but if you work in the city, then you pay for it in terms of a long, ugly commute.

If you are a remote tech worker, or your job happens to be in the next town, then you can have a large, inexpensive house on many acres of land with a 10-minute commute. Lots of people happily live like this, but they have no presence on HN. I know people who bought their first houses in their early 20's but they lived in towns you will never hear of.
Good catch!

I've gone ahead and fixed that.

Let me know of any other obvious ones I might miss! I am only human!
IntelliJ 15 was released in Nov, so we're talking 6 months. What features of IDEA 2016.1 do you need for creating an Android application that aren't present in AS 2.0? I use both frequently and it's hard for me to feel behind (so far).

If you're interested in keeping up-to-date, Android Studio also has Chrome-style Canary/Beta/Dev channels as well.
It creates a built in incentive for NIMBYs to not block development, lest they feel the pain of increased 'rent' too. If the bay area built as many units at the rate of texas or seattle for example, none of this would of been a big deal.

Imagine old people viciously fighting for increased development lest their property tax bill goes up, unlike the opposite today at most city council meetings. The elderly drive most housing policy in many ways because they have the free time, general boredom and incentive to participate in the political process this way.

Property tax is also almost never approaching %3. The range can be %0.5 to %2.5. A high property tax rate actually helps modulate the value of houses in a market since the price of housing is based on the monthly payment. This is what contributes to texas being a cheap housing state, since the high property tax prevents housing values from going up too quickly.

Unoccupied properties also cause the supply to go down without a person or family inside it contributing to the local economy. Idle assets should be put to productive use, it's half the point of a property tax already.
But you would agree that there's a qualitative difference between a Snicker's bar and a banana, right?

Sure, the banana is a selectively bred, sterile monocrop but the candy is made of 20 ingredients, resembling nothing found in nature in composition and nutrition.
It'd be a solid playbook if it worked.
EDIT: snipped confusing comment mixing expenses with income - by disbursements, I meant dividends. They don't all disburse all of their income every year, it is true. I guess it is a pretty strong reason to tax their incomes perhaps, i.e. to get a share of their income instead of waiting for the trickle down?
> In your example, the building you describe is a condominium? If so, then what does it matter what your tax bill is and if they are absentee owners; if the owner maintains the property, pays their bills and taxes, then you should be happy to have them.

The owner may not care, but the city as a whole should: it makes poor use of the scarce housing supply if sales are discouraged due to tax artifacts.
Can someone comment on the practical impact of this for people running Docker? Is Docker still using LXC by default these days? Does LXC 2.0 require a particular kernel version?
In my opinion, what you've done there is create a straw man. The original assertion was that an IQ test is a reason to run. What you've done is turn that into something else entirely, where it quite clearly is a bad sign. I believe that your hypothetical situation isn't addressing the original simple assertion.

The original assertion was not "If you've done very well at a series of interviews and proved your ability already, and then they want to give you an IQ test, run."
>Urbanites & Europeans don't seem to grasp how far it is between the affordable/cheap housing and the "tech centers" in downtown wherever (or how vast the USA is in general).

Well, I'm probably an exception, as I've travelled all across the US (several coast to coast road trips and such, from Highway 1 to Route 66 and loads more).

But I don't see a 10, 20 or 30 mile commute as a problem. He have those in Europe too, and in much worse highways or congestion in some cases (e.g. inside the city one can spend 30 minutes to get across 5 miles).

>We also average bigger homes, roughly twice the size as in Europe.

True, but also a lot of trailers and projects, which one doesn't see much, if at all, in Europe. The closest will be some small, confined, old buildings in Eastern Europe. (And I think our "projects" equivalent are much better).
Hey, great point!

the main difference is this one you don't have to go and purchase each time. It auto sends you the socks every couple of months so you never have to worry about going and buying more.

Basically makes it so you never have to even think about socks.
>How come cars, homes, wholesome dinners, home repair, car repair costs more or about the same as 20-30 years ago

Cars primarily because cars today have a lot more "stuff" in them--in many cases, safety related. Although I'm not sure given improved reliability that the $/mile cost isn't less

I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of some fresh food has dropped but it's probably not a lot cheaper across the board. Mechanized farming has been around for a long time.

Home and car repair are largely a function of labor. There's relatively little benefit in either case to improved industrial processes. The process of building a house hasn't changed much and manufactured housing has never really taken off for a variety of reasons.
Overall Javascript even with ES6 still seems like a fairly immature language. It is a definite step in the right direction though. Specifically:

I think the lambda syntax is nice and concise, although the disconnect between an implicit return with a bare statement versus required explicit return with braces is kind of silly. They should have made it just implicitly return the evaluated value of the last statement in the lambda all the time.

The de-structuring syntax is less clear and consistent than, for example, Python's. The fact that both array-like things and object-like things are de-structured using '...' means that you have to consider the context when you see it, and you could probably construct cases where it isn't clear exactly what is going on.

Template literals are obnoxious because they bind when declared. This means you can't pass a template literal around to be evaluated later. You could wrap it in quotes and use eval, but then you lose multi-line support. Pretty fail.

The fact that module support is finally part of the language is a good thing. Not having a built-in module system is probably the biggest embarrassment in the language. Now we just need a dependency manager built into the browser so people can require jQuery >= 2.0 for instance, and we won't have to worry about CDNs and what not.
Erlang excels at high throughput and fault tolerance. Number crunching, even in parallel, isn't really the goal.
I'm disappointed, but only a little bit.

Moxie has already given me secure communications and free text, media and voice messaging the world over so I can't complain too much.
Well, the "decision" was actually the consent decree in the AT&T antitrust case, which said that AT&T couldn't go into the software business. (Note well that AT&T did not have any kind of a monopoly on computer operating systems - not then, and not ever.)

The result, though, was that Unix became available for the cost of distribution plus porting, and it was portable. It was the easy path for a ready-for-real-work non-toy operating system on new hardware.
Then make prop 13 a 65+ only law that can only apply to your main residence.
Still are very, very bad.
Yeah, I was being extremely optimistic.

I'd live in the mountains, miles from anyone, and work remote if I thought I could get decent broadband and find a company that was okay with me working 100% remote. Finding the job is the easier of the two, most place I want to live have little more than electricity and telephone services.
How does 100 compare to your average local ad posting? Seems high but not as high as I had expected.
That is a fair point. I guess since one can't count on a corporation to spend a significant portion of its income every year, the corporate tax provides a mechanism to pull some money out of their income instead of waiting for their expenses to trickle down to the economy.
It's an obvious, but entirely uninteresting fact.

It's like telling poor people the way to escape poverty is to make more money than they spend.

Of course that is true, but they would be more interested in how to do it, not what to do.
> Some raise $800M, stack the board of directors with politicians and generals, and try to sell to the military.

Apply HN here I come...
There's also DOTA 2 which was a mod of Warcraft 3 as well. Valve decided to make a sequel to it, I think they hired the guy who created the mod if I remember correctly. They did similar with some other games, I guess since a number of Valve's own games were made out of mods for their own games.
It's a link to an article that has a very misleading headline. It's the kind of 'accident' I've come to expect from Theranos and Theranos's PR.
Tracking Reddit Users from Political Subreddits
I don't disagree, but there is a case to be made for using UUID over sequential integer ids, and that is for horizontal scaling. When inserting records with UUID primary keys, you don't have to have your db cluster synchronized around which sequential ID should be next. There are other ways around this problem, of course, but using UUIDs sidesteps the issue entirely.
React 15 will be shipping today
Doesn't the existence of Golang remove most of the reasons to use Erlang these days?
It's just a question of respect
Only on HN could someone argue that trying to select smart employees for technical jobs is a bad idea.
I agree. Last time I looked at why they were designing it be Chrome-only, it appeared to be due to a reliance on Google Cloud Messaging (GCM, [1]). This could be due to one or both of the following factors:

a) they wanted to re-use as easily as possible their existing back-end infrastructure which already uses GCM for the Android app.

b) they are using GCM to ensure that their desktops users are also "screened" by Google's existing authentication/security infrastructure - which ties a user down to a phone number among other things.

[1] https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/

Edit: clarity, typos
I'm getting married in May in Sonoma. I will have somewhere around 150 guests which is sizable. I've already booked pretty much every service needed for the wedding: venue, caterer, photographer, videographer, DJ, wedding planner, florist, hairdresser, makeup artist etc.

Feedback:

1. I'm the groom. The truth is, weddings are really for brides. Yes, we're both getting married, but it's all about the bride. My fiancée is a typical SF professional. I can tell you right now she would be skeptical about a "bidding" process. Believe it or not, the wedding planning process for her is fun. It's a lot of work, but "curating" her own wedding is enjoyable. Although I can totally understand why from a groom's perspective we just want to 99designs the problem away. :)

2. I'm not sure how you will convince the better vendors to join your program. It sounds like this is a great platform for up and coming wedding vendors, but once they get good - they won't need your service anymore. They'll have clout on Yelp or theknot or weddingwire. And people that are looking for good vendors will go seek them out.

3. Putting down a credit card is a scary thing - most of the contract stuff comes way later. Many of our vendors went through honeybook.com. What's to stop them from just going outside of your system and giving the bride and groom a better deal? How do you ensure you will have lock-in?

4. Maybe you'll charge money for the bidding process? Or try to place ads?

This is a great space to disrupt...I hope a product like this becomes popular at some point because weddings can be really tough to plan.
So you're saying it's specifically less efficient for a write-heavy tables, correct?

I generally prefer auto-incremented integers, but UUIDs are very useful for client-generated records (like for an app/website that's built for offline usage).
Erlang may be useful for coordinating computation tasks, but, yes, even with HIPE it is not a good numerical language on its own.

It would be interest to re-engineer a language today that tries to fit into Erlang's niche but has a stronger performance focus. Rust, Cloud Haskell, and Go all sort of cluster in the area I'm thinking about, but none are quite what I'm thinking of. Cloud Haskell is probably closest but writing high-performing Haskell can be harder than you'd like. Rust shows you don't have to clone Erlang's immutability and all the associated issues it brings with it for inter-process safety, but Rust of course is "just" a standard programming language next to what Erlang brings for multi-node communication.
Apply HN: paralleltext.io – Learn languages by reading
http://paralleltext.io enables a simple way of learning languages by reading and listening human translated books in parallel.

Problem: Learning languages is a difficult process that requires hard work no matter if you choose the academic way or to use existing apps. It also requires continuity, a key factor which is hard to achieve with the available methods.

Solution: We want to change that by combining the learning experience with the pleasure of reading and listening to a book. A large number of book translations is available, but we think they're being underutilized for this purpose.

Progress: We built a tool that matches human translated paragraphs from ebooks in all European languages and a novel interface to read them. Now we are focusing on adding more books and more engaging features.

Market: Language learning and publishing

Team: We are two developers, both with product management experience living in Berlin.

Feedback: we got amazing feedback so far (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/3x2tux/paralleltextio_improve_your_knowledge_of_foreign/)
aria2c supports HTTP(S), FTP, SFTP and Torrent/Metalink.

Many applications (youtube-dl through --external-downloader) can use aria2c as a "downloader backend".

aria2c + https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2 offers a very fast, portable and simple download manager.
> ALWAYS spend time with your future boss prior to accepting.

Agreed, this is really effective albeit sadly not very common. You could say something like, "Hey, I thought the interview went really well, but I'd like to get together for an hour or so and just talk about software methodology and about your company's products to see if we're on the same page," but what you're really doing is interviewing your new boss. I don't think any good hiring manager will turn down a request like this.
I visited San Francisco last week (for the Microsoft Build conference).

Having read here on HN about the housing problems and high rents I was surprised to see quite a lot of poorly maintained buildings, if you go a bit outside the centre. From my perspective, there seems lots of room for building and improvement. They could take down blocks and build more densely while improving quality. As in all US cities, a lot of room is used by cars.

Looking at my hometown Amsterdam, there are places like Java Eiland, (https://www.amsterdam.nl/javaeiland/) an old harbor dock where they built 8500 high quality appartments housing 18.000 people, on an area of only 1.3km x 130m. I think solutions like that could work in San Francisco too.