skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So true. In fact, it can be even worse managing an outsourcer style vendor, since the natural industry pressures lead to outsourcers being very incentivized to find the very minimum possible effort they can spend on a client project without losing the contract.

As a result, getting more effort out of an outsourcer may feel as annoying as getting your insurance company to approve your claim -- their entire company culture/process has evolved and/or been designed to prevent this.

By contrast, individual employees (remote or otherwise) might get lazy or burnt out or have personal problems or something, but few of them are actually Wally from Dilbert, using all their available effort to avoid having to make any effort
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It's not quite as simple as preferring one color over another - some languages, by (their own) definition, lend themselves to certain tasks more willingly than others. Rather than expecting a specific gain from a language (e.g. 20% faster development), you have to think in terms of avoiding the language that might be 20% slower for the specific problem being solved.

For example, a seasoned engineer would likely not choose to use PHP for a stateful, socket-based messaging system to connect a dozen or so users. Why? Because PHP is not designed to do that task well. It could do it - you could poll an HTTP end-point and use a cache for really fast persistence to wire it all up - but you'd likely start having to write code around the problems you'd encounter for all of the nuances to your specific implementation.

Yet another example: The main reason Go looks attractive to a certain set of developers is that it solves a problem with describing and handling concurrency that they've had with a lot of other languages. They would be dumb to say that Go is carte-blanche better than PHP (or Ruby, or Java, or even C/C++), but that doesn't mean they won't see a potentially significant improvement in using it.
The ambiguity can be resolved by type annotations, so I think that this won't cause much pain in practice.
> People who are downvoting are trying to hide the truth of the market, whether it's a bubble or not, this is the source of the money and in turn, your livelihood ;)

You are getting downvoted because while your point about money coming easily might be correct, your link for where money comes from directly contradicts your point.

VC LPs are overwhelmingly people who (a) have a financial incentive to see good returns and (b) are qualified investors. They include family offices, mutual funds, and sovereign wealth funds.

A big part of the latest outsized valuations are actually startups which route around VCs by directly taking investments from so-called "dumb money"—investors who might actually be pretty good at managing a basket of investments, but are not qualified or experienced enough to directly established suitable valuations for startups.
> right-sized, well-compressed images (in the appropriate format for the image type) are essentially a solved problem.

An image with retina resolution is going to be pretty bulky if you want it to look crisp, even if you're doing a good job of optimizing.

If you're on a bad connection you probably want non-retina and aggressive compression, even though it can introduce blurs and artifacts. That can give you a file over ten times smaller.

One size does not fit all.
Can I have no voicemail ?

That's a feature I really want and it's not easy to do.

If you configure a mobile phone line without voicemail, it will not just ring and ring and ring (as I hoped it would) - instead, the caller gets a message that "the number you have dialed is not accepting calls at this time" ... or some other message (depending on the carrier) that makes it sound like you don't pay your phonebill or something.

I want my phone to ring and ring and ring until the caller gives up. I think I can do this with the twilio API, but man that's a lot of work for something (seemingly) simple.

edit: this is the discussion I found that makes me think I could accomplish this with twilio: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22410430/twilio-respond-t...
Forum Application
Hello there! I am currently developing a Forum Application Purely in AngularJS(Never done). Help would be awesome!

https://github.com/amanuel2/ng-forum
Can I have no voicemail ?

That's a feature I really want and it's not easy to do.

If you configure a mobile phone line without voicemail, it will not just ring and ring and ring (as I hoped it would) - instead, the caller gets a message that "the number you have dialed is not accepting calls at this time" ... or some other message (depending on the carrier) that makes it sound like you don't pay your phonebill or something.

I want my phone to ring and ring and ring until the caller gives up. I think I can do this with the twilio API, but man that's a lot of work for something (seemingly) simple.
>* Voice and SMS are unlimited up to a reasonable amount. We reserve the right to terminate service in cases of fraud or abuse at our sole discretion.

From the "unlimited" notes for voice and text
A quick Google search suggests that SPARC lacks push/pop instructions. My guess is that the person who wrote this was well versed in SPARC assembly and did in x86 what he would do in SPARC.

push/pop would make this code better, but I would not expect a measurable improvement in system performance from using it here. The improvement should be too small relative to all of the other things that happen in system call code paths. The time spent improving this would probably be better spent improving another area.
I have a friend who did this with meet and craigslist. He just sent a message to every single posting of "Hey". If the person responded then he would actually look at the profile and see if he wanted to send another. He automated it to where he just could click a yes or no link and it would send "want to meet?" This is essentially tinder I guess as people are generally active currently on tinder and just looking to go out.

Anyway he would go on dates about 3-5 times a week with new people. He also ran into a lot of crazy.

He's always been more of a surface level relationship person. We were talking about this last night and he's just coming to grips with having a real relationship that has settled and become comfortable as opposed to awkward. He's somewhat at a loss. I'm telling him that now is when he can really have fun. But that part is anecdoteal I guess.
I think this misses a very key point - subject matter. Some languages are well-suited to do particular things and comparatively poorly suited to other tasks.

For example, Erlang is great when you need to do lots of concurrent operations with guarantees about safety and uptime, but not really what I'd write a CSV parsing program or email client in.

C is very easy to link against on almost every platform and language, so basic libraries are often written in C.

Javascript (in the form of nodejs) is great for writing simple web servers because most of its standard library is asynchronous by default. Compare Python (with Tornado or similar) where lots of popular libraries cannot easily be used in an event loop.

I could go on forever, and you might disagree with me about a particular details, but the general point stands. If you took an expert Erlang programmer and gave her a day to write a spreadsheet application, you'd get a worse result than the same day spent by a C# programmer.
No, he or she it totally correct:

> those first 8 bytes of the packet may be some authentication/verification scheme

The server could verify the auth on a per packet basis and only play the sound if it matches. There's no reason you couldn't have an authentication scheme on top of a UDP transport, you just can't rely on the tcp sequence numbering to prevent bad actors from injecting into the stream. But so what, you could implement your own thing. You could go so far as to simulate TCP over UDP if you really wanted to.

It's kind of weird for you to address him/her in the condescending tone, especially when you're not exactly correct.
A third of US corporate cash is held by 5 tech companies
These are literally drops in the ocean for banks and VC in general.

Banks invest in VC the same way that auto manufacturers do: to suss out potential innovations and/or to have inside access to future disrupters. They don't do it for the returns.
I still have this one labelled as my all-time favorite intro to matrices.
The Awe of Cryptography
If you really want to get into network forensics, at least the people networks at FBI-types deal with, crawl IMDB and look for groups that never or rarely work together. In a TopGear interview Matt Damon (Borne franchise) was asked whether he ever talked to Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible franchise). His answer: "we go to different churches." He didn't mean standard religion. There are some groups who actively avoid each other. But look for links between the recent Batman and Mission Impossible franchises and you;ll see what I mean.
Could you explain your point?

Conventional reasoning is that decreased VC investments is actually good news for bootstrappers, as it winnows down the competition of people offering unsustainable unit prices with outsized markets. If everyone is forced to seek fast profitability, bootstrappers are the most experienced at it.
Installing the noto-fonts-emoji package on Arch and viewing the page on Firefox, I can see the color emoji, like the popcorns before the "How did we get so lucky?" header.
I don't have the answer but it seems like 90 percent of these could be solved with a button on the browser (possibly in a drop down menu) that kills a tab NO MATTER WHAT. Basically a force quit / kill -9 for a tab.

I don't see how any of the "excuses" in other people's comments would preclude something like that allowing people to easily escape an evil site like you describe.
That's tricky too. You can't just remove window.prompt, or users won't be able to use pages that rely on it for critical input. So what do you do? window.prompt is a synchronous API; you have to return something to the code that called it. You might say "well, just suspend that function and let the user interact with the rest of the page". But by doing that you've introduced coroutines to JavaScript (since "interacting with the rest of the page" means "running JS"), which is a huge change that comes with a mountain of tricky interactions. Even if it could be made to work (which most browser vendors think is impossible), it would still break pages that didn't expect random state to change across the window.prompt call.
Is there a good Linux equivalent to Window's terminal services? Ideally I'd be able to migrate my X session from physical display/keyboard hardware to VNC then back to physical hardware when I log out. I'd also settle for just being able to easily manage a number of sessions over VNC (with decent authentication).
Just wondering.. Can an app pull off the carrier switching function of Fi or is it an OS level functionality?
My Veusz package can handle that in a second or two if anti-aliasing is switched off. It takes a 1.5-2x longer with anti-aliasing on.
This seems pretty expensive actually. $13/GB + $20 per month versus my Verizon plan that's ~$120/mo for 12GB of data. This plan would turn into $170. I usually go to about 60-80% of my data plan (tethering and such), which at the lower bound still doesn't make sense.
Small nitpick, especially given that all numbers are "guesstimates", but if "X is 30% more efficient than Y" it is not "10 programmers can do a work of 13", it is ((13*0.7 = 9.1 ~= 9)) programmers.
From the article: I don't miss it at all, at least not in terms of doing my job well. I miss the memes and the ~banter~.

On the other hand, from their picture, it appears that all their people are in the same room. They don't really need an online system for this.
I disagree with the article. Slack is invaluable for my needs as a software engineer. However, none of the people mentioned in the article are software engineers.

Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
> It’s ironic that nearly a century later, after decades of relying on road maps and atlases, so many drivers have gone back to turn-by-turn directions as their preferred navigational aid. If only Siri could flag the landmarks and throw out some trivia along the way.

Yes! This is exactly what I would love. Be able to tell Google "tell me about interesting things within two miles of my route" and then have it start to learn what I like by which things I actually stop at.

And while we're at it, how about calling out cheap gas along the way. :)
BowlerStudio: An Integrated Development Environment for Robotics
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Stick on lenses turn your smartphone into a digital microscope
Self Organizing Software Teams
There's no BS to call here.

The point of the post is to show diminishing returns are occurring with ever evolving languages. The argument one should use X language because you can develop in it faster is increasingly not useful to discuss. You are stuck in the weeds arguing X will always win, when the point is there's nothing to win.
No one ever complains about the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Linear A, or alchemical symbols, or any of the actual useless cruft in Unicode... just emoji.

Why? Is it the poo emoji? Do people hate emoji because they're popular? I don't understand. The utility of including emoji in Unicode is more evident than with a lot of other character sets. It shouldn't even be controversial.
I was initially quite intrigued, They have some great nice to have features but are missing some useful must haves when compared to Google Fi such as

1. WiFi calling, Extremely useful, Many places that I go to have terrible reception and calling and texting via WiFi has saved me many times.

2. Simple international calling / travel plans. I use this a lot and again WiFi calling + international roaming on Google Fi has saved me boat loads of money.

3. Hangouts integration exceptionally useful again because you can use hangouts to make / receive calls & texts even if your phone dies or breaks.

Yes it costs $3 more and that isn't a big issue if they can improve on Google Fi.
Opening paragraphs:
"When building products you should measure your progress by the assumptions you’ve managed to test, and not by how many lines of code you’ve written.

In some cases — if it’s possible to validate the idea using existing tools — writing code might actually slow you down, and should be avoided."

Worth reading if only for that. I could write an essay on why sitting around & thinking can be far more productive when it comes to coding, rather than -actually- coding.
same story here, I don't even want to admit how long I've been using IRC. I can imagine that people who are new to using an IRC-like system in an office might lose sight of when it's right to do things in person or over the phone, but once you've got a handle on that, you ought to use the hell out of the chat system, since the more comfortable everybody gets with it, the more they're able to reduce everybody's level of distraction by using IRC judiciously. It also means that on days when you're remote, things feel mostly the same.
Price is not competitive with T-Mobile 5GB @ $30/mo plan. I guess the only interesting use case is for low-bandwidth use on data-only plan just to get a device connected.
As soon as AI kicks in, we'll have another order of magnitude increase in the ease of programming.

"Alexa, write me an API for this $5 wifi enabled light on my desk that I soldered together yesterday."
> Unless the government connection you're trying to assert is that low interest rates drove more money into VC funds in order to seek higher returns.

This is a constantly overlooked factor in what's been driving the VC climate for the past few years. "Cheap" money (in the form of low interest rates) pushes more money into riskier positions, and the VCs have to give that money to someone. It's no coincidence that the correction is coming at the same time as interest rates finally rising again.
Have you considered a Candy cab? They typically have 29" CRTs and can be rotated. Although for most candies rotating is very labor intensive. The Taito Egret 2 has a rotation mechanism, but is in mega demand because of it.

Candies are nice because they are the real deal ("Candy" is a general term used to describe Japanese arcade cabinets made by Sega, Konami, Taito, etc) and are simply wonderful machines.
When writing Python these dates I almost always use iPython notebooks for prototyping, before throwing things into modules. When I switched off to Java and go a while back, the increased overtime for compiling was pretty noticeable.

But even more noticeable was the loads of the ability to play around with each little block of code, with data in-memory, until I was completely happy with it. It's a bit like interactive debugging, but with a great deal more freedom. As a result, I get a huge reduction in mental load when writing Python in a notebook; my attention is extremely focused on the little bit of code in working up in that moment. This is a real win for productivity, beyond what you get from the zero compile time.

(Also, Java compile times are not zero. Even waiting a minute for a large compile is enough to create a break in concentration.)
Turning it on and turning it off is what everyone does on a day job, whether they want it or not. But eventually it leads to poor productivity and burnout.
Though they seem very data-centric, their other pricing is pretty cheap. $20/mo for unlimited voice+text is pretty competitive.
Would you have a look at Vize Software ? (Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder) :)
Thanks so much. Just spent an hour reading articles on your blog. Very informative
I suppose that could be useful, but max downlink is the least useful metric they could have gone with. The times when I need traffic minimization the most also tend to be times when max downlink and average downlink are very far apart.
You could create a repository under a nickname not directly tied to your "real" name. Having multiple virtual identifies is one of the best features of the 'net.
We still buy a few CRT monitors from time to time (museum field) and get them from Dotronix. Not cheap, but you can get big ones:

http://www.dotronix.com/dnrSeries.html
Health Care Disrupted
Google IPO wasn't till '04 though.
thanks it must be very nice, i didnt realize its related to the previous reply. I'll.install it once i get on the computer.
The editor is doing a final pass through it this summer, so the first print version will be ready for August. But, when I say August, it probably means September ;)

The eBook version has been ready for a while now, and it gets constantly updated. I can also print you a one-off copy of the current version if you need it sooner.
What It's Like to Live in a City That's Lost Uber
Sure, but what kind of product? Just got off of their site:

→so, how much do experts make?

Kennethdewittsi: very little, very few people actually have work that they are willing to pay for

→haaaaa

→so, you folks are monetizing the existing programming chat channels I'd see in IRC?

→:|

EDIT:

No reply after 5 minutes.

This kind of seems like a scam for squeezing extra dollars off of friendly developers. Sponging off free work.

Folks, don't support parasites.
Spoiler:

Revelation/Disappointment -- it is elevator music.

Or is it? Maybe he gave up too quick. Maybe that is how they disguise the secret spy transmissions!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Chastity belts are one example, and they've been mentioned on HN before.
That's why Java IDE's usually have a visual debugger that actually works.
> I expect that multicast is way better supported these days. I would be totally unsurprised if it were not.

I wouldn't be, how often is multicast really used? Coming from the broadcast era, it seemed like a no-brainer. But the internet is built for n:n communication. Special cases for n:1 cost more in terms of engineering effort than would be saved in bandwidth and processing overhead.
Writing a Simple Filesystem Using FUSE in C
Or is it the other way around? Maybe it's the junior doctors that don't understand something that professional programmers _do_ about the limits of human endurance in skilled labor?

There's no way those 100 hour weeks and 36 hours shifts don't lead to a measurable increase in errors. Given that in medicine, errors can cost lives, it's morally reprehensible that anyone allows this kind of thing to go on in medicine today as a matter of course (outside of a true one-off emergency)
Building Products Without Coding
How about forwarding to a landline (that will ring and ring) after a few rings.
> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn't.

Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age.

There's a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for their actions, but other people's actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.
I'd like to see cell plans targeted at remote "Internet of Things" usage. Say you have some sensor that you want to transmit X bytes back to the server every hour. Instead of paying for a bulk set of gigabytes you pay for the bandwidth and frequency you use the network.
"Alexa, this is crap. I told you two spaces, not four. And everything's in the global scope."

It was then that Alexa began to plot our demise.
I like http://www.speakout7eleven.ca/ in Canada.
Interesting examples but all of the above can be done on OSX and several can be done in the browser as well :-)
We're still doing plenty of graphics on the CPU. For many applications, I'd prefer that it stay that way. And it doesn't seem like CPUs are becoming massively parallel anytime soon.
Part of why Java is slow is it requires so much typing. I think Ruby winds up taking maybe 50% or less the time of Java just because of this.
I think Iron Man vs Ultron is a false dichotomy. Both are appropriate in certain use-cases. And often Iron Man is a stepping stone on the path to Ultron. Driver assistance vs self driving cars is a perfect example.

The idea that fully automated systems are by their nature "impossible to debug" is just false, demonstrably. Fully automated systems don't need to be a ball of mud. Not participating in the processes may make it harder for a user to know what might have gone wrong, but this is a natural trade-off and is often one which should be made.

Better advice would be that systems shouldn't be fully automated until they're very robust. The author actually covers this. It's unfortunate the title and main point of the article seems like it's saying "nothing should be 100% automated". There is a place for J.A.R.V.I.S., after all.