skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no doubt that population growth is one of the defining features of the world economy. But improving average wealth and education inevitably lowers population growth. Population growth must slow to allow further advances in poverty reduction, but I think everyone understands that population growth will slow one way or another. The question is whether it will happen through economic growth or through the four horsemen.
The q and a bit was my best part, it sounded more life direct quotes.
or just pay them.
Uber and Lyft Cancellation Fees
Curses. Foiled again by modern society.
When I worked with COBOL I mostly worked in a similar hosted setting, using only a dumb 3270 terminal to write my code. However it's not the case universally, it is/was also possible to develop COBOL code on a PC that simulated the mainframe runtime (MicroFocus COBOL, if it's still called that, is what we used).
This has nothing to do with marketing or prospects for different degrees. It doesn't matter what degree you choose -- if you go to graduate school, you'll be trained for a job that you will likely never get. That's as true in Computer Science as it is in Literature.
Hammerspoon is awesome, I've been using it for quite some time for just few basic tasks (like move a window from one monitor to another), but those have become irreplaceable part of my desktop experience.

Recently I've made this hammerspoon "plugin": https://github.com/selectnull/hammerspoon-alttab

I would love to have feedback, if anyone is interested (it's not perfect, i'm aware of few bugs, but it solves my problem most of the time).
Most LED TVs sold have a setting that you can flip from something that means store display to normal operation.
> ...

> You're right, but all you'd have to do is build cloud9 yourself.

> I recently..

There, I fixed it for you. Now why would anyone want to reinvent the wheel again?
I want this working seamlessly on the file system. That means: I see JPGs but they are lepton compressed in reality. Would be a great use case for existing file servers. How could this be (theoretically) achieved on a linux machine?
> However, in a collaborative team where everybody talks with everybody, it also means everybody distracts everybody — just a little bit. This little bit adds up over time. Even worse, while productivity increases linearly, overhead increases exponentially (orange line): with every new hire, not only do you distract one more person, but one more person distracts you.

Where does exponential come from? The naïve model (which is obviously worse than reality at the extremes, since it would at some point imply that each person is spending > 100% of their time distracting) would seem to be quadratic -- O(n^2) [0] -- not exponential -- O(k^n), which not only is clearly worse than reality for the same reason that the quadratic model is, but doesn't seem to have any coherent basis at all.

This really sounds like "lets throw some mathy-sounding words, made up numbers, and pretty-looking charts out to try to rationalize an approach we decided on based on intuition" rather than explanation of actual coherent, quantitative reasoning.

[0] proportional to the number of dyads (n(n-1))/2
Conferencing Call from a Plane
You can get administrative head count back to 1980s levels. You can also ban 7 figure salaries for University administrators. That would pretty much do it. It is a simple problem with a simple solution.
RL is huge in pornography.
A gap in the past is probably not a problem, but a gap between your last job and the job you are applying for is a big red flag. Being unemployed puts you at a disadvantage because it makes you seem less desirable.

It's not much of a stretch to image a hiring manager seeing this and thinking:

- What happened that caused this person to leave their previous job? Were they fired or laid off because they were underperforming?

- Why has it taken them 3-4 months to reach us? Have they been applying to a bunch of places and they were rejected from all of them?
Expensify: Making things more expensive.

Certainly a fitting double meaning for a company which apparently had such a weak founder team that they had to replace hierarchy with anarchy - also known as "survival of the loud and smarmy".

I'm really missing an opportunity to short private companies lately...
Should I leave a job for better pay?
Did that once with the plain Cola flavor Jones Soda. "I'm sure it'll work. Hell, it'll probably be better!"

It was not better.
I think of this quote: "Think of it differently: 2 people can pick a place to eat rather quickly; 10 is hard, but doable. 100 — impossible. Nobody will ever eat." as the leadership trap.

Sticking with the self inflicted strawman I see it this way; There are constraints on where you can eat (vegans, paleo, vegetarians, low gluten, etc.) When you have good leadership they understand the various constraints that individual team members bring to the problem. So in the "place to eat" question, the leader starts with places that already meet the constraints, and then surface any concerns about the available choices, shares the concerns with the team and solicit rankings, and then tells everyone where they are going to eat that day. If they are consistent, and they rotate through equivalent alternates over time, everyone is ok with the outcome and nobody feels left out.

A 100 people walk into a room and are told to pick a place to eat and it doesn't work because there isn't a shared understanding of resolution. Is my preference stronger than yours? Is my dietary restriction something I can impose on others? on and on. Teams are most productive when they trust their leadership and least productive when they do not.

If you want to have a high performance team, establish trust, listen to concerns, and communicate clearly respect and understanding.
I did a quick test on my iPad after I read this. I am posting my experience on twitter.

https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/753709980239466497
When we were moved to an open office plan they were quite open about it - the one and only reason for doing so is they can squeeze more people into a smaller footprint. All the garbage about "facilitating communication" is just that, garbage.
Thank you for writing this! This was a very fascinating read - very insightful.
Atlassian acquires StatusPage
I don't remember paying even the $1 to them ever and I've been using WhatsApp for a good few years. Every time the expiration date approaches, it automatically gets pushed away. Either they were just giving away subscriptions intentionally or I'm just one lucky bastard.

So, No, they never had 1 billion dollar paying customers.
She probably would have gotten a big pay bump -- if temporary -- around 1999...
Here is some light in your tunnel: biodiversity falls because the fitness landscape has suddenly and dramatically changed. Humans have put new and startling pressures on each and every ecosystem on this planet, especially, recently, through the changes associated with global warming.

Some fitness gradients are impossible to climb: genetic diversity is currency, and you need a lot of it to overcome more difficult shifts in the evolutionary landscape. As the world changes, species spend down this genetic currency (through death and selection). Now the world is impoverished.

But there is a solution: we, humans, can take our boots off the throats of the rest of God's creatures. We have the capability to be good ecological citizens of this planet, perhaps more than any other species. We can create our own energy sources; we can refine and recycle our material inputs, producing a tight, closed loop of biomass and energy around ourselves.

With this light touch on the world, the negative pressure we place on the downtrodden masses of creatures by disturbing their ecological spaces will vanish. And the denizens of Earth will then reacquire the wealth of diversity that is the natural reward of merely living.
uhm, no, sorry - the field is now called Business Intelligence according to all the job postings I keep seeing when it used to just be Report Writer (who could do his/her own stored procedures / queries).

I once spent 8 holes on a golf course taking sh*t from some farmers because my Dad pointed out I had done one of the documents they got. I felt triplely damned.
Autohotkey[1] has some of the functionality at least:

[1] https://www.google.com/?q=autohotkey
The Pepsi Challenge doesn't really work in Australia, because Pepsi here tastes like the HFCS Pepsi in the US (yergh), whereas Coke here is made with sugar and is much nicer.

I never really understood the point of the Pepsi Challenge until I went to the US and had HFCS Coke, which tastes much more like Pepsi. The same is true of Coke Zero, which the ads here loudly proclaim "tastes just like regular Coke". Yeah, regular HFCS Coke, not sugar Coke. Yuck.
Taiwan banks suspend Wincor Nixdorf ATM withdrawals after crooks steal millions
There's a certain moment in the game Cave Story where you can come back to the gunsmith who you stole your initial weapon from. He begins by being irritated at you, but then notices that the weapon has collected obvious signs of being extremely thoroughly-used. This cheers him up, and he repairs/upgrades the gun and returns it to you.

Cave Story has a Japanese author, and Japan more generally seems to think quite a bit about how tools are treated over their "lives." I'm not sure if there's a specific term in Japanese for the particular sensation of "knowing that your craftsmanship is being put to use." But there is the concept of a tsukumogami—a tool that has had so much use put into it for so long that it has become imbued with its own soul. Such objects are sometimes given funerals when they break, etc.
How Fear of Embarrassment Turned into a $11B Dollar Valuation
Just a hair under $5 a month

IF you run it continuously. hyperdeficit was talking about using VMs for teaching, where VMs would presumably be spun up and down as needed.
A Startup's Roadmap to Validation
I'd suggest Phabricator[1]. Although it was quite hard to use at first, after few months we really love it!

[1]: http://phabricator.org/
All the talks from Monitorama 2016
Todoist is a centralized todo list application. What my app does is hooks into their API, pulls out the completed items and sends an email digest to the address of your choice based on the frequency that you choose.

The premise is, if you already use todoist (or wish to start using it), then you get generate automated reports to stakeholders of the tasks you completed during the day, week, or month. There are other services that do this (IE idonthis), however it requires that you manually enter in the things you did.

It's hard to demo something that involves email, but I plan to add some screenshots to the landing page to make it more clear, I just haven't had time to do it.

In the meantime, here is a screenshot of the app and a sample email that would be delivered: http://imgur.com/a/X1I5v
What I believe the parent is referring to is that there is an acknowledged shortage of COBOL programmers. See http://blog.stafflink.ca/recruiting-tips/cobol-and-the-mainf... or just google COBOL programmers shortage. There are still plenty of COBOL programmers (and jobs) but most are 45+ with many retired or retiring shortly. Why not train replacements? Schools tend not to train students in procedural programming or mainframe programming so there's a fairly hefty ramp-up period (2-3 YEARS with the possibility that the person may leave at any time during or after training). This COBOL shortage tends to be a large reason why many companies are replacing COBOL systems with systems written in Java or .NET.

That said, mainframes and COBOL tend to be used heavily at utilities, railroads, and government entities. One of my coworkers (one of two former COBOL programmers on staff) just identified that Eversource in CT uses COBOL because of their inability to handle a certain type of id.
Feed2tweet 0.5 released
>enterprises

Yeah, well, I'll just add that to my (very long) list of reasons never to work for enterprise companies.
He man. Looks cool.. Maybe I'll extend it to just filter out any applications that have no window in the current space. Cleans up the cmd-tab list a lot
> Why not only hire people 10x better than everyone else?

Probably because a small startup working on boring things (eg, expense reports) isn't likely to attract the relative handful of exceptional geniuses who actually exist.
Please no more vertical videos.[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA
Well, of those, Java, Haskell, and Lisp (at a minimum) are completely unsuitable due to allocation and, worse, garbage collection. In a hard real-time system those are a deal breaker. (Usually. You can have deterministic allocators and guaranteed-worst-response-time garbage collectors, and then you can still prove you can meet your timing requirements, but it's not easy. Or, you can try to write those languages in a way that they never allocate after initialization, which might be possible, at least for Java.)

Python? Can't you get "method not supported" (or whatever the technical term is within Python)? That's not safety, by any stretch of the imagination. Or is there some way to prove that it can't happen, by some kind of (ahem) external tooling?

Ada I could accept. Go and Swift might be suitable. I don't know enough about Scheme or OCaml to comment.
Having gone from self-hosted to their hosted solution with both Jira and Hipchat I really wonder why they don't seem to do better sharding.

Is Jira so bad to scale in their hosted configuration that it has to be slow for everyone? Our local jira, after some experienced tweaking, was so much more responsive... it's weird.
Te tiniest GIF ever
That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs. long-term rewards.
I want you to name one time in the history of humanity, that we sustained a "Light Touch".
Too funny. I would love to see how they identify a 10x person from an 8x person.

I worked at a fortune 500 company that measured productivity via a ticketing system. "Write a device driver" was measured the same as "Change 'OK' to 'Accept' on a button." Guess what the 10x'ers did all day and what got assiged to consultants like me?

I worked at another fortune 500 company that measured programmer productivity via a ticketing system, and they focused on issues. I finished my work 6 months early with no bugs or issues, but the outsourced labor continiously generated as many issues as they fixed to the tune of roughly 80% reopen rate.

They told me I they weren't going to extend my contract and I laughed and told the lead -- I finished my work six months early with no bugs, and you are going to let me go and keep the guys to write as many bugs as fixes. They kept me and let six other overseas contractors go.

I could give dozens of other examples how people are smart enough to game the system.
An introduction to Angular 1.5 Components
Bipartisan lawmakers announce 4th Amendment Caucus to protect privacy
I wonder how alcohol ranks as a cause of preventable pregnancies. Does that count as an offset against its death rate?

If you toss alcohol, you will need to substitute some other mode of social interaction with fewer or less dangerous chemicals that will get folks out of the house and meeting new people. There are many, many people out there today who never would have existed if at least one of their ancestors had never become drunk on ethanol.

You can't just chuck it without first supplanting it from all the niches it may currently fill.
The problem is all they're measuring is the genetics of this locality, or any locality. You acquire your friends mostly through geographical proximity; in most places, the people nearest you are going to have a certain level of relatedness.

But this has less to do with friendship and more to do with geography; they might have achieved a similar result by comparing people to their neighbors.
Not limited to just those products, we have issues with BitBucket.

One example: it can sometimes take > 5 mins to merge a PR.
Very cool, thanks for explaining :)
Critical shifts in thinking for the evolving leader
The history of humanity is constantly adding new chapters.
Brexit should have been a decision about policy, but appears not to have been - that is one of the points of the article.

The EU appears to have been too complex a subject for many voters to fully understand, and there was allegedly widespread distrust of the "experts", leading to large numbers basing their decision on emotional responses instead, such as "I don't trust the experts so I'm going to do the opposite of what they recommend" and "I like this bloke who talks about listening to the 'little people' and 'taking back control'".

I know there are some people who voted Leave for well-thought-out reasons, and that I can respect, because it is rational. But most analysis suggests the majority who voted Leave did not do so for rational reasons. In which case it is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. And it is not as though this was a local or a general election - this has made England and Wales look very bad on the world stage, and is something we're all going to have to live with for a very long time.
The grounds are scientific, not logical: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1207%2Fs15327558ijbm1202...

What you are describing is the broader context of innate drive for something. Meaning is a feeling you get from satisfying certain (not all) drives.
I'm sort of sick of hearing that OCaml has crappy or crufty syntax. I like OCaml's syntax. There is just a sea of useless algol brackets in so many languages. I was sort of sad that Rust fell victim to the damn bracket. At times I don't even think Scala is that much more succinct than modern Java 8 (ala bracket indentation fun).

I remember years ago (15 years.. jesus I'm old) discovering OCaml and I couldn't believe how terse the language was for producing native code. If anything I don't like about OCaml syntax is that it actually has an enormous amount of syntactic sugar.
Yes, I learned that after the first video. :-)

(The second one is a trim from the same original.)
PHP developer here. Highly recommend Laravel if you have a choice. It's basically PHP On Rails.

Also, as someone who has been writing PHP for what many would consider too long, I can safely say that there's always tons of work to be done. Not all of it is pretty, but it pays the bills, and there's a lot of really interesting organizations out there that you can work for.
There have been versions of COBOL for PCs since the pre-Windows DOS era. Not free, but neither was anything else in those days. Unix wasn't free either, neither was most unix software.
Sure, try it. It might work better than my version. I do have some other ideas for this problem (usually, i just want to fast switch between terminal and browser) but I'd like to see what other people come up with.

Let me know if you make something.
I always took it to be Milner Language.

Prof Milner was my first CS lecturer, many years ago. Ironically the language for that course was Pascal.
Isn't that peanuts compared to other employee overhead costs?
Exactly. Talk about ulterior motives.
Fair points. I guess it wasn't super clear from the pricing example. I think, as you say, expressing the price per CPU time rather than wall clock time is what would better sell me on it.

I could actually see a pretty good use case for academic computing (think SETI at home, or the genome project) to where they could get cheaper access to CPU.
Nordic Cathedral – Alcatraz and LJ – 4k – Nordlicht 2016
...or you could learn Swift and ship real apps. You'll have something to show your friends and family. You'll go much farther once you ship real software that does something that's interesting to you.
No, that's not "what happens haha." Those are several lame and, frankly, childish excuses instead of just owning that you arrogantly and condescendingly misjudged my competence and inappropriately spoke down to me like you were the universe's gift to comprehension of error handling in Python. You should learn from the experience and assume at all times that you are not the most skilled person in the conversation. I am never the most skilled person in any conversation, which, ironically given your assertions about me earlier in this thread, allows me to learn quite a bit.

Do not project your "alpha mentality" onto me, please. I am the polar opposite of "alpha." That was all you.

You were wrong, and I didn't stoop down to assuming anything about your competence as you so desperately tried to get me to do. Instead of blaming wine like a child, you should probably objectively look at yourself and your judgments of people. Your attitude is not uncommon, and I specifically look for it when I interview.

I'd have a lot more respect for you if you'd own the mistake, but I can tell that you're not going to, so this will be my last comment in this thread as well.
Top Software Engineering Books
Hammerspoon is amazing, and even more impressively, it's amazingly well maintained and its API is incredibly well thought out by its really talented development team. It really is a must-have for anyone who wants ultimate programmatic control over OS X.

Check out the really gentle follow-along tutorial:

http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/
I think the best thing you can do to speed up HTTPS is to move to HTTP/2. Check this out: https://www.httpvshttps.com/
+1 for Boethius reference!

I didn't know about his music work. Thanks for sharing.
I thought HN was a place where snarky comments don't get upvoted. I can go to proggit for that.
None of those things immediately impact the number of dollars in his bank account, or his ability to move upward in the economy moving forward, so Joe doesn't care. "Joe, I know all of your anecdotal experience says quality of life has been declining for you and everyone you know since the 70's, but just go with it a little bit longer and it'll be ok. Check out this chart of global income levels. And this one of happiness in America. See, life is better. Just not for you."
Concord Claims 10x Performance Edge on Spark Streaming
> Why not only hire people 10x better than everyone else? It’s such a simple idea, it seems deceptively obvious.

This trope is unadulterated bullshit. The whole article sometimes seems to border on a parody of the worst premises and shallowest-possible way of assembling and managing a (software) team.

There is certainly a feeling, especially when you're a manager or an unhappy team member, that there are 0.1X employees out there - perhaps even a great many. By all means, these people should be made aware of the problem and if necessary fired (heck, I had to do that a few times). But the most self-destructive assumption you can make as a manager is to unilaterally declare yourself an "A players only" team.

The performance of people depends on many factors, including working conditions, personal situation, management style, motivation to work on a certain project. The idea that somewhere there is a pool of global "A players" and you just need to find them is not only unrealistic and ignorant, it actively harms your company by turning it into a locker room popularity pageant. The people who thrive in such an environment of arrogance and self-promotion might be the ones you want (because they project a vacuous aura of success) but they're probably not the ones you actually need.

Furthermore, you don't really need to fill your company with "rockstars", if all you're doing is building another interchangeable ad-driven mobile app. It's perfectly acceptable, probably even preferrable, to have a base group of decently-performing "grunts" who can actually work on your app without feeling depressed after a month. People who aren't exactly highly motivated visionaries but have a stable 9-5 work output are more important than many people seem to think.
The problem is that there are plenty of graduate students willing to work for peanuts.