skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in a similar situation, with a few kinks: I'm in Europe (where skilled developers are seen as prize cattle), did a few years of management (which were OK) and made the horrible mistake of going into post-sales at a US multinational.

My days are filled with e-mails, meetings with customers, PowerPoint decks and discussions about product features, and even though I'm in what passes for a senior "technical" position all people care about are sales quotas and bonus targets and my manager is clearly incompetent to run a technical team - all he cares about is making quota.

Lots of lip service towards customer satisfaction and ethical selling, but mostly passing the buck onto other teams and partners.

I do get around a lot, which includes getting a lot of face time with interesting people I might not otherwise have met if I'd stuck to a development role and do a fair amount of cool demos (whenever I'm given enough time to prepare) but the agony of not being able to build stuff and just pushing prepackaged solutions onto a customer is driving me nuts.

Pay is OK (slightly less than what I made as a manager, but with a bigger, utterly impossible to reach bonus), I get to work from home, free trips to the HQ, etc. the tech is good enough, and improving. But what irks me is the baseline, unspoken attitude of "sell and be done with it".

I'm respected for my technical skills outside the company but constantly grilled about closing the sale (even when the customer doesn't want or need what we sell - which is one of the current trendy things in our industry) so I, for one, would very much like to go back to a development role.

Let this be a cautionary tale of sorts - sales might seem like an easy half-way position towards something else, but there is more than one kind of intellectual burnout.
portrait page layout on a landscape screen when what we really want is multi-column landscape layout
If there was a sane way to set up an anonymous sftp server, never mind having web browsers actually understand sftp links, things may change.
To be fair, all UA say is:

> Your security questions will also be used as part of upcoming two-factor authentication to further protect your account

The stupid nature of the 'enum answers' aside, this doesn't necessarily mean they're not implementing 2FA properly. They might have 2F set up as securely as the very best practitioners, then have this security question crap layered on top. We need to know for sure that they think the security question is one of the two factors before tearing them a new one.
A lot of this thread is in regard to development in Java, but a lot of the noise and "unnecessary complexity" also involves end user applications.

I spent a lot of time supporting Java based desktop applications. I've seen a situation where a single organisation sells two products. And the installation guide basically says "these applications need an absolutely correct JRE version, down to the point release, or they will fail to run. And they will only use the system default, and don't have any concept of bundled Java. And they don't support the same version of Java, so our recommendation is to give users two desktops".

And I know that's not Java's fault, but when a certain monopoly releases every single application with that anti-pattern, you get pretty sick of see null pointer exception errors because a user applied a (two year old) Java security update.
I've been looking for someone with this perspective. Do you think it is just AI and ML? Do you feel the same way about data scientists, data analyst (not actuary,statisticians,mathematicians, etc)?

What other domains do you recommend instead?
In particular this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12109727

about some hard-to-find tools that help with Microsoft mail (Live.com / outlook.com / hotmail.com etc). There may have been some similar strange link for Gmail - i only have access to my phone right now, so I can't check my notes.

I believe that was the thing I was missing from my setup (and it was frustrating to debug as mail simply disappeared).

Between a (for now) cacert-certificate (which I think is treated as "self-signed" for most purposes) and SPF - both Google and MS appear to accept my mail. I've turned off ipv6 - if you want it, it might take some extra work.

I'm planning to move to opensmtp "when I have time" and maybe dbmail for the store - now I'm on exim and dovecot.

I get little spam - I do have greylisting set up. What I get is generally to emails leaked in the linked-in and Adobe attacks. I should change those addresses, and reject/black hole the old ones. But for now it's manageable - and is filtered out in my "misc" folder by simple address-basrd filtering (exim .forward file)

(I generally give each site a different mail, se eg my hn profile).
> and that "free speech" is only about forbiding the government from limiting the expression of opinions, not of anyone else.

> This is true, and a big problem.

This is not true, it is a product of people confusing two different things:

> the first amendment to the constitution of the United States

> the unalienable right to freedom of speech

The american tradition is founded on the principle that there are natural rights that can never be given (as people are born with them), only taken away. Among these rights it's the right to freedom of speech and of assembly.

The first amendment (along with the rest) only clarifies the role the founding fathers intended to the government they created: one that shouldn't be allowed to infringe on these rights by legislation or otherwise.

The first amendment doesn't give the right to freedom of speech, only prevents the government from infringing on it, that's right. But it doesn't follow from that that private companies cannot infringe on anyone's freedom of speech, it is a non sequitur.

Private companies can and do infringe on people freedoms of speech and assembly all the time, and what happened to this reporter seems to be another example of that.

The thing is: it is perfectly in their right to do so, as it is very clear in their terms of service that they reserve that right, the right to control what can and what cannot be published on their properties.

The confusion comes from the fact that most of these companies (social media companies) like to pretend that's not the case, that they are proponents of freedom of speech even when it is inconvenient to the powerful.

For an example of that see the Arab Spring, what was publicized in those days as "a revolution powered by social media", "a media where people can freely express their thoughts and exercise their freedom of assembly without government interference".

As we came to realize in the subsequent years is that it was only true because 1) governments underestimated something they still didn't fully understand and 2) there was a temporary alignment between the position of these companies and that one of the revolutionary.

This alignment is over now. Governments worldwide pressure and succeed in making these companies to remove inconvenient speech from their services (examples abound).

In other cases perfectly valid forms of speech gets removed, suppressed or banned from their services for no other reason as they don't align to these companies goals. It's their right to do so and they exercise it.

The important thing is: let's not pretend they are not suppressing speech, curtailing freedom of assembly only because it's their right to do so.

They do curtail freedom of speech (on their premises), they do ban speech that is valid but inconvenient to their goals and objectives. As is their right. It is just that they lose the claim to be (as in the case of a particular service) "bastions of freedom of speech" when they do so.
You think OAuth didn't take off because people are too aware of security/privacy issues? I think it's the exact opposite reason.
Sure you have to.

It is no different than having to learn what gcc, clang, Visual C, aCC, SunPro, xlc, icc ... do to your C code outside of what ANSI C specifies how it should behave.

And even for those parts that the ANSI C specifies how it should behave, those compilers do not generate the 100% same code.

Also one needs to know how the underlying OS and CPU handle that generated code as well.

Specially interesting regarding the understanding of the underlying OS on UNIX platforms, is to learn how much the platform deviates from the POSIX specification in regards implementation specific semantics, because POSIX just like ANSI C, leaves platforms quite some freedom of implementation.

Understanding the target platform is always required.
Protect your data with Veracrypt, based on the Truecrypt codebase
> WCC unlinks machine code into a library, allowing you to interact with the object code and reliably include and call its functions from your own code, as if it were a shared system library rather than a black box.

Shared library is as much of a black box as an executable.
I guess the law needs to change then.

I couldn't agree more - but then, what incentive is there for legislators who are technically illiterate, and have attended many cheque-laden seminars in which airline lobbyists have told them they don't need to do anything about that nasty regulation stuff. Imposing strict universal security requirements would be deemed anti-competitive, and could potentially result in businesses suing the federal government for loss of profits.

Personally, I think the future comprises a frothing sea of crapware, leaky everything everywhere, and nobody taking responsibility. The most probable ultimate response will be a "war on hackers", after someone pulls something spectacular off, which will generate trillions of dollars in profits for enforcement agencies, and give the public that warm fuzzy "somebody is being bombed and it isn't me" feeling.
Solve a problem for yourself! Ideas are in our everyday lives - look closely, those things/services/tools you 'wish' could exist, you just might spot a niche - then build it for 'you', and you'll realise how many people needs this product/tools/services!
> What good is a beautiful station if there is a 4-hour gap between trains on a weekday?

Transit begets transit. The shame in urban planning is the reactionary cycle that engages the public process of investing in efficient and multi-mode transit.

In the Bay Area, I'm continually frustrated by the lack of Caltrain service. A light rail system with the local Caltrain service density and a headway of <15m could provide the backbone of a huge number of bike commuters. In my experience, Caltrain > driving for most commutes in the SF <=> SJ corridor and having adequate last mile solutions. The challenge now is to transform the chore & appointment traffic into public transit friendly opportunities.
RAID controllers cannot be relied upon to do check sums, as most RAID controllers do not possess this capability, and of those which do, their firmware is opaque and buggy, and therefore cannot be trusted.

If you care about your data, never use hardware RAID, and always use ZFS or Oracle ASM.

mdadm(8) is a good start on GNU/Linux if one is forced to run on an (older) operating system version with only ext3 or XFS, however while it provides administration consistency and scales to many systems, it does not provide data checksumming, and therefore no data corruption detection and no self healing capabilities like Oracle ASM or like (Open)ZFS.
Most mobile browsers can't the, last time I checked. Although, it's easy enough to read PDF with so many options on Android, but opening another viewer and then zooming, scrolling is just painful. PDF might guarantee the formatting but I think it should only matter when it comes to printing.

Besides that, fixed size containers and fluid grids give plenty of flexibility with web documents. So in case, the author intends to have fixed formatting, I think it's achievable with HTML and CSS.
Great. I wish there could be charts of the monthly cash rate, also it would be nice to mention how much maintenance time and cost of servers and such...
> Actually taking a degree as an experienced adult was a blast and I can really recommend it.

I couldn't agree more.

When I was 20-something I dropped out of Uni and started a career in public and media relations.

For several years, though, I had been making websites on the side, mostly for friends and acquaintances, as a sort of hobby. However I was becoming good at that and I was starting to get paid good money. So, after thinking about making a career change for several years, I finally decided to became a web developer full-time.

At some point, though, I realised that, while I was knowledgeable enough to build websites for small clients and earn a living, I didn't have a solid theoretical background. Software development, to me, was a passion, not just a way to pay my bills, and I wanted to know more.

So, at age 34, I started a bachelor degree in IT, majoring in software development (despite the name, it was quite similar to what would be identified as a CS degree in the US).

It was one of the most interesting periods of my life. I realised for the first time how valuable education really is. I had to work part-time jobs and study at the same time and that was somehow hard but I have a feeling that having to deal with (moderate) difficulties made me stronger (I'm lucky, my life, generally speaking, has been relatively easy as a whole).

For some reasons, some of the other students decided that I was a sort of authoritative figure (possibly because of my relatively advanced age) and started to ask for help whenever they couldn't really grasp something.

That helped me to discover that sharing ideas with others makes you a much better developer. So I started going to Meetups and talk to clever people and exchange ideas. Having those connections helped me to find a much better job as soon as I finished my degree.

Needless to say, when I decided to leave my job to become a developer (I was already over 30 by then) everyone told me that it was a bad idea. Same story when I told my friends that I would go back to Uni. However it worked out well for me and I'm happy now.
nonsensical rant is nonsensical....
And PDF is bad because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author. The author's formatting might work on a single screen, but it sure as hell won't work on the multitude of devices that access the web.

PDF guarantees the end print result, but it shouldn't be used for anything else.
Password is the ultimate form of security through obscurity.
Ask HN: Who are the leading woman founders?
we hear lot about the male founders who created started their startup and make it big. And these guys are are well respected in the community or talked about.

Are there any woman counterpart for the same ?
The next big thing is not my concern (2005)
I just wish that PDFs were more developer friendly, from what I've seen they're kind of a painful format (not that the modern web page is any easier to read the source of but still)
>Hypothetical eyes make no bugs shallow.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/who-actually-reads-the-c...
What mobile PDF readers do you recommend? I’ve been longing for zoom fixation and continuous scrolling but had no idea this existed in current apps.
Quoting https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056

@eugeneglybin Proprietary though it is, DOC[X] is easier to reflow to fit my screen. Also, I guess PDF fans don't use mobile screens enough.

Reflow isn't about PDF per se, it is about the underlying reader being used.

That said, it is certainly a much better alternative than DOC[X]. Different versions of Microsoft Word tend to produce different output for the same document.

With PDF, you are guaranteed the same output upon printing to any device; which isn't quite the case with DOC[X].
I think meeting new people is a great way to find startup ideas if you personally don't have any. I am collaborating with two different friends that were complete strangers prior to a couple a months for fun and both the ideas are not mine. I am working hard to make sure both gets good traction.
That's why when you're trying to print professionally, you're gonna use the original software and not something that try to re implement it. I know it's sad, because open source, but when a (good) standard exist that is closed source, we have to made due, till something arguably better exist.
> I think this is very easy verify: just climb down the abstraction ladder and try to solve some particular problem without those abstractions. If you then find yourself yearning for monads, macros or whatever else, then no - you haven't.

I yearn for things that don't actually make me more productive at times.

"Will this save more time than it costs?"

Lots of possible things influencing that to forget or poorly estimate.

You're right that going back to basics and seeing the pain points that arise (or go away!) is informative, however.
But myself, and I know I am not alone, firmly believe especially regarding HA and ZFS that following anything other than the KISS principle is pain upon pain upon pain.

Rarely have truer words been written. Highly available, highly reliable storage means keeping it as simple as possible, but no simpler. I wonder how long will it take before computer professionals at large realize this?
Y combinator real life application: recursive memoization in JavaScript
Pretty sure you can't do anything when you're not connected to the internet.
I see a lot of people who find these privacy issues creepy. They might not necessary care enough to get off google, gmail or facebook, but care enough to install an ad blocker, and I presume declining to use facebook to login to some place.
”with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore”

I really can’t agree with you there. Despite that, the reading experience suffers a lot IMO.
do not use -X without having read the manual, it can break redirects and other things.

from the curl(1) manpage:

-X, --request <command>

(...)

Normally you don't need this option. All sorts of GET, HEAD, POST and PUT requests are rather
invoked by using dedicated command line options.

This option only changes the actual word used in the HTTP request, it does not alter the way
curl behaves. So for example if you want to make a proper HEAD request, using -X HEAD will not
suffice. You need to use the -I, --head option.

The method string you set with -X will be used for all requests, which if you for example use
-L, --location may cause unintended side-effects when curl doesn't change request method
according to the HTTP 30x response codes - and similar.

PUT is indicated by using -T / --upload-file, POST by -d / --data or any --data-foo option (eg. --data-raw).
DELETE is the only HTTP method in the parent list that needs -X to be used.
Are there really any PDF viewers that does reflow? I’ve never heard of that before.
Playing devil's advocate: If I go on his Facebook page, what will I find? The usual "we are surrounded by terrorists they let in, etc." pediga-style litany or some well researched papers from a "middle east analyst" ?
If the underlying document doesn't embed the fonts it uses, then the reader would perform substitution. This causes different outputs on different readers.

It's more of a PDF producing application problem that fail to either embed the rather uncommon or proprietary fonts.
Would an email signup alternative be a more friendly option? Google Plus, Twitter, or none at all?
I guess 'all the straws' is as many as you can remove. If you removed any more than that, you would have to put some back to return to bale of zero straws.
Beware the Senior Software Engineer
> Ageism is definitely a problem in software, but not in other specialized fields, which suggests to me that it is fixable.

It will take decades to fix if ever, and the fixed state won't be recognizable.

In my opinion, ageism in software exists mostly because it is a fashion business, and (statistically speaking, and rather objectively), older people are not as good at catering to the latest fashions. This also happens in the real fashion business (that of clothes, makeup etc) and also in marketing and advertising, and acting.

The fields in which ageism is not a problem are mostly regulated fields (medicine, law, mechanical engineering), where someone can die or lose their freedom as a result of malpractice. People in these fields often need to prove they are up to date with recent methods and findings to keep their certification. I, for one, would NOT like to have to prove competence with hadoop or Angular (and then .NET WinForms, followed by WPF the following year, followed by Node.js the next one) to not lose my license -- and if software developers ARE licensed, the requirements will probable [d]evolve that way.
Gradle 3, due out soon, will use Kotlin instead of Apache Groovy as its prefered language for writing build scripts and plugins.
Let's hope the smart city doesn't get sponsored by Google or Facebook :/ at that point the city dwellers will be owned by the mega corporations.

http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/obama-cuba-internet-google/
Lots of people talk about this, but do they really occur that often? I don't seem to encounter many such situations that can be solved much better than current offerings. As a fresh graduate there is a lack of domain experience as well for me to understand (or know at all) the pain points in various industries.

Perhaps I'm just not thinking out of the box enough.
The PDF creating application needs to ensure that the document is accessible. Adobe Reader (on desktop) does support reflow [0]. Adobe Reader on Android also supports reflow [1].

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...

[1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-free-PDF-reader-on-Andr...
Exactly! One of the big pain points in HTTP/1.1 is that you don't know who the client is. You get six or more connections at a time, so you have to correlate them together using cookies or other ids. It's easy to proxy and cache so you don't know if it's a single person on the other end or many people. Since there are so many connections they close in a minute or less so you have figure out which connections are the same user from earlier.

Now with HTTP/2 there's only one connection and it stays open for a long time so that connection info can be used to identify a client session. It's TLS only so much less likely to be a proxy, since the proxy needs a trusted certificate added to the browser. And also connections to a third-party domain are shared across all pages, so if you are doubleclick.net you know the same user is browsing different sites.

The new protocol makes tracking users much easier and fixes a huge privacy problem in HTTP/1.1.
You should not confuse or conflate Java the language with Java the virtual machine. They really are quite distinct technologies.
PGP solves that problem, and yours. Running your own MTA comes at a price. You need a domain, certificates, your ISP needs to not block port 25, possibility of abuse (so separate IP, server, domain, certificates), server which costs money needs to be maintained and draws power and requires space, and another responsibility to maintain. Disclaimer: It is possible containers mitigate some of the above problems. It is also a legacy protocol. Just run PGP on top of it and use any free provider out there. If you don't use that you can assume Google's oversight (the NSA) sees your mail.
Usually it is the PDF that is at fault, or rather, the assumptions made by the author (or the authoring software). A PDF meant to be portable and usable for a long time should embed all fonts used. If you get different fonts and sizes in different viewers, that tends to hint at a lack of embedded fonts, leaving the PDF viewer to substitute using its fall back fonts.

Most PDFs I come across tend to come with embedded fonts and work just fine on any decent PDF-viewer.
Oh My God..Can You Believe This
PDFs are great. Things look the same everywhere. Word docs on the other hand god help you if there is some minor difference in Word version / printer model etc and you're shooting for consistency.