skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Little ballsy, Raises a good point as well. I'll need to keep that in mind when I go for my first FT job
Yahoo is even now more profitable and successful than Twitter ever was. I guess Yahoo is only perceived as such a failure because they could have been Google, but the numbers themselves do not look bad. They are making money for almost 2 decades now.
My comment from the medium post:

I think the key takeaway here is: a) requirements suck always, b) figure out what the real problem is that needs to be solved, c) fashion your solution to the unique needs and culture of the team you are a part of.

Computers are hard.

I’ve been specializing in front end stuff for 4 years and it still took me a month to master the react ecosystem. It’s better than anything that came before it though by a landslide.

People whine a lot expecting everything to be easy. There is a laundry list of classic cognitive distortions present in these types of articles.

If this is literally your only requirement and no new features will ever be added: “create a page that displays the latest activity from the users, so I just need to get the data from the REST endpoint and display it in some sort of filterable table, and update it if anything changes in the server”.

Which I highly doubt, but let’s go with that premise.
What you’d really want is to be step back and look at the needs of the app. The real needs are websockets for real time, and a way to tail the oplog of the database you are using to get the latest data pushed without needing to have the websocket proxy you’ll setup poll on the server side.

The front end implementation is fairly irrelevant here, IF nothing ever changes ( yeah right ).

If that is truly the case ( it’s not, believe me ), then just use a jquery datatable plugin which updates it’s data when new websocket data comes in. That’s like 100 lines of code, done.

If you’re using mongo it’s not too hard server side because you tail the oplog, the way meteor does. If you’re using something else you might have to poll server side to get the new data, which is honestly the hardest part of this problem. The front end of this is not the issue frankly based on the requirements presented.

This is IF this is all a one off project that never changes and will never need new features or bugfixes.

If it ever needs to be changed, you do benefit a lot from using more modern technologies so instead of a lump of jquery spaghetti you have clean component api boundaries which can be easily unit tested and modified in isolation without breaking other areas of the app.

Every situation is different.

As presented, this is more of a server side problem than a front end problem. What data stores are you using, how are you going to get that data in real time, how are you going to set up a web socket server, how are you going to scale said web socket server etc.

I think that blog post comes off as attacking the wrong problem and complaining that computers are hard. It doesn’t appear the requirements were clearly understood and evaluated. Picking the right tool for the job is really a thing. Dogma is dangerous in software for sure. On that point, I agree.
Why are Nobel Prize winners getting older?
> Just FYI, this is not sarcasm, it's ironic humor. Not the same thing. Sarcasm is "the use of irony to mock or convey contempt" which is obviously not what you meant.

Just FYI, you were humorless in your interpretation of his comment. Humorless is "unable to see humor in things when most others do."
Oh. It's cool to try Vim.
I think the reason for the location is due to the proximity to our 3 letter agencies. Thus the ability/requirement to tap into their infrastructure.
What do you duo instead? I want to get into embeded/systems development or marine (ship systems) development -- but the vast majority of that work seems to be DoD and/or require more than Public Trust clearance which I refuse to get.

Web Dev is just so easy to get, and pays well, at the moment the temptation is hard to ignore.
Fair enough. Your original comment did not make this distinction.

I dug and found https://www.fiala.me/pubs/papers/sc12-redmpi.pdf the title of which is "Detection and Correction of Silent Data Corruption for Large-Scale High-Performance Computing."

They state that for a cray there was a double bit flip about 1x/day for 75k modules. To (probably incorrectly) extrapolate, if you have a server with 16 modules that would be equivalent to a single double failure about once every 13 years.
Ill add people doing COBOL, C, and C++ to that list. Rate of change is slower. People are more conservative about what they're doing. Reuse of proven components prefered. Knowledge doesnt have to get worthless so fast if it was worth something in the first place.
I don't expect people to find much money in LED lightbulbs. You buy the LEDs from one of the big LED producers, and then the rest is commodity electronics. If there starts being money in it, new companies will jump in.

Which I suppose can get prices down to the point where someone can make a company that stays in business, but it won't get them to a point where there are significant profits to be found.

EDIT: The area where this is likely wrong is the locked-in home automation silos where you can get people into an ecosystem and then screw them as much as you like. I'm hoping we can avoid that being the dominant strategy.
You clearly know what's wrong with parable, so adjust it accordingly. Give an A to the top 25% of the class when sorted by number of pots made.
ISPs resort to this stuff because there is no standard protocol for ISPs to notify their customers of anything.
I was more interested in rockets at the time :-) Computers didn't exist for me outside of scifi.

My high school acquired a Business Basic 4 computer my senior year. The math teacher decided to teach a BASIC programming class, where we'd use a punch card machine to write our programs, give the card decks to him, and he'd run them. He wouldn't let any of us touch the computer, or even be in the same room with it.

My most advanced program was a quadratic equation solver, just a few lines of BASIC. (The class was more or less a joke.)

But when I got to Caltech a year later, they gave all students an account on a DECSystem 10 timesharing system, and everything went downhill for me after that. I'd go to class in the day, and spent all night in the computer center playing with it.
Good to know for future projects.
They are not being charged for allowing people to post ads for "escort services", they are being charged for knowing about sex trafficking and facilitating it in order to profit from it.

The facilitating part of it is key. If you are FedEx and deliver a package of drugs, that is not your fault, but if you offer a special service where, for a large fee, you'll bag any package in coffee grounds and srap the outside of it in cleaner to reduce the smell, you'll probably be charged with facilitation of a crime.

If you own a hotel where children are regularly being raped and it has been brought to your attention many times and you still refuse not to stop offering the special room in your basement with extra soundproofing to single men who show up with children, that's facilitation too.
> There is nothing about text streams that prohibit tools from understanding whatever language you're writing in. Unless you have an very interesting compiler, your IDE is processing text, too.

Well, the text stream lacks context of related entities. Let's say you're piping a single source file. The program you're piping to can certainly parse "import foobar", but how will it know what's in "foobar"? You could argue that it could parse foobar, but then it would need to recursively parse all of "foobar"'s dependencies too, and so on, which seems pretty inefficient if you're doing that a lot compared to a program keeping it in memory. Sure you could create files to cache that data, but at that point you're sort of waltzing into IDE territory anyway.

Besides, the "unix as an IDE" idea is based on using general purpose utilities, not specialized language specific ones, and those utilities make no strong assumptions about the input text.
So does this make my data with them fall under the category of American companies and is not subject to warrant less searches? Or only their VA data center?
>He suggested I open with something along the lines of "merge two sorted lists".

We (my team at Amazon) don't start with a softball, but we try to make sure every question can be down-leveled if someone is struggling. My current one degenerates to: "insert numbers in a sorted list, then find the index of a number in the list". A surprising number of people struggle with this.

I know lots of people get tripped up by graph and tree problems (myself included) because they don't use them in real life often, but simple lists are another story. At FaceGoogAzon scale you can't always rely on array.sort().
I don't know if he was an "idiot," or not, but there's value in having something to oppose. Kind of like a diagram that isn't correct, but can be seen by all and iterated to something that IS correct.
I believe the same. Nobody writes an article called the granite counter top quandary. You won't buy leds, the contractors constructing the house will.
This statement is false

> Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years.

and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much of what is said.

Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works never gets old. Knowing how to set up an allocation problem as a mixed-integer program never gets old.

In short, there are many things that never get old. What does get old is the latest fad and trend. So ignore the fads and trends and learn the fundamentals.
I didnt even know all those were owned by one company. That's a trip. I agree Twitter should follow suit to profitably maintain its existing users.
As annoyed as I am with the situation, I actually have a hard time blaming this entirely on Lennart Poettering. Red Hat pays for this development (as they do with quite a lot of GNOME). How many project managers are going to go and say, "No. You must spend more time to decouple system X from system Y even though it provides us absolutely no value as an organisation." He's doing his job and he's nowhere near the worst lead developer I've ever seen ;-)

The main problem is that, as the responder to my comment said, there are not enough outside developers getting in there and fixing the problem. I am included in the list of people who could fix it, but won't because I have other things to do.

It doesn't stop me complaining about it, though. I don't think the complaints are counter productive either, if they are aimed in the right place: Red Hat. Blaming Lennart is useless, whether or not it is fair. It's Red Hat's behaviour that needs to change, because if they replaced Lennart tomorrow the new person would have a mandate to do exactly the same thing.
It's like a low-rent version of Second Life.
Based on a Microsoft ruling, I believe only their US data center. As always, take measures to keep your data out of the US if it's important to you.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/micro...
Nothing as cool as embedded development, database development or anything like that. Just general backend positions, working on the guts of something that may have a web layer, mobile layer, etc. Web jobs are plentiful and paid fairly well early in my career, but pay on the upper end has a pretty hard cap, so it's been a worthwhile move as there's more opportunity for career growth. It also better lends itself to specialization (ML, natural language processing, etc.) so that is another opportunity.
Ask HN: Is the “14-days free trial” mandatory for a b2b SaaS business?
It seems to me that lots of b2b SaaS businesses, specially when they starts, include a 14-days or 1-month free trial for each of their plans.

Even without a big knowledge in marketing, I can obviously see the main goal: customers acquisition, transform potential customers into paid customers.

However I think it comes with some drawbacks:

- extra code & logic to handle the trial

- extra terms of service to avoid any legal problem?

- let your competitors spy your product for free

- dismiss your product? Some companies don't take your product seriously if it's cheap

In addition, lots of SaaS businesses don't force any commitment nowadays, companies can cancel their subscription when they want. So you pay one month to try the product and then you cancel if the product doesn't fit your needs.

That being said, I'm wondering if I should include a free trial for my b2b SaaS business?

Maybe the right answer is to A/B test each model (with/without trials) and choose the model that converts best?

I would love to know what is HN opinion about this topic.
How an Elephant Loses Its Tusks
Exactly. Also, how can we possibly want to eat something that the company producing it is going to great lengths to prevent us from watching how it's made? That's really creepy.
Whether or not growth in economic value is infinite, no company can grow faster than the overall economy indefinitely, which is what, in theory, determines where investors put their money.
Freedom of speech in the digital age
Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but:

>the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell

I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else.

Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks (Distributed Programming, Embedded hardware to list some) that are likely harder than web development. But I guess what I'm trying to say is: I don't appreciate you calling what I make a living off, and spend quite a few hours studying weekly 'easy/boring as hell'.
You implied that other major mail providers might not be subject to this search order. We have no reason to believe they weren't.
"the demo's facial expressions were controlled by button presses, not facial analysis"
>> I accept that a high enough ranking employee at these companies can view this information at will

At a huge number of companies, every junior dev on their first day of work gets full access to production database servers. The reality is that once you make any piece of information available to any web server, assume it can be found in anyone's hands within an hour.

That's the reality. The secret is to not care, and live life not worrying about it.
I'm definitely questioning this decision because I believe a lot of their business comes from people doing some pretty questionable things with copyright. Might open up some of the larger video hosts that work with them to the scrutiny of US authorities.

I wouldn't worry about a personal seed box, but some pretty big video hosts work with them closely.
> Perhaps one of our stat-geek readers will be able to tease out a conclusion regarding power cycles.

I think it's obvious. If the drive has errors, this may cause or cause need for a reboot.
Second Life IS the low rent version of Second Life. I don't think anyone has made the high rent version yet.
Here is the legacy of Jack and Twitter, ex 1: Dilbert creator:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-sco...

How much traffic is that?

Ex: 2 Milo. Etc. So... what business is he in?
Yes, I was using the playstore app.

But this is what I mean as an example of an easily fixable problem. If user is using the Play Store app, show a dialog or otherwise redirect them to another source. Even a simple help menu telling you about the problem and how to fix it is low-cost.
Thanks. That was very interesting. Overall, a total band-aid of course, but still better than nothing. I can completely see doing ad hoc queries with that (and I can't wait to try it out) but I fear the performance hit of trying to build a system around it :)

It didn't give any examples of queries going both directions, e.g. the down-up V first example. You probably often also want the up-down ^ shapes too. It would be nice if the PATTERN had alternation too "STRT (DOWN+ UP+)|(UP+ DOWN+)" so you didn't need to double your queries. Or else you're probably better off creating a temp on CUR-LAG(1) to give you the sign and then pattern match the sign (if that makes sense).

Oracle really does go out of their way to keep SQL modern though. I remember the first time I saw a "CONNECT BY". lol. I had an interview a few months later and was asked to write an SQL query to basically traverse a tree (the gist of it). I being a young smart ass gave the correct answer (you can't) and proceeded to write the START / CONNECT just to show off a little.
By that logic the owners of Google should be charged with thousands of crimes. They are aware that you can find all kinds of illegal things through Google, and they financially benefit from it.
Yup.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150309102116/http://www.timecu...
I was only speaking for myself. The challenges got old and most of the work felt like framework jockeying; it was work I could do in my sleep apart from the sweat of learning new tools. I won't deny that there are some exquisite challenges in frontend development, but most of the paying work does not involve them and is pretty CRUD-oriented. Also I was referring to web development in general, not just frontend.
Apparently old is a matter of perspective ... To me not quite 40 is still a young'in.

I'm over fifty and just got back from presenting at a major conference. I've managed to say current through 35 years of embedded systems design (hardware and software) as well as a stretch of software-only business. It's really not that hard if you understand your job is to continually be learning. I must be doing it right because often those I'm teaching are half my age.

As an aside, I've done the management track and moved back to the technical track when I found it unfulfilling.
Ive been thinking about it and Im fine with ""Free Basics"" of lets say wikipedia or some city/ weather.org websites or other Non-profits.

However I have no idea why Facebook should be the gatekeeper nor why Facebook or any large corporation should be on Free Basics.
I think Saddam wanted to actually create the suspicion that he had WMDs, to scare off potential invaders (and he was probably right).
For programmers it is helpful to visualize the horn such that the volume = features and the surface = possible bugs
>> "Virginia successfully competed against North Carolina for the project, which will create 54 new jobs"

How many people typically work at a data center for one of the largest hosting companies in the world?

Because 54 jobs seems kind of low, no?
It might be, but political affiliation, religion, and age would be equally good proxies. But these aspects rarely if at all get addressed.
I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone notices (because those with experience probably aren't touching it yet, and those without experience will discover the shortcomings in time.)

When learning something new, I find that this group implemented with $NEW_THING in a completely different way than that group did an implementation with the exact same $NEW_THING. I have a harder time understanding how the project is organized than I do grokking $NEW_THING. And when I ask "why not $THAT_THING instead?" I get blank stares, and amazement that someone solved the problem a decade ago.

Sure, I've seen a few paradigm shifts, but I don't think I've seen anything Truly New in Quite Some Time. Lots of NIH; lots of not knowing the existing landscape.

All that said, I hope we find tools that work for people. Remix however you need to for your own edification. Share your work. Let others contribute. Maybe one day we'll stumble on some Holy Grail that helps us understand sooner, be more productive, and generally make the world a better place.

But nothing's gonna leave me behind until I'm dead.
1/2: Are you on iPhone or Android? I was there a month ago and my Google Playstore downloaded variant only used Google Maps.

Great point on the driver calling being an issue for non-Mandarin speakers. I also experienced this. I actually asked drivers why they do this and apparently riders seem to put incorrect location information in -- this in itself indicates there is some problem.

Regardless, I don't begrudge Uber much here; the driver call culture is hard to fix (even in America, I'm called sometimes) and it's not unreasonable to require your customer base speak the local language. (It is unreasonable though for the phone app to assume your locale matches the local language [help screen problem] or to assume that you've downloaded the app from a completely local source [Google maps source issue])
> You will never win a war on vice.

Maybe, (depending on your definition of "war"), but we can culturally transcend vice.
I never implied we should be tolerant of ignorance. "It isn't necessarily malice" is what I basically said. That's not the same as "It's ignorance and that's great."

And the distinction isn't thin. It's the difference between an easily solvable problem and a really hard to solve problem.
Also, "PC" was never a specific company. You could infer things like Microsoft or Dell or HP or whatever, but they avoided specifically naming a company.
We started out making our own farm for animals (pigs + chickens) but we figured we actually liked the little buggers (what you describe as watching them grow etc, for me, especially with pigs, makes them the same level as dogs and the hypocritical west is as the hypocritical west does which I couldn't really stomach) and went vegetarian anyway. Don't miss meat at all (don't actually like it anymore), but that's not the point; the life is good if you like that kind (nature, fresh air, quiet usually if you have a small farm) of thing with or without eating meat. We have fresh eggs from our chickens and fresh fruit and veg without pesticides and water from our own well.

We started growing hops (& more apples) for the brewery and it is really nice. It isn't for everyone but if you like it then there is no reason not to if you are a programmer (which I am). You don't have to go full in with a complete farm, just growing / rearing your food partly is a nice feeling. It also is, at least here in the EU, much cheaper if you don't go full in (and you wouldn't have to if you don't have to make money); everyone wants to live in cities (I feel left out as I hate them :), so the country is empty and land is cheap. As are houses (depending on the location). In a lot of countries you would not even need a house per se; just a container or caravan would suffice (if only I had known this when I was young).
You must not be familiar with the "Prescriptivist vs Descriptivist" debate.

http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-d...
That's pretty typical. You need maybe a couple of technicians to run the water and air handling systems, a handful of people on skateboards swapping out dead machines, and some security guards.

Here's a recent article that says Google employees 400 people in their Oklahoma facility, which is enormous.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facil...