skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simplicity for voters is one example concern, but administrative/tallying simplicity is important for large elections with potentials for challenges of election counts and gear, and the potential need to fallback to humans in a distributed network of locations tallying votes.

A method which is summable for k=1 is good for this, one which is summable for some k>1 is less good, and a nonsummable method (like IRV) is, to me, unacceptable. [0]

[0] http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Summability_criterion
It didn't even say that, IIRC.
> Do junior positions exist that engage politically while still providing the sort of technical engagement and creative freedom found in a smallish software shop?

I think the best place to do this has been at the USDS (United States Digital Service) or 18F, which operate like startups inside the federal government. But their funding appears to be threatened by the outcome of the election, so it's unclear what'll happen there.

You could also consider working on topics like user privacy, crypto, decentralized systems. I agree it's hard to get hired for -- or even just get experience with -- distributed systems while you're still a junior programmer.

> Could it be better to work a satisfying, apolitical position and simply donate to the organizations we care about?

Yes, see the "earning to give" approach in effective altruism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give. (One worry is that people tend to share priorities with those they're surrounded by, so taking an apolitical position -- e.g. at a hedge fund -- could change your politics unexpectedly.)
95k base is indeed low. Severe undersupply of developers with deep mobile knowledge.

Whilst it's been years since the advent of mobile, most enterprise organisations are doing their first mobile project in 2016/2017. You can thank Gartner for that.

As for $150/hr on contract, I know someone who invoices more than that but you must be on your A game and be ready to teach, teach, teach.

There's nothing too special about Xamarin knowledge. Drop your Apple vs google fanboyisms, learn both platforms, learn MVVM, implement pure MVVM (don't fall back to singleton city).

If you know android/iOS well and are wondering where next to apply your six+ years of mobile development knowledge vs having to compete with comoditization and off shoring - this is it. With your deep knowledge and experience you will smash the existing talent in the market out of the park.
A lot of Microsofts recent work has been really interesting if not surprising. Linux support in Windows and Visual Studio (as a cross platform target with debugging!), VS Code, bringing on Xamarin... Etc.

I'm Glad to see them pulling their head out of the sand. It wired to see them changing place with the post Jobs Apple. (In regards to head in sand :P)
Real industries that run 24-hours a day and have to be up all the time, run three shifts, they don't screw their day-shift into having to be available at the drop of a hat to cover.

They also pay significant overtime multipliers when they do have to call somebody in outside of their scheduled hours.
Many tollbooths have been replaced by overhead transmitters/receivers that interact with in-car electronic devices. ISTM such a technology could continue to improve, to the point that eventually an exact accounting of road use would be practical.
How about responding to the list with everyone on BCC stating "You have been unsubscribed."
The good plugins have both acceptable code quality and acceptable license/patent terms. The ugly plugins have acceptable code quality, but unacceptable license/patent terms. Bad plugins are lacking code review, documentation, or are unmaintained, or have other problems that keep them from being moved to good or ugly.
What you're talking about are ego defenses. And yes, it is in part projection. But the two cases are different.

When you see one person who is personally or socially powerful, and that person is a champion of one thing you strongly believe in, you will support that person in order to have that thing come to fruition, as long as the other things that person supports aren't too distateful to you. It's then necessary to defend that person so they can continue to be your champion - either out of ego, or purely to achieve your goals.

But when it's Linus, people don't defend him because they need to achieve something. They defend him mainly because of what he represents to them, and also for the work he does.

When it's Trump, people defend him because he's simply the most extreme choice possible. He makes you feel good, and that combined with anger becomes a positive feedback loop. He could murder someone and people would still find reason to cheer for it, not because they like what he does, but because of what he represents to them: extremism. (and now the thread is going to go down a political spiral... oh jeez, this poor thread)
"The attack surface of the Linux desktop does not appear to be under control, or adequately monitored for regression." No kidding. I ran into an interesting example for this a year or so back - the library used by KDE's search indexer for reading image metadata added support for video files with a bunch of classic buffer overflows in the new code, and even though it wasn't used to index video files a similar filename trick could be used to get the indexer to call it. Not sure how easy it would be to get code execution, but it wouldn't require any user interaction thanks to Google Chrome.
There is at least one big company out there, where every dev is part of what they call the "on call rotation" -- where being "on call" typically means being on pager duty -- without any special compensation for that. The only exemption is if you're working on a project that isn't yet in production. They tell you about it during their recruitment process and they communicate it very clearly: take it or leave it, there are no special cases. It sucks, but a lot of people take it anyway.
It's a little odd that this has received media attention.

What I'd do: independently of the email, ask for a procedure to be sent out to create an email filter/rule. Wouldn't take more than 1-2 minutes to complete for each end user.
What about saying "a 0day" which I read as "a zero day <attack>".

This same thing happens with "MVP" I think. "An MVP" sounds good, but "An Minimal Viable Product" doesn't. So I use a/an depending on whether using the abbreviation or not, but I have no idea if there's a rule for this or not.
There is a third group -- which I would place myself in. I feel a strong responsibility to an environment I work in; but I also have a need for a disconnect and work/life balance. I absolutely am not ok with people in group #2, but I think group #1 is similarly unhealthy -- being constantly aware of issues can lead rapidly to burnout.

This is why you have to have an on-call rotation, with an SLA (i.e. all pages are ack'd within ten minutes) with enforcement for people who regularly miss pages, and keep the life-disruption to one or two team members. Obviously, anyone who's worked on a large software product knows you might get an escalation even if not on-call, but that's a hugely different workload than being attached to a pager and having to respond to them.
I was in the same boat and I agree. It's actually one of the many examples of why it is difficult to start a business in California. Bootstrapping is hard enough, and on top of that you have to pay over $1,000 in taxes and related expenses.
I love that they're called "Matrix".

Turning us into batteries.
Yeah, it's the screen I'm curious about. The renders on their Indiegogo page make the screen look pretty awesome.

FWIW, the original Pebble is rated at 2.8 mW and the Pebble Time is 4.6 mW.
I think you're conflating corporatespeak/not being direct with being rude. Compare these three statements:

"There's a problem with the function you wrote. I need you to fix it tonight."
"The function you wrote is non-optimal for our goals. Please reconsider and reevaluate when you get a chance."
"You fucked up that function. Fix up your shit NOW."

The first is "standard professionalspeak." It's clear, direct, gets the point across. It isn't rude. The second is worthless corporatespeak. The third is rude and dickish. It's also how Linus tends to communicate.

I agree the second is not great, but would you really prefer the third to the first?

My point is that you can be totally direct and clear about what must be done without being nasty to the person doing the work, and that is the ideal. I don't think there are many cultures that would prioritize being mean over being direct, but if yours does, I'd be curious to understand what advantage you think that confers.

Further, if we're going to embrace different communication styles, then I would say the onus is on people to learn to communicate inoffensively, not to learn to accept offensive communication.
Agreed. This is the first list I've seen of everything used. $1400 is a big initial investment, though people who already solder may not need to spend that much.
Even in the .NET Core world, the managed runtime is written in C++, the native runtime (for .NET Native) is written in C#.
That last part will need some market research. eASIC already seems to do it for silicon. Quite a few vendors in embedded do for their side. There's at least potential HW upstart would want a pile of tooling at zero cost in exchange for a percentage of operating profits they get from it.
>"[human activity] has been extremely likely been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid century."

This is worded strangely so that it doesn't mean anything. Of course human activity has been the dominant cause of humans observing something. Why don't they say CO2 emitted by human-made machines or something more specific?
4 Things Startups Can Do to Better Manage Interns
With large early rounds exercising your stock might set you back 50k or more, making you an investor as well as an employee. With the odds of startup success it is advisable to diversify more than that unless you are already wealthy.
It's been a few years, but I remember getting stranded at the U-Bahn station a few times when I was in college because we got out of the bar too late and having to walk home or wait around for daylight.
> Turns out people don't know their actual physical addresses either any more.

Just move countries and cities often enough, and throw some business travel in for good measure, and it's pretty easy for that to happen. I've e.g. had similar sounding zip codes in a variety of cities and countries, and nearly the same street name within a city. After a while you start to very easily make mistakes.
It's not about effort but rather risk, specifically the risk of filing incorrectly and getting fined (or worse, audited) by the IRS.
I agree. The real question then is do we have enough information about individuals in order to screen on a case by case basis, and what rubric should we use to determine who should be screened out.
> So Mozilla is making it harder for end users to find and kill service workers?

about:serviceworkers was added as a hacky debugging/introspection tool with the expectation that the developer tools team would integrate the functionality into more full-featured, supported tooling. about:debugging is that tooling.

For example, about:debugging's "Workers" tab (on nightly):
- Displays all registered Service Workers as well as whether they are stopped, enables starting them if desired, and attaching a debugger to them.
- Also displays any open (Dedicated DOM) Worker instances as well as SharedWorker instances and provides debugging support.
- Listens for changes and updates the UI in real-time covering whether the ServiceWorker is stopped/running/installing/etc. (about:serviceworkers renders in a single snapshot).

I'm parsing your underlying concern to be that ServiceWorkers are a powerful new capability for websites and that you want to make sure they're not being brushed under the rug as a "don't worry about it, nothing could possi-blye go wrong" (https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E04/442491) situation.

It's indeed the case that ServiceWorkers are powerful and they open up new avenues of potential misbehavior. While the fundamental event-driven design of SW's where they're only spawned by explicit user action (browsing the site providing the service worker) or user-approved site actions (push notifications which require explicit user approval), there's still the potential for bad actors. Implementers share these concerns, which is where efforts like https://github.com/beverloo/budget-api and (potential? not sure if this is actually implemented?) heuristics like Chrome generating a (desktop) notification if a ServiceWorker gets woken up by a push and doesn't generate its own notification come from.

And I believe it's in these goals of having browsers proactively inhibit bad behavior and make users aware of the behavior of sites they have implicitly or explicitly granted permissions to, that the best defense of users is found. Which is to say, there will always be UI that helps users find and kill service workers, but the design goals are likely to center around a) debugging, b) performance/"what on earth is making my browser/computer run so slow!", or c) storage/"where did all my disk space go?" rather than one of manual gardening of service workers like they are weeds that spring up and users are responsible for cleaning up after.
That link was confusing - I was expecting some research from UTA (The University of Texas at Arlington), but apparently it's an article from Time magazine that a UTA professor published on his personal web site.
> There is no incentive to improve the software under those circumstances, and the people that get paged aren't in the position to fix what's broken.

Sure, one solution is to make developers responsible for support, too. I find it hard to believe that's the best solution.
This is a surprisingly tricky question.

If you are _really_ good at cryptography engineering --- that is to say, top-of-your-field good simultaneously at systems engineering and cryptography --- then there are fairly lucrative jobs you can get either as a consultant for a firm like Rambus/CRI, or as a crypto engineer at one of the big tech firms.

Unfortunately, if you're not that person, or you can't live in California, the answer is a bit fuzzier.

There are some big obstacles to working in the field:

* The overwhelming majority of crypto is built (poorly, dangerously) by amateurs, and there's no real force in the industry to change that.

* The overwhelming majority of crypto is built as, at best, a feature of a much larger product. Even when crypto is critically important to the value proposition of a product, in terms of lines of code or commits per year, it's usually not that big a factor. This means that even projects that need good crypto tend not to have a headcount allocated just for crypto (it's also a major reason why most crypto is done by amateurs).

* There are good jobs breaking crypto, but not that many of them. Being able to reliably find cross-site scripting is --- at the firm level at least --- more lucrative than being able to reason through a practical exploit for an unknown key share bug. There are crypto pentesters (with extremely high bill rates), but that brings you back to "top-of-field for multiple disciplines".

* You can, of course, make an academic career. You'd go for a PhD in cryptography, and then either stay in school as a professor, or join a research group at one of the big tech firms (this is a different job than crypto engineering at one of the big tech firms; your principle job will probably still be to publish) --- so far as I can tell, those research group positions are exclusively staffed with PhDs.

That's not to say people shouldn't study crypto! They absolutely should: it is mind-expanding in ways orthogonal to the other specialities engineers take on to expand their minds. It will make you a better systems programmer. It might make you better at software security, too (it might not, though). It will, at least, mean that when your project is called on to, I don't know, encrypt a password reset token, you'll be able to do that competently.
Not true, in my case at least. I often use relational database. It depends on the use case.

Because the document model allows an arbitrary number of columns I think in this case it would make adding custom attributes to leads in an easier to manage way than using the traditional join with attributes table method.

I think a relational model may be a bit overkill in this case. But with that said, I'm sure it can easily be done with traditional relational DBs as well.

I've also used Elastic for similar projects to because it's ability to do faceted filters on data is unparalleled IMHO.
And fully tracking every trip made in every car. That'd be an interesting database to compile
I agree that it shouldn't be called FOSS, but let's stop kidding ourselves about the 'charge for support' model. Few kinds of software require the kind of support that would keep a single developer off the street. Most of the types that do can rarely be supported by a single developer.

I like the idea of a paid-source licensing program. I just don't know how it could work, long-term.
My Friend Leonard Cohen
The problem is that paying for open-source software isn't something that people do by default in the normal course of obtaining it, as one does when legally obtaining proprietary software, a book, music, etc. It's something that you have to deliberately go out of your way to do. Until that problem is solved, most users won't pay for open-source software, even if they'd have no problem doing so in principle.
Why don't they just use kinetic energy from the movement of your arm like mechanical watches have been doing for many decades now? Surely it's easier and more of it.
I'd sign & vote for that initiative.
>“We see ourselves as a thermal energy harvesting company,” Anne Ruminski, Matrix’s head of engineering told me, not a watch company.

Harvesting humans for energy? I guess the Matrix name is fairly tongue-in-cheek here.

Curious to know how plausible this is considering how little heat we produce. I wonder if there's a catch like "needs weekly charging" on top of the heat based charging or also has a charger from the kinetic movement of our wrists with the heat charging being a gimmick to get attention and VC money.

I'm also concerned this watch will have way too many energy saving compromises to be practical. How often will it pool its bluetooth connection for messages? If it all? The indiegogo page doesn't show any integration with your phone other than fitness stuff, which can be synced infrequently. What about alerts and messages? I don't even see that addressed. Sorry, but its not a smartwatch if it can't integrate with my phone for alerts and messages. Its just a fitness device with a clock then.
Thinking so low about the entire human population besides yourself, won't get you far in life.
Pelting devices are pretty expensive and relatively low efficiency. I'm surprised nobody has made a small MEMS oscillator to generate power the same way self-winding mechanical watches work. Perhaps arms smply don't move enough.
I've donated to Ubuntu (I felt it got me started on programming and interested enough in computers). Usually when I download their desktop OS (~$79/a year)
Yes. Exactly. And then I argued (some levels up in this thread) that it isn't easy for some user to know what he e-mails refers to (curl?) in the way that it's displayed. Or that he could have a different copyright notice in future versions, preventing his emails from appearing on Multimedia Car Console...
One of my favorite games when I was a kid was Captain Goodnight by Broderbund. Apple II game. I loved the musical score to the intro so much that I wrote a (snail mail) letter to their HQ asking for the musical score to the intro music. Pretty random! I was a random kid.

They wrote me back! Not with the music, but an apology saying they didn't have the music score to send out. As an adult, I get it.. and I also have to say as a kid I was elated to receive a response back from the company. I didn't really expect to hear back from them at all.

I'm conflicted about this but I realize the bigger company has limitations. And a small shop has even more limitations. I get both sides.
I've seen hbase used in production at a number of startups, and worked at one where it was used. It's very powerful and flexible, but it's also not like running any other database. Setting up Cassandra is like "java cassandra.jar". Setting up HBase is...someone's job for a while is going to be "running HBase".

Anyway, I'm talking about small-ish startups that aren't super researchy technological trailblazers. There are definitely people outside of microsoft (I'm assuming that's what you meant instead of Google as Google already had BigTable and HBase started out as a Powerset project and so ended up at Microsoft) running HBase in production.
Create an Excellent Python Dev Env
AdNauseam Escalates the Ad Blocking Arms Race
Well, that and the data on the card is probably in some proprietary format. But that's not the point. :)
I've donated to half a dozen FOSS projects or organizations, and to a couple of individual FOSS developers. For two of those, I provide monthly donations, for more than the typical cost of a proprietary software license. I've paid for crowdfunding projects whose result got released as FOSS. I've also helped arrange corporate donations to FOSS projects.
> Party rules to amend it would be a slap in the face of Trump

It's always going to be a slap in the face. Start the campaign now and try to get it in with the next term.
For me (and I'm guessing a lot of other developers) the hard part is balancing time between side projects and the other passions in life. I love diving in to a new technology and building things when I get home from work, I have seemingly bottomless energy for that. The real hard part is ensuring that you're not neglecting all the other responsibilities in life: partner, kids, friends, chores, etc.

The thing about the software industry is that there is always so much to learn. I always wonder how field leaders manage their personal lives whilst remaining sharp and current on emerging technologies and methodologies. That's the real challenge, staying abreast on the state of the art while not becoming a hermit.
Interesting idea, though explaining the complications of licensing may cause problems when it comes to marketing.

I've had a related idea for a while, setting up SaaS for FOSS maintainers to charge for a SLA (license/source is still open, corps essentially have some security that the project won't be abandoned). Is there anything out there like that?
How Kayak co-founder Paul English got hit by a ‘truck full of money’
What can small groups do? (2011)
Can you please elaborate on how a CRM is likely to be in a category where it would benefit from state heavy client-side?

A CRM is typically a form based app doing CRUD - to be this makes it a solid candidate for being a stateless client.

I feel like there's a whole class of applications out there now (including my own) that have gone down the stateful client route where it wasn't necessary and introduce a whole new set of problems and solution libraries / frameworks that can be forgotten about with a return to a stateless arch.