skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is anecdotal evidence from conversations I've had but it has been recurring. A portion of the 18-50 "prime aged workers" believe that when people say "teach them skills" or "provide continuing education" they take it as being told they're stupid. Which, to me, is a viewpoint that makes sense. They are the group that completed high-school and went straight into the workforce or didn't complete high-school at all. They view the public education system as having failed them. It was something they were required by law to do and as such did it until it was no longer required. The last thing they want to do is to go back into a system where they were repeatedly told they were "inadequate" either through grades, by their parents, peers, teachers, or all four.

It is my opinion but I believe this is going to be much harder to fix than just teaching new skills. Specifically for those individuals I described above. We need to fix how we as a country approach education and how our population views it before we can move ahead with teaching those already out of the system, and jaded by it, new skills.
JS is actually 21 now. According to wiki, it was developed under codename "Mocha" and shipped with Netscape Navigator 2.0. [1] "May 23, 1995" Personally, I'm pretty sure the version of "JS" when it was first released and more modern JS share very little other than logic and symbology, I think that can be said for many programming languages.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
Be a little careful with the terminology here. If you drill down into the research, they're referring to the cognitive/manual routine/non-routine quadrants. Typical illustrative examples would be:

Routine/Manual: Factory line work

Routine/Cognitive: Retail clerk

Non-Routine/Manual: Truck driver

Non-Routine/Cognitive: Software developer

In this scheme, every job falls into one of those four quadrants.

I agree, welding (probably most of the "trades") are "non-routine/manual".
As he said, we do have some experience with Class Breaks. Off the top of my head: Palm Pilots had a little button on the back to reset them. Chrome Books have a read-only OS/boot loader. Old software licensing dongles covered the chips with epoxy. We use VLANS to separate classes of traffic. x86 uses rings to separate classes of code. Firewalls and QOS systems separate classes of traffic.
I used to write in a pre-11 style. When I got my first job where everyone was using all the hot new features, my mind was blown and my life quality doubled.
This article resonated with me quite a bit, the Bridgewater connection notwithstanding. People love to sensationalize Ray Dalio as a cult figure and, at the same time, seem to not be able to stand how successful his firm has been. My encounters with Bridgewater staff (interviewers, friends, and a day onsite) all struck me as unusual but refreshing, even though at the time 7-10 years ago I could not succeed in that environment. Nowadays, I find myself shooting for a similar level of transparency in my work and personal life and being much more successful because of it.

This is a case study of distorted news from an individual who understands the motivations behind it like few others, because he has been targeted by this sort of distortion more consistently than most. Those motivations include:

- pressure from management to spin a story a certain way
- the reporter's personal desire to confirm his/her point of view
- the desire to put down success stories to feel better about oneself

The distortion of news is not the only place in the world where these forces are at play, but given the platform news organizations have, we must find a way to control for them.
I wrote scheme before it was cool (or at least something you sometimes read about on HN), and I will continue writing scheme when it stops being cool.
> Having strong opinions about what is good and what sucks will quickly get the ire of others.

Expressing said opinion might get the ire of other. Besides, Americans seem to enjoy ire, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Wouldn't a more graphical implementation of the symptom checker, possibly with a tree the user can follow in a wizard style be more effective than a simple texted based chat?
Why would it be penalized by Google? One of the factors in the SERP algorithm is how accessible a page is when someone clicks-through from Google, including load times, page-covering ads, and so forth.

Google also punishes pages that show one thing to the crawler and another thing to human visitors who click through on the search results, i.e. "cloaking" [0]. That is not the case here.

edit: Maybe your question is actually: why does HN -- and all other non-Google sites who link to WSJ articles -- continue to link to WSJ articles when it provides a bad experience for the user? HN admins have made their position clear that the content of WSJ articles are worth going through the workaround.

[0] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/17-ways-to-get-de-indexe...
Yes, it appears to be a timing attack where invalid users are denied more quickly than valid users.

https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/auxiliary/scanner/ssh/ssh_...
Pet peeve: how do you "reduce traffic by 3x"? Shouldn't this be "reduce traffic by 66%"
Like the BBC? Which is abused roundly by everyone (so about as neutral as humanly possible)

There's no real solution. In the end news firms are bought by businesses as they struggle to survive.

Businesses need profit, so those firms end up giving ground to the necessities of survival. All the firms you see today are the survivors.

The firms which don't deal in interesting stuff, don't carry much weight in the mainstream since they aren't "communicating to their core audience." And are left for those few people who have the time, patience and willingness to dig through what is today considered "long form" journalism.

These firms are in turn targeted by those vested interests who still need the facts massaged. (Cut funding! It's Biased against X groups! It follows a liberal agenda! It's conservative!)

This leads to the final 3 points.

1) a fair media is a source of power. The powerful politically minded will always vie for control or work to discredit it

2) mainstream media will continue to be a lost cause, and actual discussion of facts will be done in specialist and scientific journals. Nothing will survive the vortex of money and power.

3) fact checking is now dependent on the moral and intellectual fiber of the reader. Those people who cultivate open minds and self doubt will be the few who make the effort to know the world. (To what end though, you try to communicate and it will be lost in the vortex)
Old programming languages don't die, they just slowly fade away.

The oldest thing I periodically touch is VBA for Excel
This article badly needs pictures!
> Indeed, you could consider investors and shareholders in a similar manner to workers and lenders; investors provide money and in exchange the company gives them profits.

To clarify:

Investors provide money once and in exchange the company gives them (or whomever they transfer the stock to) profits forever.

Is there any model which allows a structure for stocks to expire after a reasonable period (10-20 years but it would vary by industry).
This is amazing work! I wonder if you've been actively using patents as your source of ideas? It seems like an unnatural path to go down, looking for ideas.
Ruby. I guess it's still "young" as compared to many in here, but still, it suprises me to be this "old".
The iOS marketshare is a orders of magnitude larger than that of macOS so the target vector is larger. Malware and the like would be hugely more profitable on iOS than macOS.
I want to try Monte but the documentation isn't very good and I don't understand their IRC conversations.
The thing about a lot of inventions is that they do sometimes look "trivial" after the fact; in other words, things look really simple once its been done!

Most inventions (and patents reflect this) are actually small improvements to certain parts of other inventions, which improve the system in such a manner as to be considered a patentable item of their own. As such, they tend to be small things, which when you look at them after the fact, seem to be obvious.

Maybe they were - but only to a particular person, who may also be somewhat versed in the art, and also willing to spend the money and time doing the "invention", who also doesn't think (or is aware) that nobody else has done the invention before (often, sometimes you might see something, and go "hey - this could be improved if they did this" - then think "but somebody has probably already done it, it is so simple" - and you never follow up - which if you had, you would have found that nobody did! Because they all thought the same thing!).

We see this often in software (also, there is the correlating idea of software that - after it is made and is popular - seemed too stupid for it to succeed before it did - Twitter, anyone?) - that there is a need for something, but everything thinks that either it has already been done, or that a new version wouldn't be substantially different or better than what is already out there - and so it doesn't get developed.

...Until someone does develop it - then we look at it, and smack our foreheads thinking "It is so obvious!" or "It is so simple!" or "I thought of that years ago!"

Maybe you did, or maybe it is - but you weren't the guy who followed up on it (or in many cases, you might actually follow up on it - but the market doesn't care or want it at that point - only to find that a decade or more later, that's when the market wants it - and someone else does it, while you aren't looking).
And what skills? Machine operator just got automated, whats next? Taxi drivers, truck drivers... what should they get an education in?
Why don't these coal miners just become data scientists?
But metal detectors aren't that much better than millimeter wave scanners.

Shoes, belts, and taking the laptop out are the only significant pain point that America has that the rest of the world doesn't. And the shoes thing is a the result of someone walking through security with bombs in his shoe, so it's hard to be too critical.
What are you going to retrain as? A 50 year old programmer with no experience and 50,000 in school loans?

I was a carpenter, I retrained at 28 and it was rough. I can't even imagine being older. Most of the guys I worked with out in the field didn't even own computers. They were just getting real phones. It's a brain rewiring not just picking up a couple new skills.
Hard to have much sympathy for someone who's strangling themselves with their own gender stereotypes.
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precisely. maybe its a trivial example, but if no mathematician had discovered the factorization of n^2 - 1, this visualization device would have been a helpful clue.
I like this one - backpack vacuum cleaner. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5588177
I think there is a thread above this one that nails the discrepancy: the target market here isn't poor Ethiopian villages. Rather, the target market is NGOs and governments who have funding to buy overpriced but cool stuff that looks like it will Make A Difference.

So you make something that's ostensibly targeted at poor rural villagers, and sell it to some deep-pocketed do-gooder entity at a huge markup.
Progress Openedge.
I have never seen anyone on HN mentions it. The codebase is from the 90'.
before that, I have worked with a codebase from the 80s, 10 years older than me.
Have you heard anything back from your contact at all?
I'm starting a greenfield project using Rust for the backend and Elm for the frontend. Strong typing and safety all around. Wish me luck.
You can also create a normalized system that aggregates all of the local systems together. And this also applies to international law (assuming you're talking about treaties) because there's a treaty and then there's the national implementing legislation in all of the treaty countries.
It's a non-starter for CUDA development, which is important to anyone doing serious GPU programming.
Engineering and Medecine seem to be the only safe places atm.
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We're a small team, so you will have an opportunity for a high-impact role, targeting over 50 million users. But our best perk is our colleagues: a diverse and extremely talented team of seasoned engineers and data scientists. We are located in San Mateo, walking distance from the Cal-Train station. Come visit or apply online at http://staples-sparx.com.
> One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop

Inefficient programs with shiny GUIs.

OSX + GPU + Chrome + Hipchat alone consume over half of the available memory on my machine right now. And that's just the software which supports my development, no editors, compilers or VMs.

Start to throw in modern editors, VMs (software which behaves very poorly when swapped out), compilers that trade memory space to reduce CPU usage, or a JavaScript heavy website, and you're one errant command away from your machine becoming unusable as it starts swapping like mad.
ITT: everyone realizes how old most widely deployed languages are.
This is an excellent article, including a section where they compare ordering a pizza via a chatbot and a simple wizard based interface: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....

The wizard was by far the better experience.
Perl 5. Perl is awesome and versatile, and it's the fastest scripting language in common usage.
C (I hate C++)

assembler (various) (I've even learned x86_64 well after being a RISC aficionado, it's actually kinda neat)

sed

bash

LaTex

I used to use YACC/LEX but that's been replaced with ANTLR for awhile now.

What language am I starting to use? Rust and R.

I wrote something in PERL once but when I woke up the next day I couldn't really read it. So that was that.
Based solely on seeing this title scroll by on HN, I was so hoping this was going to be a piece about Roswell...
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I don't understand the reasoning here, like, at all. For decades now researchers have been pointing out the demographic issues of aging populations and the workforces required to care for them. I don't know the specific numbers, but they're doubtless enormous. Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?
Vb6
40 New 7th Generation Intel Processors
The cure is worse than the disease. But it's coming. It will come as a devastating one-two punch: the end of general purpose computing devices and the rise of a publicly-identified Internet.

The former will be phased in as countries legislate it. Legislators won't be concerned with the slippery slope between abacus and iphone, the courts will likely draw a distinction somewhere around anything north of "silicon-based electronics with the right resources for an IP stack". A few countries will be bastions of Free Computing, but many/most will draw up similar laws.

The latter will be held back by Metcalfe's Law until some near-global momentum can be built. It would likely take a simultaneous attack on many global corporations/political parties/beloved individuals, but it seems like that's just a matter of time. Faced with repeated attacks, the public won't accept "but we designed it that way intentionally" as valid.
> He's really great in his humanitarian work.

I'm sure a lot of what Gates is currently doing is praiseworthy.

But to be even-handed, we should also remember the means by which he obtained a lot of the money he's giving away.
Welding is also just about the least middle-class job I can think of.
What do you do in Perl?
It is free-ish. It's free to use but there are restrictive licensing terms that prevent anyone from building anything with it: http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html.

My blog post on this topic: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ and https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/.
Telecom?
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I get a call about once a year from somebody who I did a favour site for in 2001. Still running. Still breaking.
An algorithm that points out discrepancies in news coverage is an interesting idea. Then it could just label discrepancies and let the audience judge each piece of coverage in context for themselves.

Unless a 3rd party fact checker is an open-sourced algorithm I doubt anyone will accept their definition of 'fact' and 'fake'. Even then someone could game it.
From the Internet of Things to the Internet of Everything
That math might work out if you consider the value of the miles you're getting.
New: Rust, ATS; new to me: J, D. And working on the compiler for Kitten[1], which should be usable by the end of the year.

[1]: https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten
Just curious, do people already know about your product/company but they're just interacting with it in a different way than the chatbot? Or is the chatbot your main interface?
Quantum computers ready to leap out of the lab in 2017
Ask HN: Who is firing? (January 2017)
Post any companies that are having layoffs, mass firings, unusual churn, etc. If possible, please identify the company or as much specifics so you can help others in the community.

Previous month's thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13081362
I could see one peace corp worker supporting two of these in a village. Ideally though he'd have to support two full crop years before there would be a chance that this would be self supporting. Even then a key part would break and the villagers would be unable to fund its replacement.
Electric bikes leading a quiet revolution on Vancouver streets
OMG the memories! I did work in MUMPS while I was in college in the early 90s. I had completely forgotten about this. Thanks for that :)
What's old? Anyway, I'll be using:

Ruby, age 21. Web development, some text processing scripts. Design started on February 24, 1993 first release on December 21, 1995. [1]

Python, age 25, almost 26. Web development. Implementation started in December 1989. First release on February 1991. [2]

JavaScript, age 21. Web development. Designed and released in May 1995. [3]
However if Ruby and Python are clearly the same languages they were 20+ years ago plus the natural evolutions, I don't know if the JavaScript we're using today has anything more that a resemblance with what it was back in 1995. After all we say we're using bash (Bourne Again SHell, it couldn't be more explicit) and not sh, speaking of which:

Bash, age 27. Scripting. Coding started on January 10, 1988 and released on June 8, 1989 [4]
If we count the Bourne shell, that is from 1977 (age 39), coding started in 1976 [5]

Erlang, age 28. First prototypes running in 1988, work on BEAM started in 1992, in production as we know it in 1998 [6]
Actually I'll be using Elixir for backend coding. Sometimes all what an Elixir module does is calling Erlang modules so it's handy to code that directly in Erlang. The Elixir compiler handles compiling and linking Erlang well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#Hi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

[3] https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#History

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...

Considering that PHP, Java, C++, Perl are also in their 20s (and Objective-C is 30+), should we really call them old languages or old should that be reserved to something dating back to the 70s or the 60s? (C, COBOL, Fortran).
Crowd fund it! Of course, then you have the issue of a journalist that becomes popular and gains more power, and then distorts stories for profit and more power ... and ... never mind. :-)
Cities pass "bylaws" that affect their municipality. In Canada municipalities are more limited in their lawmaking powers than cities in some other countries.

Bylaws are hard to lookup and are city-specific.
FYI: if you use list comprehension within a function or method that immediately consumes the resulting list, you can usually omit it altogether:

subrange = {x for x in range(1, 101)}

print '\n'.join(

'fizzbuzz' if x % 15 == 0 else

'fizz' if x % 3 == 0 else

'buzz' if x % 5 == 0 else

str(x)

for x in subrange

if x % 2 == 0 or x % 2 != 0)

Notice how the '[' and ']' are missing in the code above, yet it is still both correct python and correct fizzbuzz solution and runs faster because the code does less work.
what about the silk road?
I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie.

I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.
Definitely Kotlin. I had a meeting with my team and talked about the advantages of Kotlin and why I believe we should start writing a proportion of the new modules in Kotlin and have asked for their input. This is one of the cases where it needs to be unanimous decision, but so far everyone seems in favour of it and looks like we'll be writing a good amount of Kotlin in the coming months.

The reason why I believe Kotlin is a great way ahead is - Great java interop, removes a huge amount of boilerplate, results in very readable code and extremely easy to learn (one of the reasons we could not switch to Scala was the steep learning curve which would be a big problem for new developers joining us).
I dunno, there's probably room for all of them. There's lots of uses for dashboards that are not BI-driven - Castor even suggested their service could be used for conference room information etc.

I think the problem is dashboards on their own are pretty low value - ie $40/y for Castor. But that doesn't create a very interesting or particularly sustainable business.
some of the biggest advancements in PHP recently have come from folks who were not born when PHP was initially created...
> It costs essentially nothing for the airline to let me pick a seat

If someone is willing to pay the airline $20 more than you to pick a given seat, free seat picking costs them $20.
> alternative - food stalls in airports serving specific food/packaging for flights. haven't seen a single one in those 30+ airports i ever visited.

Maybe it's a US/California thing, but that's pretty common here
I don't know about the original poster, but Perl is great for back end development, and there are wrappers for just about every GUI toolkit if you want to go that route.
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It's not just been going on it have had an actual effect on the number of new jobs created and the kinds of jobs it is (lower paid and temporary). Also the mistake many do when they talk about this is that they look at the global trend which is basically creating more jobs in the developing world and it's doing it at a cost for westerns jobs.

The number of new jobs created each decade in the US has gone down since 2nd world war. This is the point that many don't seem to get. Outsourcing is mostly the last step before automation.

Here is the reality of what I am talking about.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/routine-jobs-are-disappearing-14...
There are many others:
http://www.saflii.org/ (Southern African countries)
http://www.paclii.org/ (Pacific Island countries)