skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
History is littered with counter-examples and great successes. Each generation of company is more efficient or solves more complicated problems than those before it. Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation, which is why their product is so smooth. But not all companies specialize in hard tech, and all companies get old.
I did this in college, every day I wish I could go back. But my workplace has a strict 9-5 mentality with ~2 days to work from home each month.

I'm seriously considering to go freelance just for the hours.
The company you're talking about ("Interneto Vizija") isn't an ISP. They are, however, the largest .lt registrar (recently passed 100k domains) and the largest hosting provider (shared/VPS/dedi) in the country.
> That should be expensive for the middle-class.

So you're saying only rich people should get taxi rides? I thought Sweden supported the poor more.

Also, you're aware that when the minimum wage is too high, it just means there will be more unemployment, not that everyone gets a raise.

Now the debate is: are people happier with a job with a low wage or are they happier at home doing nothing? Studies show that people are more depressed at home when unemployed and have more chance to improve their condition and salary by starting at lower paid jobs doing something. But many of the supporters of high minimum wage would rather people stay at home than improve themselves starting with lower paid jobs not because it helps the poor but because it helps the high minimum wage supporters sleep better at night knowing that although more people have no jobs, at least no one is being underpaid... well... except for those not being paid at all.
>So it disproves your claim that the marginalized are hardest hit.

Even if poor people in Sweden are better off than poor people in the US, it doesn't mean it's because of the collective bargaining, it may be caused by something else.
Verizon just bought aol and yahoo and are looking for more companies to buy.
Dude I'm enthusiast from way back. Woke up every day vibrating in anticipation of getting a little 1:1 time with a Plato terminal or a VT-52, or maybe a TRS-80. Whatever I could... Didn't matter. We sweated over Knuth's books and dreamed of the day we could get access to a really big computer.

Nearly 40 years later I recognize fellow perpetual students during job interviews. To be fair I'm hiring for sys admin roles these days but the principle is the same: there are people with two years of butt-in-seat time who know more than folks with ten.

Now imagine how excited I am to meet a fellow perpetual student with 10, 15, or 20 years of experience!
From the article, "For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach "master" ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours." And given that this excludes everybody who gives up before reaching master, I believe the real gap is much wider.
For something less academic and more "look at cool stuff" there's also https://www.reddit.com/r/cellular_automata/
$16B is a great price for Mobileye's team, but I am not sure it is the best move for Intel. But I guess Intel will try to sell package deals to car markers and thus use this to try to keep NVIDIA and ARM from locking up the in-car market.

Thus it is a strategic move on Intel's part to fend off competitors rather than reflective of the intrinsic value of Mobileye.

BTW what was Mobileye's revenue last year and profit margin? About $350M in 2016, with probably $500M in 2017 it seems. So the multiple is around 30x revenue or so?
That is pretty much exactly what we try to solve a https://cloudron.io

There is still a long way to go to make it work for your grandparents, however I think we already made quite some progress. The act of getting a domain and a server itself is still something most people might not be comfortable with though.

In the end I think there are only technical issues to be solved to get to a state where having a server and installing apps, just like most people now do with mobile apps on their phone, is entirely viable.
It probably is.
But, given a reason as "not being a good cultural fit" does not have to describe that it is about age I presume.

I guess that you can always make up some kind of excuse other than just saying "too old". But I am unaware of how they corresponded this to the person in question.
I worked at a place where non-technical management didn't like hearing things had to be refactored occasionally. So the technical managers became very good at including refactoring of old code in estimates for new (related) features.

This generally worked, except when a lot of refactoring was needed. Occasionally, we would learn after the fact that one of our designs, programs, etc. was fundamentally flawed in some way, but we couldn't fix it with a series of moderate changes. Those cases really need a dedicated refactoring effort.
AWS S3 Outage: Lessons Learned for Cloud Foundry Users
This startup is taking the hassle out of airbnb hosting
After reading the article I tried to think of all of the ways which I interact with the "gang of five" and quantify their importance in my life.

Apple - I'm writing this on a brand new Macbook Pro, and my iPhone is sitting right next to me. I have a $5/month subscription to Apple Music. It would be painful, but with a gun to my head I could easily switch to Windows, Android, and Spotify.

Google - I'm browsing HN in Chrome, by far my favorite browser. I use google search dozens of times throughout the day to figure things out, it's truly an extension of my brain. I could switch to a new browser, but I haven't tried Bing enough recently to know if it would compare to Google.

Amazon - I have a Prime membership, but I'm only a sporadic online shopper. That said, the Amazon shopping experience has provided me with a lot of value. No real alternatives here.

Facebook - I don't use Instagram, I don't use WhatsApp, I do have a Facebook but I don't use my real name and I have very few friends. I use the News Feed Eradicator extension to get rid of the Trending section and the News Feed. Of all of the companies, I consider Facebook the most dispensable from a personal perspective . The only features I regularly use are Chat, which is functionality that existed long before Facebook, and sometimes stalking people that I just met to see more pictures and get a "life resume" on them, which is a habit that I would rather not be able to indulge in to be quite honest.

Microsoft - My work computer runs on Windows, I use Office 365 at work, and of course tons of companies that I rely on in my consumption supply chain and infrastructure are dependent on Microsoft in some form or the other.

I'm truly shocked at Facebook's ascendance to the tech stratosphere. Obviously the numbers don't lie, but Facebook just seems like it has so much lower utility than all of the other companies mentioned here. Yes, it's younger and in a newer category, but all of the other companies provide fundamental building blocks to the modern technological experience. Social media seems so much more superfluous by comparison.
> there's no way to stop progress. You can't control 7+ billion people.

How does this fare for bio-weapons?

It's more correct to say you can't control 7+ billion people now. A few WMD attacks later, maybe the incentive to find ways to do so will come about.
It should be pretty obvious by now that Marx had (partly) the right diagnosis, but did not really have a clue about the cure. That's understandable though. It's easy to say what's wrong about society.. harder to predict which fixes will work.

I think the closest we can come to the socialist ideals, is to have a free market economy, but have the ownership of capital be more distributed.

The government can not efficiently control the economy directly, at least not without some powerful, yet-to-be-invented, AI. The beauty of the free market is that it's basically an enormously powerful computer which, given the right conditions (relatively fluid markets, lack of monopolies, etc.), calculates the correct prices for goods and services for an efficient economy. Not utilizing that computer, without some equally good replacement, is doomed to fail.

But the government (and by extension - in a decent democracy - the people) can be a responsible owner of capital. It requires some discipline, and low levels of corruption, but there are plenty of examples.

I do think less government involvement is a more ideal solution, but it requires better technology and better organization. I think the way going forward, is to create a harder separation between capital and income, create a system where capital more naturally tend to distribute evenly among people, and to improve the efficiency and quality of stock markets.
Thanks for looking out for us, random guy on the internet.
Domain Authority
There is no such thing as intrinsic value. There is price and price ($16B) is determined by the market.

Talking about PE and multiples is pointless for tech companies where synergies and rapid adoption/changes are common.
Setting goals is fine but goals are more attainable through milestones.

Set tasks and tie them to milestones that finally achieve goals.

Any todo list supporting hierarchies can allow you to achieve this. e.g: Asana.

Then you can add more complexity like setting dependencies among tasks, adding dates, priorities, etc.
My wife has Mobileye in her car - it works quite well - warning you when you're too close to the car in front or when you're wandering out of your lane.
That's not very Christian though.
Interesting, that in all income tax discussions the underlying premise of income tax is not questioned.

For me it's a form of extortion. If I avail of certain services provided by the government, I would expect a bill only for the services I availed. And just like my ISP I should have the option of not opting for the for their services.
The CVE-2017-5638 Apache Struts 2 command execution flaw affects Cisco products
> to trigger a nontrivial sized piece of space debris to hurl towards a major city

How?

Also, maybe with personal space travel, comes an extension of the usual 'air'-space.

That said, 9/11 shows how both easy, and how hard something like this might be.
The rubber duck doesn't talk back either[0] but he always helps me solves my problems when I explain them properly to him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
> it's a problem that was solved many times before, but not successfully at this scale or cost

I'm not familiar with the scale+cost of every every bank, stock exchange, flight search, messaging app, log transport system, telco CDR matching infra, etc. Can you comment re: similar scale/cost projects?

> They patched FreeBSD and Erlang

Neither of these are distributed systems, which I think is the interesting challenge part of messaging.

Do you have a link for this whatsapp info? It sounds like you got a lot of good information from it that others could benefit from by reading.
To be fair...

if the guy they pay 80K is young and inexperienced like their nephew...

maybe there isn't as much difference as we'd like to think?
I agree. As someone who only recently entered the workforce, I have noticed that people from the US seem to have a particular tendancy to dislike unions whereas here in the UK they are often seen as a good thing. Anyone have any thoughts as to why?
For Python, check out the Pyramid web framework: https://github.com/Pylons/pyramid
Nintendo switch hackbaar via webkit exploit
I spent a few months at Facebook and left because of that. Not necessarily because of poor code quality but because of all the issues it was causing, and a culture of turning a blind eye to (or worse still, being proud of!) those issues. It's obviously true that quality of their code does not affect their market position, but it sure affects who they hire and who they retain.
Meet the European Banks of the Future You Might Even Like Them
For things that can be handled by quick research online, and things that don't necessarily need a doctors approval (e.g. Should I take ibuprofen or acetominophen?), seeing a doctor is overkill. But for most situations, it's not that simple and a doctor, especially one who knows your medical history, would be very useful in determining if something is good or bad, what the risks may be, what complications something may have with a medication, and so on. This is especially true for a less common disorder or disease.
Laws to "allow" unions do not grant additional rights. In fact they take away rights. Specifically they make it illegal to do certain jobs without being a member of the union, creating a government-sanctioned monopoly. Union advocates say that people are better off without the right to work outside the union.
Cylix tackles secure note taking problem
Unions are obligated to defend the person accused of harassment. Why do you believe that giving accused harassers another line of defense will help?
Free apps make money
Advice from my physics professor: make a detailed plan and then discard the plan and do what you feel.

This doesn't mean the plan was unnecessary...rather the plan carves out the neural pathways in your mind. The feeling part is important too since if I am so rigid then I am going to be crushed by the randomness of life.
Whatsapp is indeed a bad example for 'Code monkeyism', since it's quite the opposite.

The Whatsapp guys were smart enough to think about using the right tool for the right job in the first place, i.e. stuff like Erlang - which has been tried and tested for scenarios like this for decades - and applied it to a modern infrastructure.

Twitter OTOH was built with Ruby on Rails... That's more like a fitting example. :)
Benchmarking time-series database on 32-core machine
It amazes me that Syncthing handles rapidly-changing files better for me than Dropbox. Where Dropbox has left different versions of files on different computers even after they have changed multiple times, Syncthing happily synchronizes them without issues. And the fact that Syncthing is open source and allows me to keep files on my own machines is a big plus. However, I would love to see a paid option for easy backup of selected files to a machine in the cloud. Some people want their files backed up and accessible through a web service and I wish I could recommend Syncthing to them as well.
I agree with you that it's sometimes good to focus on getting things out the door fast instead of the code quality behind it. But surly there must be a point when the pendulum swings back and you should switch focus to quality. I would argue that Facebook have definitely reached the point where they own so much of the market and with their infinite resources they should be able to ship things with good code quality. Sooner or later the costs of supporting all that crappy software will make a dent even in Facebooks chest of gold.
Whether income tax is generally acceptable is a much broader (and philosophical) topic than the simpler question of whether it should be simpler to handle (obviously yes unless you make money from its complexity).
>I read Richard Gabriel's "Worse Is Better" essay

Fyi to help set the record straight... RG's "Worse Is Better" is not shorthand for "worse quality" is better than "better quality".

Richard Gabriel was trolling readers with the word "worse" for comical effect. His essay is: "simpler with less features" wins in the marketplace of ideas more than "complex". His observation isn't about "quality".

That said, there is another meme with the exact same 3 words called "worse is better" which does stand for "worse _quality_ is better than better _quality_" but that's not related to RG. It's just the more common interpretation of those 3 words -- especially for 99% of people that are not familiar with RG's original essay.

tldr: Richard Gabriel trolled people so hard that "worse is better" has taken on a life of its own divorced from his original thesis
Iceland to end capital controls from 2008 financial crisis
Is "hold forth" an older or less common phrase? I don't know if I've ever run into it, and I wouldn't have guessed initially that is its definition.
This is an absurd leap of logic. There's many quality programmers who have never worked at a large company and many more terrible programmers who have worked at large companies.

Anyone can share their opinion and regardless of where they have worked it may or may not be valuable. If you are judging value based on the market CAP of their LinkedIn profile then you are probably missing out on most good information out there.
Structuring the workday: the new '9 to 5'
> The password list to check against is at worst a few megabytes.

People stuck on a slow mobile network would tend to disagree.

> Besides we already know how to encrypt such that I can send an encrypted password to you, where you can, without knowing the key, can verify simple claims about the data.

The server can't verify such claims without actually inspecting the password because the client is (from a security standpoint) untrusted. In the HTTP/HTML web client/server model, there is no effective way for the server to guarantee that the client is truthfully executing certain algorithms. That's fine, but it does mean that the server is the only source of truth for these type of security claims.

> If we accept your thesis that we must send the password to the server upon changing it, we could still use client side hashing for a marginally improved security model.

That's a dangerous road to take. Such a marginal security improvement still comes at a cost of increased complexity and maintenance burden. If users don't like the idea of sending passwords to a remote server, they should request that the service implements a two-factor authentication solution instead.
Young people may be measurably quicker thinking and willing to work longer hours for less pay, but that doesn't help when they lack the skills and experience and end up making the wrong decisions.

Older people generally aren't willing to work for the same low pay because we have enough experience to justify it.

This kind of discrimination is peculiar because the exact same people are often sought after if you only change their title. E.g. as a consultant I'm sought after at a far higher price point, and my age and experience are a big selling point, where trying to apply as a regular developer would make people wonder what's wrong.

This is more of a perception and marketing issue than it is about young people having an edge, and the pereception comes down to the same reason we ascribe more value to e.g. an expensive watch than a cheap one: Signalling effect.

Being a developer at 40 signals to a lot of people that someone doesn't have the skills to get promoted, because they don't understand that you can be a developer and do stuff any random CS graduate could do, or do stuff that makes you one in a million without getting fancy titles.

Conversely, being a consultant signals to people that I must be able to do stuff other people can't.

You see the signalling effect clearly when pitching for work as a consultant: I have conversations with people that are 90% about me telling them whether or not I can do the work, rather than being interviewed by someone who is trying to figure out if I can do the work. The assumption is that my judgement can be trusted because I'm a consultant rather than some "lowly developer" applying for a job.

Seeing the difference in respect and attitudes (and money...) makes me even more determined not to go back to normal employment.

(There's also a subtle difference there between attitudes to presenting yourself as a "consultant" vs. "contractor")
You have right to criticize, but don't expect your criticism to be taken too seriously. There are two reasons for it: a.) you don't have frame of reference to compare whether facebooks result is better or worst then other companies b.) you don't know what tradeoff are necessary for making it work nor what it takes to achieve success.
Yes, these models can applied to a lot of non-NLP tasks. For example, I've seen seq2seq models applied to medical record prediction, program generation, etc. Noise removal seems like a good candidate.
Sounds more like an aircraft/spacecraft part in transit. Or aircraft weapons. Regardless of the OP, nukes are small. They dont need big trucks. My money would be on a shipmemt of missles parts (rocket motors) or similar weaponry that you donr want shipped by air.
Yes because you're going to survive an event like that; the Fukushima and 911 references don't make sense because you clearly don't understand what I was talking about. I'm talking about being able to have a reserve that can be converted easily into something useful (fungible) so bitcoin in these events might not be useful but nor would gold or a Rolex. I'm just stating why I think Bitcoin price will continue to rise even though it's not a currency.
Ask HN: How do I view HN links with adblocker-blockers?
Increasingly I'm seeing links on HN with adblocker blockers, that try to nag or emotionally blackmail me into compromising my privacy to consume their content.

I, naturally, do not want to expose myself in this way.

So, what can be done about the proliferation of adblockers, and how can I read HN links without being nagged by desperate advertisers?
Doing something well releases dopamine - isn't that why doing something that you're good at is recommended as being good for mental health and to relieve stress?
> Neither of these are distributed systems

On the contrary - Erlang and its runtime were built from the ground up for use in distributed systems.
Like what? The article is talking about broadband deployment to urban areas of Cleveland. What subsidies are directed at such deployment?
I think it wouldn't, at least in Spain, if those receiving the emails are acting not as individuals (final customers) but as company representatives. So it's OK to send an email to Jane at jane@somecompany.com but not to send another email to the same Jane at jane@gmail.com.
Hey everyone, thanks for defending me in the comments here :D

I'm the author of the article, you can ask me anything :)
I wish I could upvote this more than once.

I'm a 40+ years old life-long programmer with some academic science background, and it's not possible for me to actually get a job. A few years back I thought I'd try to get a full time position, to no avail. The only work that happens for me is freelance work with clients who already know me. It's not an uncomfortable life, but there's also a very distinct ceiling I'm always aware of.

I was instrumental, and often also the de-facto project lead, in launching several multi-million websites and other software, but as a freelancer I'm not really benefitting from these successes. In most cases I can't even legally advertise it. I'm stuck at a medium income level that I feel could dry up very quickly if bad luck strikes.

The job market appears saturated with programmers, and to make matters worse for everyone involved, companies lack the tools and the will to even select applicants properly - I suspect this is partly due to the fact that programming is considered such a low-value skill. At times it feels like it's the corporate equivalent of working as a burger flipper. It's not really considered a dignified position to be in when you're 30. Yet, perversely, the world is built on software.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding - even inside tech companies and SV startups - what the nature of programming-as-a-profession is. In my opinion it should not be some menial work that should only be performed by unskilled youth looking to advance to a "real" job as soon as possible. It's a skilled trade that takes time to develop.
ING in the Netherlands. Although to be fair, most banks have outrageously backwards password rules, and most limit the maximum length to something like 20 characters.