skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's nothing new here (trouble is nothing has been about it):

"TRENDS IN COMPUTING by W. Wayt Gibbs, staff writer. Scientific American; September 1994; Page 86 : Despite 50 years of progress, the software industry remains years-perhaps decades-short of the mature engineering discipline needed to meet the demands of an information-age society."

http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/SciAmGibbs/...

The question is why.

Actually, W. Wayt Gibbs answers the question. Essentially, programmers do not treat programming with the same level of discipline and responsibility as engineers do in other engineering professions (like say bridge building where people's lives are at stake). Programmers essentially consider themselves as artists and thus they program in undisciplined ways. (A software engineering profession won't evolve until the software industry takes itself seriously as do other professions).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Software prototypes are an excellent tool to explore solutions to problems. We need to stop the hubris that we can immediately know exactly what we need without any effort.
When it's for the matter of compatibility, are patent laws applicable?
@ianmiell
Actual Reality vs. The Lies the World Tells You
You mostly have a presentation problem if you have marketable skills that won't sell. I started when I was 15 and the trick was displaying confidence, humility, and maturity in every interaction. It's harder than it sounds.
Are you a fire/police chief or in command of some public safety entity?
Ask HN: Should I even bother trying to sell to universities?
I’ve been working on a piece of software (https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY) which is a probably too general to be a product as it is at the moment. Instead, it could be specialized in different ways to make different products—but I would like to focus on just one of these initially.

The potential products I’m trying to decide between are: (1) A multi-language ‘object monitoring’ utility kind of like Chrome’s object explorer with certain enhancements (2) An easy to use, and very flexible instructional algorithm visualization system (3) A ‘high-level’ algorithm debugger.

I believe (1) has the greatest profit potential, and fewer complexities on the business side—but will take more work than the others code-wise, and I’m about out of money and need to get a job soon.

(2) wouldn’t take much more work to have an alpha in order—but then I have to try selling to universities! I have no experience with this sort of thing at all. I’m unsure whether the profit potential is reasonable (i.e. whether they typically even have much money to spend; is it like Enterprise sales?), how rigid they are about adopting new software, whether they would even speak with me, or how I would initiate contact, etc.

I would use (3) personally, and it’s the reason I started the project, but after sharing the idea with a bunch of other programmers, I can’t see it catching on any time soon.

Any comments on which direction seems best are welcome, but I am particularly curious about what to expect if I were to follow the selling to universities route. Thanks!
Hiring AWS and Azure engineers in particular
I think it acts as a genetic counterbalance to ADHD. They gave the ability to blue sky a problem (ADHD) or a dictionary attack (ASD) or Fuzz a problem (Both together). Twice exceptional are attracted -- which carries on the gene pool.
The Wikipedia page describes what happens when someone does call. I wonder if that was a priori knowledge or if the writer called to see what would happen and then shared his findings :P
The US hasn't enforced its anti-trust legislation in over 30 years. Some link Reagan's "assault" on anti-trust to the breakage of the American job market. There's been zero net job creation in the US between 1999 and 2009, a time which also saw significant consolidation.

Small businesses drive net job growth, and they are also more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms.

Not to mention, smaller businesses allow more people to own capital. I'm sick of economic discussions that focus on jobs and wages - ownership is what gets people out of serfdom.

But, little guys are feeling the squeeze. "The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit."

So, this isn't only about privacy, or the false perception that "big is evil." It's about economy as ecosystem. "Biodiversity" in the economy creates robustness against hard times and distributes resources in ways that allow many participants to thrive. Monocultures are extractive, and ultimately fragile.

Edit: source - http://bit.ly/2rhPiXp
GameStop confirms extensive credit card data breach
What strange timing. I just had breakfast there (no idea what restaurant--just walked into the first one I could find that had a VISA sign out front). Of course after jet lag woke me up at 4 am...
This is by definition security by obscurity, is it not?
...or the interaction challenges that will give rise to significant advances in AI.
In theory and in an actual democracy the state would represent the will of the people, and its agenda would align with the citizenry.

In the US at least I don't think it is so much the government doesn't represent the people than 2 centuries of usurpation have established a system to produce enough brainwashed drones to the will of power that they can act with the facade of democracy while actively harming the indoctrinated. It seems not to actually take a majority to create an environment where the state acts against the interests of the people, just enough of a minority to give voice and legitimacy to regressive ideology.

I think this century might be the time when all us intellectuals have to come to terms with how, in the same way you cannot get everyone into STEM to handle automation eating the economy, you cannot get everyone into enlightened politics where voters inform themselves with fact and evidence. At best, a minority, and today, a majority of people are either naturally or nurtured (often intentionally) to be incapable of participation in science and rational debate. And as long as you have this uninformed, illogical portion of the population (and of course the smaller it is the more functional your society is) it will erode democracy and liberty through powerful people taking advantage of that weakness.

What we see in the US right now is that weakness in Democracy instead being a gaping wound that has been bleeding - probably since the founding of the country, made worse by many events in history (the civil war, great depression, 9/11) that make the wound bleed greater, yielding the state from being a democracy to an oligarchy ruled by ideological indoctrination and exploitation rather than good will for ones fellow man.

That was long winded, but my point is don't throw out the notion that nations can act to improve the circumstances of their people in the general case - the US is demonstrably not doing that for observable reasons that could be fixed, but would require everyone to want to fix it.
We're not talking here about what is right, or even what is correct under the law. We're talking about what a set of lawyers think they can plausibly use to bring an infringement case and not be laughed out of court. A broad spectrum of possibilities.
...until they lock your account without giving you a reason and without recourse.

This is why AmaGooFace is so dangerous, because the way things are going they will have unprecedented insight and control into global populations. Multinational corporations are a much more dangerous threat to humanity's future freedom than governments.
Cracking the Girl Code to Tech Success
Shanzhai Archeology: defying our standardized technological imagination
I'd say the recent elections have shown that people are reaching that point. Or at least, the people who matter in electoral politics finally are - especially young people with no prospects of living an American dream style of life. There is a very significant portion of the population that have always had the need for a revolution and still do - the vast number of black people living in poverty or, worse, in and out of the prison industrial complex. There are also plenty migrant workers who suffer terrible work conditions to produce all that food (among other things) so cheaply here, government subsidies or not. If the racial divide could be crossed, as recently​ seems to be happening, where young educated white people are starting to see solidarity with people of colour with similarly grim prospects, there could be a considerable force to challenge the established class relations in the USA. I think there are interesting times ahead.
Nice, will it be available on Podcasts (iTunes, etc)?
I'm afraid your logic is a bit flawed here. The home value increase or decrease does not factor in when considering your mortgage. Your mortgage continues to exist no matter where your home value goes.

You have to pay that same mortgage even if the market tanks and your home becomes worthless. Even in the case of just "letting it go" the bank will take your worthless house and will still come after you for what remains on the mortgage.

That is why putting money into your mortgage is a "risk free" investment at 4% (or whatever your rate is).
The bureaucracy is beholden to itself (and acts to survive on that basis), and the elected official presents a principle-agent problem.

Now, I understand how it is supposed to work. But I am asserting that this is not how it does work.
A Power Outage in Silicon Valley Was Caused by a Drone Crash
CityBikes: bike sharing networks around the world
More info on Wireless Priority Service(WPS): https://www.fcc.gov/general/wireless-priority-service-wps
What is "relative power" in the context of, say, an employer with excellent business acumen, a manager with excellent interpersonal acumen and an employee with excellent technical acumen?
It sounds like the lawsuit against United focuses on payments from a bonus program and a severance package.

If you have ever taken a job, you have signed an agreement that limits payments of performance bonuses and severance packages in the case of gross misconduct.

I suspect the employment agreements for the executives in this case included such clauses. The board failed to enforce them at an expense of millions of dollars. The investors are right to sue.
Well, sounds like the only people you know to be autistic are low functional...

Traits that may be beneficial in milder versions can often be detrimental if too expressed. If you are working with software developers then there's a good chance that some of your colleagues falls on the spectrum. It's probably not something they go around telling people about, assuming they are even themselves aware.
So that'll put AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud all with large presence in Seattle. Interesting time to be working in the field and the area.
Hopefully the former, since the latter would be "original research" and therefore against Wikipedia policy ;)
You're right. And I agree with you on the point that some features that even someone who doesn't like corporations uses and loves were made possible by said corporations.

What I'm worried about is corporations becoming so powerful that they can just change the whole economic landscape in their favour.

For example, I'm a HUGE fan of Steam, but if Valve grew large enough that you can only buy games from Valve, the only programming jobs available were at Valve for 20k$ pa whilst "Lord Gaben" was close to becoming a trillionaire along with his shareholders I'd definitely stop using their platform, even if that meant I can't play games as conveniently or not have access to them at all.

Bottom line, companies can do good, but governments need to keep them in check if they become too powerful.
Well-known tech companies that sell services instead of software. When a small team is entirely responsible for designing, developing and running a service there's a huge incentive to avoid unnecessary complexity and maximize reliability...
No, but I do work on what is considered critical infrastructure.
Oops, I was on mobile and didn't see that the list wasn't linear with respect to version numbers. That's awesome.

I hope GKE is planning to migrate to a newer Docker version soon (they've been on 1.11.2 for a long time) so we can benefit from this.
Thank you so much for posting! Is type A (personality) rare/suppressed in Japan? Was whale meat on sale? (I know a whale is not a fish) I hear it tastes oily. (type A jedi shinichi)
Possibly because emulators didn't provide a source of potential licensing revenue—they're all free.
I sometimes wonder if we sometimes self-label ourselves, in general, as being "on the spectrum" just so we can justify getting pissy when uninteresting people interrupt and harass us while we are trying to concentrate on interesting problems.
> ... I had a purposeful tendency to discuss abrasive subjects in order to elicit strong reactions.

That sounds a little like trolling, but I get that you meant it as educational. Maybe a distinction that simple machines don't make.

> ... anonymous conversation app that pairs users and groups together with various conversation starters ...

And that sounds a little like Usenet, or discussion forums. Except that group selection and migration are totally voluntary. In my experience, unless there's moderation, you eventually get trolling wars. Which seem like harassment, to people who don't want to (and/or don't know how to) play those games. And everyone but the trolls eventually leaves.

If you could build an app that facilitated intense discussion, and prevented trolling and harassment, that would be very cool. Forcing anonymity would largely prevent harassment, because anyone who felt harassed could just move to a new persona. And there would be no meatspace impact.

Did you ever go on talk.masked? It used to be a main branch off core.onion (Tor onion services).
Yes, but lets hope your income is not based on investment success and that your job is still safe even in a market crash. Of course, if you have a steady, locked in income from a very safe pension or trust fund, then go ahead and borrow on your home. You don't have to worry about losing it in that case.

But you only have to go back to 2008-2009 to see how well that worked out for a very large swatch of the American populous.
I haven't been to Iwa for dinner, only lunch. That runs about 7000 yen. FWIW I've found the chef fairly talkative the three times I've been there.
So... Forth, basically. ;)
Auditory Illusions: Lyrics in MIDI (2015)
Well, certainly, enough forces are at work as to make serious prognostication of this type a fool's game...
Patents are entirely unlike copyright in this, in that you can come up with a totally independent implementation, and still infringe the patent. The patents are very similar to audio or video codec patents - for example, they patent the process of executing a particular instruction.

For example, here's Intel's (expired) patent on the CPUID instruction:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5671435A

It claims the particular encoding of the return data. Good luck implementing CPUID in an emulator without infringing.
I believe their chips continue to use samsung fabs today.
That's a really good idea! I've produced mp3s with randomised velocities for the Chopin track and also the Yiruma track. I'll be adding them to the blog post. Thanks!

Chopin:
http://imanmalik.com/assets/audio/random_chpn.mp3

Yiruma:
http://imanmalik.com/assets/audio/random_y.mp3
What do they need supervision of? Perhaps they're things they wouldn't have been expected to do on their own a few thousand years ago anyway. Perhaps they would have had an easier time in an early, small human community.
Even if it happens within a platform it's still a very concerning problem.

If a company decided to put cameras in people's homes to improve "customer service" that business would be out of business the next day. And yet companies are able to get much more information about us by having access to what we do on the internet and everyone is fine about it.

I understand that this is a result of people not wanting to pay for access to websites and online-services but, in my opinion, that's because they don't understand the ramifications. I don't have a solution for this problem, but I hope we'll fine another way, one that doesn't involve companies knowing so much about you.
There's also no citation for that claim.
Actually I think I can make this work for me. Tagging doesn't seem to be supported for Github releases, but I can work around it.

Thanks!
"But if being able to program means being able to write large programs..."

What does it mean when someone is only able (or only wants) to write small programs?

For example, small programs that can work together to form a "system" for managing something.

Is that not considered "software engineering"? If not, what is it called?

(Embedded software engineering? But not all small software is "embedded".)

What has a better chance of being error-free, a small program or a large one?

Should "ability to program" be measured by how large a program one can write?

For example, if someone writes a small UNIX utility, but does not write a large program, should we assume he does not know how to program?
Why talk in terms of one big company? Maybe small investors with conflicting ideas and interests would like to own and run small companies. Except, a couple of big companies are making that very difficult.
I imagine this was part of what was dialed in last week's Twin Peaks
You also need to collect all sweat, urine, and feces and figure out a way to exactly measure the undigested calories found in it.

So I would say the mask method is the BEST way, but not necessarily accurate.
This kind of things make me wonder why I am honest and poor (I mean not rich to the millions, I am not actually "poor"). I could do scams like this and be rich by the minute...
Intel also makes arm processors (a cortex a5 i think?); perhaps they do license it.
Ahem, Blackwater (or Academi)? East India trading company historically? And again, you're forgetting about the externalities that are less obvious and definitely less publicised. How many people working for Foxconn committed suicide because of the terrible working conditions or will die early as a result of them. Remember Erin Brokovich? How many lives have been ruined by companies like PG&E that were just never brought to justice?
Even worse, "senior engineers" after taking a 6 months javascript course and working 3 years in the field.
Yes, I left that part out of my answer just to keep from muddying the water even further.
I'm not so sure this was off topic. It was probably a joke, and not a bad or hurtful one. I giggled, and also subscribed to the podcast.
> fickle

Historical figures regularly vacillate between hero and goat. The Founding Fathers are currently heroes, and Edison is a goat.
Ajax.cloudflare.com is down
When you clone a game, the original game makes no profit. Pirate Joe's gave TJ's full profit.
Show HN: Lilite, a Linux package autoinstaller
Logically this implies that I can't execute some i386 binary that I possess without infringing Intel patents.

I think this theory of infringement has to run into various thought-experiment problems such as : can I auto-translate that binary into some other instruction set, then execute the translated binary, without infringing Intel patents? (yes, surely) Is the translator now infringing Intel patents because it has to understand their ISA? (no, surely).

Now, can I incorporate that translator into my OS such that it can now execute i386 binaries by translating them to my new instruction set which I can execute either directly or by emulation? If so then I am now not infringing. Or did infringement suddenly manifest because I combined two non-infringing things (translator + emulator for my own translated ISA)?
All the https://www.indiehackers.com interviews
> I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad.

I've never done it, either. I clearly remember the only few times I clicked on AdSense ads - once by mistake, and was extremely annoyed at the results (it was a sort of list like search results), and 2-3 times to test my own AdSense ads (yeah, against ToS).

Yet AdSense is raking in billions. I've always wondered who actually clicks on the ads :D
Someone also has to design, program, update, coordinate, and negotiate things around the robots. I admit that I haven't built out a map of a person + support services vs a robot, but I don't think it's suddenly an order of magnitude less jobs, it's just that the jobs will be different. There are some societal standards which are hard to change, such as the preference of some to have a human cashier ring them up at the grocery store. I personally prefer the scanner tables, since I can do it quickly and there's typically less of a line, but at e.g. Safeway and Home Depot, half the time they're out of order. Target doesn't always have them and Whole Foods doesn't have them (in ones I've been to). Self-checkouts have been in stores for at least 15 years ( http://articles.latimes.com/2003/nov/15/business/fi-scanner1... ), yet there aren't replacing many cashiers, and the trend I've noticed lately is away from them.

My point is that it's fun to think about, but I think we're many decades away from having to worry about robots replacing a majority of minimum-wage jobs, and it might not even be worth it to automate some of these things until minimum wage is much higher. Another example I can think of is a table busser at a restaurant. It'd be hard to make a robot who could operate as smoothly in tight quarters as a human, not spilling stuff everywhere and making lots of noise. You'd basically need design a restaurant around automation, not the other way 'round. You could also just design a counter-service restaurant where people take their own dishes to a tub, which is a lot less involved than maintaining a fleet of dish bots. Diners might also scoff at (or be amazed by, or both) robots cleaning stuff around them while eating.

Industrial robots I've seen aren't very pretty or clean. Do you think that the Knightscope bots clean and wax their own exteriors? At that point, do you pay someone to clean the robots or just have them clean the tables? Or clean the robot with another robot-washing robot. This might work in Star Wars, but even there, Chewie and Han did the wrenching; R2 just helped them diagnose it.

Again, my point is that I doubt there will be less stuff to do in the future, just hopefully higher-value stuff. If you look at history and as other commenters have mentioned, e.g. the move from subsistence farming to increasingly more automation, workers go from picking vegetables to other hopefully more desirable jobs (maybe driving a fork lift to load the boxes of produce into trucks).
No program is small, as it must include the operating system.

Now - you could go down to machine code, or work on embedded systems, etc etc - but the point remains. It's not just the software you are writing that's part your program, it's also all the other, existing software (and physical designs) it makes use of, or interacts with.

Edit:
Might be called "software systems engineering", or maybe "dev ops"?
Everest: Towards a Verified, Drop-In Replacement of HTTPS [pdf]
Note that this search is in everything the Archive backs up except the Web.
Ask HN: What is the Workflow for your life?
What tools do you use to make yourself more productive, how do you plan your day, how do you know if you had a successful day, etc.
I remember something in an old Phrack or another hacker zine where someone was recounting a rumor about this mechanism that he heard from someone who worked in a telco (viz., that there were special government phone numbers that were treated differently by the telephone system). It's interesting to see the progression from underground rumor to Wikipedia article.