skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Step 2 would be the creation of an actual software engineering profession complete with the equivalent of the 'iron ring' and a pledge to go with it. Maybe the ring could be made of ferrite ;)

This is already possible. If you graduate with a B.Eng in Canada you can become a P.Eng with the appropriate training/certification. Many Computer/Software Engineering programs in Canada are B.Eng programs (the alternative is B.Sc though those are less common).

Software/Computer Engineers who graduate with a B.Eng are eligible to receive the iron ring, and many do decide to participate in the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer.

I think it's much less common to find a P.Eng who is a software or hardware engineer, versus say a Civil or Mechanical Engineer, but the option exists.

I'd be very surprised if Pratt & Whitney Canada didn't have a P.Eng to sign off on their turbofan control software. But Aerospace is different, because it's a highly regulated industry and people's lives can be quickly and obviously at risk due to a mistake.
Working on UCM Oracle for a consulting gig once was what I consider the low point of my career. I do believe that's the stellent product post-acquisition, right?
To reference: https://youtu.be/xOCurBYI_gY?t=15m57s

It's fun how program learning to play teris pauses the game just before loosing.
Sparc is also effectively dead. Solaris and Sparc exist as ongoing projects only to the extent Oracle is contractually required to maintain them--e.g. to Fujitsu. If you accept that Solaris is dead, then by the same evidence Sparc is dead. If you believe Sparc is still viable, then by the same evidence Solaris is still viable.
> instead of actually supporting POSIX

What do you mean? Using Linux kernel syscalls is just one of many ways to "actually support POSIX".
> Every single person I have interacted with, core developers included, dismissed bitcoin on first exposure, at least in the early days.

I was exactly the opposite. I was entranced by how cleverly the blockchain solved the n-party Byzantine Generals problem.

Then I realized the while bitcoin is a neat technical solution, it doesn't solve any real-world problems except committing crimes and fueling a bubble.

> Bitcoin solves a real problem of trust.

No, it doesn't.

For the vast majority of people on the planet, a stable fiat currency is more trusted and stable than e-tulips. Rational people trust banks more than they trust Mt. Gox.

Can you give me an example of a common situation where trust is lacking, where normal people would have been better off using bitcoin than say... VISA or Mastercard?
Even those 'non-striver' people would prefer to have growth over time, in their position, wage, and skills. Humans are not static - we like to learn and we get very frustrated when we can't improve over time.
I'm in the customer service industry. A lot of issues stem from certain customer's preconceived notions about the capability of a person on the other side of a phone. That attitude is usually conveyed by tone of voice and mannerism. You expect to be treated like a human, and so do customer service workers.

I'm not surprised you have such a sour taste in your mouth when your belief is that customer service people are worthless.
Assuming wealth is earned, why would you want to tax it? It already was taxed when the individual was working.

Inherited wealth is another matter.
See one of the authors, Sendhil Mullainathan, speak about a similar subject here - a lot more high level but he's a great speaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7izsrYGhdU&feature=youtu.be...
If standing out as a foreigner somehow isn't a problem for your plate-faking needs, then you could just as well make up a fantasy country that uses comic sans plates. Nobody would be really sure that it does not exist.
The ‘reverse ICO’: How existing businesses will start tokenizing
But guys, I was told automation would solve all of our problems.
Well, we fixed that by not having a scrollbar! You had to click-and-drag to move the viewport, and thus it was difficult to move it more than ~1 screen width at a time.
In our market, it's at least 1:10 (CentOS is ten times as popular as RHEL). We don't actually record a difference between them in our license system (they both register as generic "redhat" with a major version), but we distinguish between them in our ticket tracker.

We had a bug in our installer recently where it wouldn't work at all on RHEL (I stopped testing on RHEL a few years ago because compatibility was so reliable that it never behaved any differently from CentOS). It took almost 24 hours to get a bug report about it (we see about a hundred new installations a day). So...it may be even less than 1/10th.

That said, we mostly operate in the low-end web hosting market: solo web developers, small design shops, web hosts selling to solo web developers, small businesses, etc. Our software rarely ends up in huge enterprise deployments. Even for our customers that are big businesses that use RHEL on the backend, they might have CentOS on their web server, because it's just a rental and that's what their web host installed for them. So, our numbers are certainly skewed toward CentOS because margins in web hosting are razor thin.
Lightning Labs | Crypto Protocol Engineer, Frontend Developer | Remote | Fulltime

https://angel.co/lightning

At Lightning Labs, we scale blockchains. Our current focus is the development and deployment of the Lightning Network[1], an open blockchain scalability protocol[2] primarily being developed for Bitcoin. Lightning allows for high volume, low fee, instant payments on top of Bitcoin. We strive to continually push the edge of innovation w.r.t blockchain scalability, advanced privacy-preserving smart contracts, and cryptocurrency UX. Amongst our team include applied cryptographers, the designers of the Lighting Network protocol, and several Bitcoin developers making key contributions to the open source Bitcoin eco-system such as roasbeef[3].

We're looking for an experienced software engineer well versed in applied cryptography, peer to peer networks, distributed systems, open source software collaboration, and cryptocurrencies. Your job description would include working on lnd[4] the most feature-complete implementation of the Lighting Network, neutrino[5] an advanced lite client operating mode for Bitcoin, conduct novel research into cryptocurrencies (and related areas), and helping to design the next generation of smart contract applications on Bitcoin.

Our work on Layer 2 presents a number of UI/UX challenges, as we lift traditional wallets to the next layer creating a new application platform on top Lightning. As a result, we're also looking for a frontend developer that is able to pick things up quickly, develop skills in our interdisciplinary space, and has strong implementation ability. Applicants should be Javascript experts an eye for design, that have experience building applications with React and React Native.

You can contact me directly at roasbeef@lightning.engineering with some, or all of the following: link to your github account, resume, a brief cover letter detailing your past experience in the areas listed above, and some relevant work you've done.

[1]: http://lightning.network/

[2]: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/

[3]: https://github.com/roasbeef/, https://twitter.com/roasbeef

[4]: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/

[5]: https://github.com/lightninglabs/neutrino
Oh god roasted parsnips! So good.
Oracle Cements Interest on Blockchain: Joins Hyperledger
Never understood why they loved it.

Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?"

Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?
In terms of Airbnb socializing costs, it's not the flat owner who is taking on some costs and some profit, but their neighbours, who bear the costs of noise and reduced security and community.
This is Aladdin City, a heavily hyped and over-sold new city that fueled a real-estate bubble in the 1920s in Florida.

https://goo.gl/maps/Xe3ns9Cd2tv
ERROR -9190 RUDE CUSTOMER

CALL TERMINATED
Love when threads like these dissolve into "How can we further overcomplicate tax law to benefit to ultimately benefit the government"
That is a big incentive for everyone who likes money, not only for services like Lyft and Uber.
Not sure of the best way to word the question but the scope resolution operator in PHP (::) is called Paamayim Nekudotayim, which means double colon in Hebrew.

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.paamayim-nekudotayim....
Out of curiosity, did her org structure / leadership / messaging change at all after Wachovia was acquired? I've heard through the grapevine that that really wasn't a good acquisition for Wells, being very different wrt corporate culture.
My favourites, I eat tons of them, from Albert Heijn (common Dutch supermarket). But they're better in the summer, if I'm not wrong.
Wealth, or more generally, rent-producing assets:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/the-obscure-economis...
Comments at the bottom indicate it was not pre-disclosed.
It may be competitive, but the utility function isn't flavour or choice, it might be price or convenience or microwave dinners or something.

I speak as an Irishman who had a terrible time merely finding decent bread when I moved here (there is zero good soda bread in any British supermarket, I actually imported and froze mine for the first few years, then I went the bread maker route, until I made my peace and stopped eating bread at home), with a German partner for the past ten years who feels even more strongly about it than I do.
Kilotons per kilogram (2013)
Check your assuption.
> I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the dot-com boom.

AR?

(Assuming the recent past of Pokémon GO and the upcoming general availability of Apple's ARKit is anything to go by.)
No, the underlying systems need serious rearchitecting to avoid these issues to begin with. A third-party trying to verify your identity should never have enough information to impersonate you afterwards.
Starting your own blockchain and raising Bitcoin to distribute your new tokens seems to be the quickest way to big bucks.
Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.)

If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.
Can you define and parse command line arguments that easy using raw PHP ?
بالفيديو ايفون 8 الجديد
Hardly overlooked, though
As additional clarification if you align the piece upward to look like this then you're fine:

#
##
#

You'll end up with

# # # # #
##########
# # # # #

which becomes

# # # # #
# # # # #

which you can just repeat over and over again forever (if your variant of Tetris includes gravity even this collapse to nothing).
i've used ff since the phoenix days (0.6? do not remember). this particular laptop now has 55.0.2 with Cookie Monster, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, Policeman, Show my Password, Tab Mix Plus. some other extensions are installed but not used.
> Can you give me an example of a common situation where trust is lacking, where normal people would have been better off using bitcoin than say... VISA or Mastercard?

I guess that depends on whether you consider the 2+ billion people worldwide without access to payment networks like Visa or MasterCard "normal"...

I think the better question is whether cryptocurrencies are a better fit than existing options for those people.
What reason is there to think ADHD is just nice words for failure?
> But Aerospace is different, because it's a highly regulated industry and people's lives can be quickly and obviously at risk due to a mistake.

Self driving vehicles and 'the Internet of Things' are in the same league.
> Never understood why they loved it.

Expensive parties, gifts etc
Just curious - what languages do you have in mind?
Personally disagree
That's him. Though he doesn't seem to have updated his personal website, he's now CEO/Founder of Stedi: http://www.stedi.com/
The Wordsmith Shares His Craft
My first intention was to extend Symfony/Console and make it more easy to use, but the main pain points were defining and parsing command line args, mocking stdin and filesystem, ...
R2 - Spiritual successor to request.
Except it doesn't work that way because cost basis gets reset during inheritance which is a huge give away to the most wealthy families. It is also the reason for an Estate Tax.
fraud accounts
Building Canada's Epic Ice Road (2009)
Actually forcing people to spend their money before death would be really good for the economy (despite you picking illegal activities for the negative connotation.)

And the real solution isn't a 100% tax but 100% tax over some lower amount, say $50,000 along with lowering the yearly gift tax exemption.

Inherited wealth is anathema to meritocracies.
Crap. What does this mean for the fate of ZFS?!?
It can't be "on chip": data has to get in and out somehow.

It's "quite possible" to do a lot of things if you don't intend to actually do any of them.
Yes, because nature isn't your friend and is completely indifferent to your pain, suffering, and existence.

It's easy to fetishize and "love" nature while we sit in our climate controlled boxes looking at pictures of the 1% most scenic sites in the world.
The prices are competitive and the stores are open 7 days a week, but the choice of products is quite bad and limited.
New Zealand consumer law has a requirement that goods must be 'fit for purpose'. This means that if a company sells you a clothes washer for example it must clean clothes, but if you try to wash your shoes and it breaks it's not the manufacturer's fault (unless they said it could of course).

I think something like this could apply very well to software. If someone uploads source code to github they haven't sold it to you with any purpose in mind, but commercial sales have functionality promises so they could be held to them.
It is true that Javascript, like many other languages (Java, Win32 wide chars, etc) has to deal with the problem that they assumed unicode code points could not exceed the integer value 65535, so you have to deal with the surrogate pairs. So I guess that is one way to "encode" all planes of unicode in a backward compatible way. Bytes don't enter the picture though!

It is still very important in general to distinguish a string from a byte array, and I felt like the article was fairly counter-productive with all its talk about "UTF-8 strings" (which doesn't make much sense, either you have a byte-array that you can apply UTF-8 decoding on to get a string out of, or you already have a string, in which case encodings in the traditional sense (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 latin1, etc) doesn't apply)
Considering the differences under the hood, that wouldn't be easy.
Co-Living Buildings on the Rise
> a kernel module whose sole purpose seems to be to inject advertisements into the user’s unencrypted web traffic

Ugh…why is this even a thing? Like who thought it would be okay to add this "feature" to a modem, let alone at the kernel level where it would be difficult to disable and easier to be compromised?
Here are two boring problems:

Affordable housing and affordable health care.

For each, the current system only wants to create more cost and not benefit the consumer. Somewhere the bottom will fall out.

Maybe independent housing communities will start being a thing where the land is cheap?

Maybe medical tourism is where its at?

Probably neither of those solutions will really work out.

They're big problems, though, with real money in solutions. Technology will likely help provide an innovative path forward.
There's a related annoying question for which I've never found a conclusive answer: for the standard tetris board (width 10, height 22), is there a strategy for the player that guarantees that they will be able to fill at least one line? or conversely is there a strategy for the game (supplying the pieces) to make the player die without having filled at least one line?
Bitcoin gets compared to gold and has even been described as an "anticurrency" [0] but I think there is an
important distinction between bitcoin and gold -- the underlying asset is intrinsically worthless, unlike a gold bar which can be melted into jewelry which can then be sold for instance.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-09/here-s-wh...
Twitch stream of growing mold in a cup of coffee leftovers
ZFS isn't lost. ZFS on Illumos (Smartos) and FreeBSD is alive and well.
I just thought he was being funny at the same time as pointing out we are animals too. And books serve several purposes, one being entertainment. So what if some books or authors don't take science seriously?
Yeah that quote definitely crossed my mind. However I think the OP is confusing ideas vs. systems:

The next big idea invariably seems to grow out of the next small idea; ideas that are big from the beginning almost never work.

That doesn't really make sense with respect to ideas. The real quote is about SYSTEMS, from this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/d...

The system is the realization of the idea. You can have a big idea, but you can't implement it all at once. TBL had a big idea, which is necessarily a big system. So he grew it from a very small piece of code (HTTP 1.0 was ridiculously simple.) There was an unbroken chain from small system to big system.

The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's just not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic kernels. But the real innovation is the software development process. The fact that thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little coordination is amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an expert in software collaboration and
evolution.

Linux is a universal hardware abstraction layer, which is an easy idea in theory, but extremely difficult in practice until Linus figured out how to make it work.

So Linux is a big idea too, as well as a small system that grew into a big system.

-----

This reminds me of Paul Graham's advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless.

Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.

I think that's pretty much in line with what's said here. You can have a big idea, a big 10 year goal, but you have to break in into steps. Gates had an explicit goal of "a PC on every desk" and Zuckerberg had an explicit goal of "connecting the world" (at some point, not at the very beginning). But they necessarily started small.
Uber's Next Chapter
It may be legal for you to do so (for now), but it doesn't mean that they are obligated to make it easy.
The Emotional Journey of Creating a Successful Product Hunt Project
And how happy was Van Gogh?
Commented this on the blog; cross-posting here:

V8 turns out to have a ton of internal string representations. They don’t affect semantics (the general point that JS string functions think in UTF-16 is valid) but they’re interesting.

V8 apparently stores all-ASCII strings as ASCII, so stuff like HTML tag names or base64 blobs doesn’t double in size.

Like Go, V8 lets you take a substring as a pointer into the larger string; the internal class is called SlicedString, but from JS-land you don’t see anything different from a string literal. As in Go, keeping a short substring of a long parent string keeps the whole parent ‘alive’ across GCs so sometimes folks will be surprised all those bytes are still allocated.

Unlike Go, V8 has a ConsString type, so concatenating strings sometimes doesn’t really immediately copy the underlying bytes anywhere. Building a string with a loop that runs str += newPiece probably goes faster than expected because of this. [It turns out it flattens the string the next time you index into it, or at least used to, which has some perf implications of its own: https://gist.github.com/mraleph/3397008]

That’s mostly from this post by a member of the Dart team http://mrale.ph/blog/2016/11/23/making-less-dart-faster.html ; his blog has a lot of interesting stuff about how these fine-tuned language implementations really work.

Kind of amazing the lengths V8 (and other JS engine) teams went to to make the code they saw in the wild work well.
Nothing, ZFS is alive and strong in Illumos and FreeBSD.
Quantum Crypography: Keeping Telecommunications Secret
Diamonds are also more expensive than water. But of course water is more valuable than diamonds.

Price is not about total value provided to society but about the marginal value of one more diamond, 1 more gallon of water, 1 more janitor or 1 more programmer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value
CenturyLink does this too - they're a tech holding company who buys and sells companies (Level3, Tier3, Savvis, Cyxtera, Electricbox, etc) in order to reap M&A tax benefits while squeezing the engineers.

Of course, these businesses don't make enough money to cover the massive shareholder draw, so it's all a stage play to convince Wells Fargo to loan them enough to pay those dividends.

It's an untenable and irrational position in the long run, but markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. And many businesses are in this same situation, needing bank loans to pay never-reducing dividends.
I am not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that companies need to treat contractors substantially different from full time employees or get in trouble for basically having full time employees that they don't pay employment taxes on.

So the choice is more like:

* keep cafeteria workers on the payroll

* hire a specialized company to run the cafeteria

...the middle ground would be to require all vendors provide minimum benefits of some sort (vacation, sick days, etc.). But that wouldn't make it feasible to offer a temp event worker a data maintenance role. That would basically be poaching another company's worker.
No one really wants to work
A number of the ideas in this thread are a little crazy. I wonder what is the economic potential of a tax that is vested over the people who propose it and their families. For example, it would be like "if you propose taxing wealth at 80%, the government goes into your house and your family's houses to take 80% of your wealth as a 5 year experiment."

"Oh you live in a 300k dollar house? Confiscated! We are moving you to a tiny house valued at 60k with all others who think like you"

I wonder if that would help folks come up with more sensical solutions. We could vote on the ideas, and the winners get the ideas implemented on themselves first!
BeOS almost made Apple a different company (2015)
Why must we 'fully' trust the state? We just have to trust it more than the markets.
> your parents' level of economic attainment is the best predictor of your economic attainment

I've read that marital status of you biological parents and the marital statuses of the parents in your neighborhood are also great predictors.
1. Errr what? You mean the input data? Sure, but that isn't usually considered the power consumption. Otherwise you can totally have most of the data (in the sense where data is the weights and activation maps) reside on chip. That's the only way to get high power efficiency.

2. Well, only time can tell there :)