skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is one point where the article asks why programmers seem to get compensated well compared to other professions.

> The second most common comment that I hear is that, of course programmers are well paid, software companies are worth so much, which makes it inevitable. But there’s nothing inevitable about workers actually being well compensated because a company is profitable. If we look at this list of the most profitable companies per employee, we see companies that pay well, like Alphabet (Google) and Facebook, but we also see hardware companies like Qualcomm, Cisco, TSMC (and arguably ARM now that they’ve been acquired by SoftBank) that don’t even pay as well software companies that don’t turn a profit, and that the compensation between the software companies that are listed isn’t very strongly related to their profit per employee.

The relevant barriers to entry perhaps aren't to programming-the-skill, but programming-the-business-activity. In other words, the barriers to entering business of profiting from programming. And that makes software engineers higher priced commodity because there is higher competition from other companies, but also self-starts.

Hardware companies don't have pay their engineers as well because those engineers have a harder time leaving for other businesses. There are fewer capitalized companies, and self-capitalizing a chip HW business is very difficult. (and arguably the many smaller company options in that industry are rapidly consolidating - so employer options are going down rapidly).

So in the end software is paid well perhaps because the software profession deals with business areas which yield high value return on the labor, _and_ the low capital business barriers to those activites supports higher competition for software labor.
Georgism: The Single Tax
IRS Cops Are Scouring Crypto Accounts to Build Tax Evasion Cases
Out of curiousity, what's the project?
There's a great white emptiness on top, but when you scroll down there's some text. No media though. But I'm using private browsing mode which has tracking protection enabled and disables local storage among other things. I guess they don't feature-detect those things.
>> They might not deny your request if you claim your home is a prison, but didn't try that route.

Pure genius. I think I could believable get away with saying my house is a 1/2 way house for people getting out of prison. And there are stresses on the delivery driver that should only fall on a full time professional.
What’s a “suicide burn”?
Not really a proper linux version but I had success running HeidiSQL with Wine since a while and I am a happy camper.
While you make a fair point, who mentioned anything about untrusted users? You seem to be off on a tangent..
We haven't really had anything as collapsing as the "dot-com" crash occur in the past decade (knock on wood). As the article points out we are at all time highs, Congressional Research Service [1] reports that computer science jobs are projected to continue for the next decade.

I also like to mention [2] because it seems like this is where female enrollment's number dropped and never recovered. For a short while, I was researching about how these numbers came to be. Unfortunately, the majority of articles only talk about how computers were marketed to males and "Revenge of the Nerds" stereotypes pushed females away.

Instead, Dr. Roberts' article looks at a simple realism - everyone got sick and tired of CS. Sure, it was lack of resources in the 80s, but it shows a different perspective than marketing did it. I cannot find any research on CS perceptions stating it, but there was/is a severe "elitist" attitude among CS students. I think this is where a lot of the unattractiveness of the subject comes as well. In the 80s, you had to be the best of the best to get into these limited programs. I think it inflated a lot of student egos, which is where that personality quirk was created.

Maybe all STEM people have it, I don't know, but I do see it in CS. It's getting better as other programs are starting to teach things like coding, but if we continue to have limited resources, something needs to help relieve the strain. Better MOOC/Cyberlearning retention, grade automation, novel teaching approaches, etc. Otherwise, we'll just be repeating the 80s drop soon.

[1] - https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf

[2] - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Blockchains seem to be really good at raising capital.
My grandfather was a farmer. By necessity he was also forced to become a competent mechanic, carpenter, electrician, and plumber (did I miss any?).

Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.
> act like "dude just get more servers" is the answer.

The biggest problem here is that it largely used to be a distributed system. You used to just be able run your own dedicated server on whatever provider you liked. The dev would just run a single server list. Now many game developers have decided they're the only ones who get to run servers - primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell.

It really hurts games - PUBG is the best example I've seen - constant lag issues, complete lack of server side checks for things like shooting through the ground (because hey, that costs CPU and every additional cloud server they need means less profit), etc. It's basically made the game unplayable.

Game developers are unfortunately stuck between immersion in their games and the rage that leaves players with when technical issues occur. The more immersed your players are, the more rage they'll experience when your game crashes or lags at the wrong time.
That's such a ridiculous coin pumping meme. I watched the entire testimony. The government wants to enforce all the same regulations on the crypto world it has on the traditional world.

If they succeed crypto has a much reduced value proposition. The main value of ethereum has been in tokens, and the main value in tokens has been sidestepping egregiously restrictive security regulations.

The people at /r/cryptocurrency pushing this as a positive have earned the rank of shill.
I am not sure that is a minor correction. My guess is that Waymo bet on finding such evidence through discovery, but all it ended up with is armfuls of what is, at best, circumstantial evidence of collusion.
Was the box marked fragile from the outside?
All the trade secrets claims were plan B for Waymo. The case was initially about patent infringement, and for undisclosed reasons they were all tossed out.

What was supposed to be the original slam dunk for Waymo, 'trade secret 96', Which referred to PCB circuit diagrams that were accidently emailed to Waymo instead of Uber ATG by a shared supplier, was even dropped. Waymo's whole case was pretty flimsy.
KDE's Kontact PIM has been best-of-breed general office communications on Linux in my experience.

It doesn't suffer GNOME disease, it has mail, contacts, calendar, RSS, and if you want, a browser. It's reasonably stable and robust.

My principle preference remains console tools -- Mutt, lbdb, and a mash of other tools, or the Emacs world -- but that's not what the general end-user probably wants.

I've also found Sylpheed is an exceptionally good "just email and contacts" application. Fast, light, and simple.

https://www.kde.org/applications/office/kontact/

http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
New Business Ideas with Sean Bingham
And yet I still instinctively skip over links I see to video/audio content as it generally takes much more time, concentration, and attention to get value/information out of them.
> The author thinks low-income people's incomes are rising and that is false.

The author doesn't specifically mention low-income people - she just says that 'incomes rise':

But then incomes rise, and rents don’t. People with higher incomes have more resources to pursue access to artificially cheap real estate: friends who work for management companies, “key fees” or simply incomes that promise landlords they won’t have to worry about collecting the rent.

Your observation that poor people's incomes are stagnant actually strengthens the authors point above, because a growing income gap gives rich people 'more resources to pursue access to artificially cheap real estate'.

> The rest of the article is fallacious because of this.

There are some points in the article that are not dependant on rising incomes. For example,

Meanwhile, price ceilings reduce the supply because they decrease the incentive to build, and can make it downright imperative to remove rental housing from the market and turn it to some other use -- condos, warehouses, anything that won’t trigger the rent controls.
London 2038 https://london2038.com/ It's a revival of the MMOARPG Hellgate: London which released in 2007, closed in 2009, was revived as a pay-to-win Korean reincarnation in 2011 and shut down again in 2015. Our version matches the version of the game from 2009.
20 things founders say and what investors think
And a GPU that can output 10-bit color.
>My understanding is that skill supply is simply not elastic in this way. Kids generally pick what to do based on their aptitude and what they like to do,

Right. You see this in 1st year CS major attrition rates and programming related MOOC completion rates.
A tender offer is not a round. Most tender offers for stock (common or preferred) in illiquid companies are at a discount to new preferred stock from the most recent round.

This happened with multiple other companies like Facebook and AirBnB, so I don't see why in the case of Uber that anyone who is informed can conclude that it was a down round.
Same experience here in the UK. Started out poor, but now just as good as Royal Mail.
Particularly, it can hurt the share price on an horizon over which the C-level execs have their performance measured.
All of the managed products from the different cloud providers are, more or less, great. The problem is they are black boxes. When something goes wrong you're completely at the whim of support. Ever call Dell/Comcast support and want to tear your hair out? Yea... it's like that except neither AWS nor Google have phone numbers to call.

The other problem is that most of these things aren't easy to migrate to. AWS RDS is much easier because its just managed whatever you're already using. But cloudspanner? DynamoDB? You have to completely re-architect your application. Then you have to move your application, and data, to this new system...without massive outages. It's a lot of work and a lot of cost. So until things go HORRIBLY sideways, most companies don't have the spare time/money.

Been there, tried that.
League of Legends offers a colorblind mode in game that does exactly that - changes the teams to Blue and Red from Blue and Purple.

IIRC, they even use that mode for their E-sports tournament streams - but I might be wrong on that as I haven't watched any LoL tournaments in quite some time.

E: Just tuned into the EU LCS to take a screenshot - and it has colorblind mode on: https://vgy.me/ijQgrR.png
To be honest, I think if anything the trend will continue and the salaries will go up. There will still be a shortage of highly skilled developers who demand higher salaries. At my company we've been trying to hire a senior frontend developer for the last 6 months; it's hard, especially outside of major tech areas. Most people come unprepared, lie in their resumes, and suffer intensely from the Dunning Kruger effect. I don't see this trend of lying to get the job that pays good money to stop anytime soon. Out the 1.6M programmers employed in the US, I think a large portion still have the job because companies are desperate to hire, but don't know how hire for this industry.
Sure, programming is hard, but so is any job that pays more than the median wage. Hence why they pay more than the median wage. No one refers to "shit is hard" as a barrier-to-entry, because this "barrier" is so ubiquitous, it doesn't even need to be mentioned.

Artificial barriers-to-entry though, such as the licensing requirements for doctors/lawyers, are unique to some specific professions. Hence why they are worth highlighting.
Nah, us Philistines use cursive still.

That said, I read just as much as ever. Though I read far more non-fiction and news than I used to. I used to read more fiction and poetry. The easy access to content gives me too much to read, in fact!

My reading list grows daily. I simply can't keep up. And don't get me started on going down the Wiki-hole
"Rent control is one of the most effective ways to destroy a city’s housing stock."

The concept of 'housing stock' is generally a foreign one to the bay area. Residents mostly care about their own home value, rather than how having ample supply regionally benefits everyone.
This has to do with the IPO. Ideally the lawsuit will be done before the IPO so there is no uncertainty about future liabilities. Even if Uber won its unlikely that the appeals will be done before Uber wants to IPO.
It's a good one.

I think it's also true that It's cool; users love it is valuable regardless of importance and that the internet tends to turn "big" into important, or at least impactful and profitable.

It's cool & users love it is an easier approach to big than "important." I think this explains why toys now turn into serious businesses.
I've noticed that 2 day prime has become 4-5 day with some rare exceptions.
I thought it was $1.9b originally.
Tech newsletters worth your time
Show HN: Chrome extension to go from amazon book page to book page on goodreads
Unfortunately, mitigating a vulnerability can take a long time and might never happen.

When the Imperfect Forward Secrecy paper about weak Diffie-Hellman exchanges came out in 2015, not all systems using the vulnerable groups upgraded immediately, and some systems couldn't be easily upgraded either because they were hard-coded or because they had other software limitations.

The IT security situation in many developing countries is also pretty alarming, for example if you look at the prevalence of old unsupported operating systems and browsers in many places.

Even thinking about traditional emanations issues, the "van Eck phreaking" attacks were publicly demonstrated years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5HS8GWIec

but have still not been widely mitigated in practice. Neither have the emanations problems documented by Tromer.

https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/

And we know that the vendors were notified about Spectre in June of last year and the public was told over a month ago, but pretty much all of us continue to be potentially vulnerable to it in some settings, even more than seven months after vendor notifications!

It can be nice for infosec researchers to think that attackers only gain power and capability by knowing secrets, and that if those secrets are exposed the attackers will lose their capabilities, but a number of people have been pointing out that it doesn't always work that way -- or at least there can be quite a long window of vulnerability.

(However, exposing secrets is definitely an important prerequisite for denying capabilities to attackers.)
This doesn’t make much sense. If there’s an explosive risk, then it’s going to be a huge risk over land as well, and it doesn’t make sense that they’d be increasingly putting outlets at every seat.
I met someone recently who had a huge learning disability with reading, to the point that they are functionally illiterate. It really underscored just how essential textual communication has become in our world. Even menial jobs require literacy.
Lisp, not necessarily because it's good, but because it's easier with reader macros to transform another language into it as needed.
I'm probably overpaying because I stayed in a public (not private) health insurance plan, but I pay about 800€ a month, so close to 10k a year.
I'm new to macOS. Thank you. I need these tips. It's really annoying in the differences, but I'm sure thre are more hidden things that are useful I suspect I am not alone
Reflections on indie game development in 2018 – did I just waste 3 years?
> The real question is why would you remove it ?

To make more money per handset sale by selling wireless headphones.
Seems to me that if you're talking about smuggling hardware into a SCIF and installing exploits on the servers then doing this exotic form of data collection seems like overkill. There should be faster and more reliable options at that point, like turning the keyboard cable into a crude transmitter by banging bit patterns over it.

I've never seen a SCIF where going in after hours is the "easy route". They're full of motion detectors and the entrance is typically a heavy metal door with a combination lock. The air ducts are too small to crawl through. :)
> Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data

Yes, do consider.

In many, many cases the appropriate answer is "whatever stack you're familiar with".

In maybe 10% of cases the answer will boil down to technical requirements and you'll need familiarity with "Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..."

And that's where the bimodal distribution comes from.

> There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught

I don't know a lot about the law.

But if you think that MDs are not "self-taught" in the same way bootcamp graduates or CS graduates are "self-taught", you should talk to an MD some time.
Selika, Mystery of the Belle Epoque
Yeah I'm unclear if they were exaggerating, or just wrong. It seems unlikely you'd generate a plot showing an intentionally wrong trajectory/aphelion that could be shot down by later observation. I'm actually wondering if they just had insufficient or insufficiently accurate data initially on its position/velocity and as they got more observation time, corrected it.

>But astronomers online noticed some discrepancies with the numbers Musk tweeted, and SpaceX ultimately sent a revised orbit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Wednesday (You can find it by selecting “target body” -143205.) The new orbit shows that the car will indeed travel farther out than the orbit of Mars, but not far enough to make it to the asteroid belt. The belt begins about 329 million miles from the Sun, and the Tesla will reach a distance about 160 million miles away from the Solar System’s star.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16983744/spacex-tesla-falc...
Oh man that's awesome! I saw the Vetinari name and wondered if it was a Sir Terry reference or something else, respect to those folks at VLC.
They've always been (incorrectly) characterized in what I've seen in media/pop-culture as hardworking but relatively simple. The more I learn about the difficulties of modern farming and what it takes to succeed, the more respect I have. I'd love read a blog from somebody with career-level experience in both software-engineering and farming. I'm sure I/we could learn a lot.
"I once had a top-tier business school grad friend claim that programming really isn't that hard and that we're all whiners."

It truly is amazing how people outside of a field always seem to have the best idea of how long something in that field takes to do.
The judge was admonishing Waymo for showing what were essentially marketing materials to the jury in closed-door sessions. Their lawyers were showing clips from Wall Street in court. They were asking Travis Kalanick to explain video game terminology in ludicrous detail. And so on.

No company that aims to be taken seriously wants to be involved in a circus like that.
is not a framework
Bluetooth headphones make headphones complicated. Where previously it's literally a wire with speakers on the end, now your headphones now need to run software and they have a battery.

Previously a search for the right headphones was the intersection of few concerns:

* Price

* Sound quality

* Comfort

It was hard enough finding the right intersection of the 3 that fit me. Now I have to also balance the decision with:

* Battery life

* Ease of use (for HEADPHONES!)

* Rechargeability

* Connection quality

Headphones are such a simple idea. For some people the complexities of bluetooth headphones are worth the cost, but I don't want my cell phone to force me to accept that trade off.
Hey, I've heard of this! Good work. :D

One thing I notice from your site is that you provide _many_ ways of giving feedback. The Discord widget, the 'Contact Us' menu item, the FAQ is peppered with communication links, there's a Forum, Wiki, et al. Basically, I'm seeing an incredibly low barrier to entry for anyone wanting to express themselves to the developers.

Have you considered paring that back? IE, ensuring all communication channels are moderated, and limiting it to only one or two services?
I kind of think its so impractically hard that there are easier exploits they could find.
There can be many kinds of faulty. Some faulty wires crackle when there is something broken that comes into (and goes out of) contact when moved.

For example, having uneven thickness will noticeably reduce audio quality like you mention.
What specifically makes them underpaid? Are their wages getting stolen or illegally withheld? Is there some market force that is coercing lower wages than they would get otherwise?
The cone. Whomever came up with that icon deserves way more credit and recognition.
Who is this mythical people who consume video news? I can't stand the slow pace and lack of details.

I very much prefer text, where I can skip boring or redundant parts, or radio where I can work in something else while I get updated on recent developments.
Running fine on a 2017 MacBook and my old 2014 MacBook Pro. No issues beyond anything I saw on any other versions. To be clear, I did end up wiping and re-installed the 2014 MacBook Pro as I had some strangeness. That laptop had been upgraded through ever version since 2014 and had 3rd party kxet, etc.
If you are talking about more than 10 years from now....

There is no way Amazon doesn't fire all these Gig operators and replace them with Drones. I live in Las Vegas where we have the most industry friendly drone laws in the country and have already received a test delivery.
> The great thing about a headphone port is that if you stick something in it you won't ever hear anything over the speaker.

iMac does that, and I find it very annoying. I normally use headphones, but occasionally want to use the speakers. To do that I have to reach behind the iMac and unplug the headphones. This is annoying because there are things in the way on my desk.

I cannot understand why Apple did this. They got it right on my older Mac Pro: you could select in the Sound settings between the headphone jack and line out (which was were you generally would connect your speakers).

Am I missing something here? Making an analog audio signal electronically switchable between two paths is not something that requires an EE genius to design.

If for some reason they cannot do that...how about putting the headphone jack in front instead of on the back? Put it in the middle of the black Apple symbol on the front if you are worried it will throw off the aesthetics. It would be hard to see there.
Seems to me that in the short term, as long as cryptocurrencies keep getting used to move money out of non-western countries (India and China amongst others), into western countries, there is no reason why western governments would want to hinder such activity. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if China and India try to ban them, although with all the rampant corruption at all levels of government, that might prove very hard to enforce for both of them. With regards to Russia, I don't know what to think.

Am I wrong in thinking this?
Ask HN: What other websites/forums do you use that are of similar quality to HN?
Has Anyone Seen the President?
That was my point yes, sorry if I was being unclear. Thank you for your articles by the way, they're always insightful. It's nice to see somebody actually using those cryptocurrencies instead of merely speculating about them.