skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This misses the point of what a product manager actually does, though. A PM isn't there to criticize your work or even to manage developers - that's more the project manager's job (or perhaps a lead developer's).

PM's at most companies translate customer feedback into concrete specs that devs can execute on. PMs usually do not have any authority over developers, but instead try to work alongside them.

I really don't understand why devs hate on PMs - they exist to let devs focus on code. PMs create customer personas, user stories, UI/UX specs, and business reports, which are all things that the majority of devs don't want to have to deal with.
Getting a bad reputation from the spam it has been encountering apparently.
And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada.

I don't see how you added anything to the conversation.

Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs.

For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a standard salary at less than £300 p/d and that money had to pay for salespeople, pre-contract technical support, offices, secretaries, etc. and all the effort on lost jobs as well as the actual work.

As a freelancer you don't have all those costs.
It's a definitional thing. "Works" at (say) Microsoft or Google means "produces a correct result at the end" whereas it means something quite different at Apple. The most egregious example I've seen of this is the way Mac OS filtered mouse movement data from the beginning, but it still doesn't feel right on Windows (and wasn't even in the ballpark until around Windows 98/NT4). (And, by contrast, the Amiga had pretty much nailed mouse movement early on as well.)
So you're basically saying a brand-new phone with 3 times the specs feels much like an almost 3-year old iPhone? Amazing!
Dear Somalian Pirates,

You're never going to believe this.
The article is quite light on details. The version from Microsoft Research is somewhat more informative: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/stories/hi...

My take is that MR is contributing compute resources as much as they are contributing algos. It's too bad that neither article really describes the problem domain nor the solution space. If this were a genetic study of HIV resistance to ARVs (and it seems like it is but again, few details), one could at least imagine having to look for 3-way interaction terms across the HIV genome, a large search space. Would be interesting to know if this is the problem they are tackling, and if MR's major contribution is algorithms or compute.
In my experience it depends on the work. For consulting jobs where you go sit in a bank or whatever and bash out code onsite all day, £300 is low. But for freelance work, remote work, it's much harder to find anyone who will pay £300, let alone higher. It's not impossible but there's much more of a race to the bottom in the latter jobs than there is in the former.
I've always thought of a "product guy" as a competent hacker who can can switch hats as he's working to think about business, the users, the design, the ease of use, the infrastructure, etc. A jack of all trades, one step away from entrepreneur. Never did it occur to me that "product guy" means something entirely different to others.
Apple to Samsung: Don't make rectangular tablets
Interesting data to scrape would be the reviews. Since the reviews are tied to the actual sales, it could give some kind of estimate what kind of sales volume we are talking about.
I am amazed by seeing developers, people with great attention to details, generalizing at this levels.
I thought I had until 40, before mid life crisis. Now you're stressing me out!
Taking Right Stuff to Maximize Your  Lead Generation Software on Internet
This sounds like it has similar goals to the Nix package manager. http://nixos.org/nix/
I disagree, the distinction between a contractor and consultant is not that one is on site and the other offsite. Many freelancers will work at the client's office if need be.

The terms have a massive grey area between them.
This isnt going to happen. Search is too important to Google to let go in Firefox. Remember, Google is not a browser maker (well, technically it is I guess), its focus is on search. Chrome is the unofficial child of Googlebot and the reason it exists is to help them dominate search. It wouldn't make sense for Google not to renew with Mozilla because that would be a gift to Miscrosoft's Bing.

As far as bloat goes, well addons account for a lot of bad performance and we have to remember that Firefox is old and there are people who have been using it for ages. Those people are carrying a lot of baggage in the form of old browser profiles, the user database, maybe even years worth of cookies and history. Setting up a totally fresh Firefox install would speed things up for many.

But I can't be a Mozilla apologist. I switched to Chrome but use FF for testing. I've found that FF is what I wouldn't exactly call "slow" but just "less fast" than Chrome.

It seems most software ends up bloated. Anyone who codes knows that code is never finished. There's always that temptation to add more and more to a project. Security updates and under the hood stuff is boring. New features are sexy! Sex sells. I recently created my own little web dev boilerplate and the first version was a nice starting point. Then I had this urge to add stuff until it was no longer a boilerplate but pretty much an entire website minus content. Ridiculous. It sucks but it's reality and we need to control that impulse to constantly add where no additions are needed.

Edit: spelling.
This is one of the more outlandish ideas I've seen show up in The Economist. There are a mountain of hurdles to cross before you get to any kind of autonomous "state". Still, I hope someone tries it. Some casual observations:

* Would this be Bitcoins first big opportunity? For a Seastead to make the leap to true statehood, they'll need some kind of currency that isn't controlled by a foreign government. Bitcoin, with it's entirely decentralized design, would seem to fit the bill.

* The artricle makes some statements that these Seasteads could be used to prove the utopian Libertarian ideology. The notion that a small colony of a few hundred people are going to prove that any ideology would work in a state the size of the US, France, U.K., etc is patently absurd. They'll ignore it, dismiss it, or find good reasons why mechanisms that work on a micro scale don't scale to larger nations.

* The article talks a lot about the need to be outside the jurisdiction of large nations like the US, and even mentions the willingness of the US to extend its jurisdiction pretty much anywhere in the world. The author seems to believe that if they stay away from the big-naughties, they'll be ok. I think he's wrong. If enough large corporations do the math and find that moving to an off-shore platform is a positive value proposition when compared to continuing to pay taxes, large, tax-dependent governments will find ways to replace the revenue. So you want statehood? You got it. Time to negotiate a trade agreement. How does a 60% tariff on all goods imported to our nation sound? Don't want to play ball? Embargo. Good luck with your 700 person economy.

* The last thing that strikes me is the monumental risk associated with building your entire nation on something that can sink. Literally. Say this idea eventually scales to $10,000 people. What is an acceptable level of safety for an entire population of that size? Lifeboats for everyone? Will the platform be sold as "unsinkable"? We know how that goes. Even land-based settlements face the risk of natural disaster, but it would seem the probabilities are greatly in favor of dry land.
It's not a hack, it's just one set of tradeoffs with pluses and minuses, like any other engineering decision.
Just been watching a documentry on floating homes in Amsterdam. Could be worth checking it out. Look for 'Amsterdam's Futuristic Floating City'. It's one of the Extreme Engineering series. Episode 7. I saw it on Discovery Science. Hth.
Hummm, home brewing then. You career is being an employee of a startup? Do you have any side projects between startups?
To be fair, though, they would have an even bigger problem with it if it wasn't cutesy. They have a problem with it because they believe it's satanic, not because it's cutesy.

Take your Harry Potter example. The people who are anti-Harry Potter aren't really against it because it trivializes black magic. That's just a rationalization. These people certainly don't support something like the works of Aleister Crowley, even though they're much more serious about their treatment of the occult. They're against it because it contains -- in their view -- black, satanic magic.
On David Allen and Actionable To do Lists
1) Surveillance is not uniformly bad. It's bad when it turns into an baseless invasion of privacy (such as with warrantless wiretaps). It's bad because of the privacy invasion (and all the negatives that come with that). Oversight of wiretapping is not bad, because it is not an invasion of privacy unless you believe that warrantless wiretapping is a private matter. Such oversight enhances privacy.

2) You've said that they should stop funding such agencies. That's not a partial dissolution. Also, removing the head of an agency still has the same issue. It's rarely the best action. Agencies with constantly-shifting heads are less effective due to constant priority and strategy changes.

And this isn't just an issue of budget. It's not uncommon to forbid agencies from doing illegal things or things outside their jurisdiction.

3) If it's legal to suppress privacy, the government would do it on a regular basis and this would make society less efficient and more likely to end up with authoritarian government.

The government owning everyone's secrets gives them additional power and control. It has many potential abuses.

I'm trying to get you to actually think about what you're saying. The arguments you have about freedom of speech largely apply to privacy. By the arguments you've applied to wiretapping, we don't need oversight into freedom of speech abuses. Why pass strict laws protecting speech? Why worry about the "gray area" abuses? Why not allow the government to engage in widespread speech suppression if it makes them more effective?

Why does speech deserve such attention, except that you happen to believe that it's important for society (which I happen to agree with, but which you've provided no meaningful support for)?

4) A 1% false positive rate might be acceptable for spam, where the loss is simply an email, and the fix is simply to scan the spam folder. A 1% false positive is not an acceptable rate for wiretap-driven arrests, because these are humans, and the fix is a long and complex legal process.

5) Speech is not important only in comparison to more important issues, such as freedom from false arrest. Of course speech has some value and deserves some protection. But it is already protected well enough and not a major concern at this moment.

We're apparently not going to agree on whether privacy is important. What I find more bizarre is that you swing back and forth between privacy being important and not. You've made numerous statements in support of unfettered wiretaps. I feel like you actually do not believe what you're saying, or that perhaps you haven't thought it through very well.
South bay website design
iDriveBiz assists Local Businesses with custom websites and marketing that create an interactive presence for their small business that allows direct interaction with the target customer. Its assists Small Businesses with their Advertising & Marketing Strategy as well as helps to faciliate Strategic Partnerships and Local Affiliations for your Local Business.
For more information please visit:- http://www.idrivebiz.com/
6 mutation testing systems compared
Now we just need to figure out why so many tech workers _believe_ that older tech workers are disappearing. Part of it is, as you say, a demographic shift. I wonder if a big part of it is also due to the employee structure of large, non-software companies.

Non-software companies do hire programmers, but have difficulty recognizing the talented ones, and don't really have structures in place for rewarding that talent. So, the "successful" programmers in those companies quickly figure out that they need to switch over to management. These workers with only a few years of actual software development experience move up into management roles, and take charge of software development groups. What's interesting is that they have so little actual software development experience that they might be perceived as non-technical to their employees, hence the tech worker has effectively "disappeared".
> I really don't understand why devs hate on PMs - they exist to let devs focus on code. PMs create customer personas, user stories, UI/UX specs, and business reports, which are all things that the majority of devs don't want to have to deal with.

My issue with this is that most PMs do an exceptionally bad job of this.

Understanding the user is a task as complex as developing the application, and it's something that is best suited to a dialog between an actual UX designer and the software engineers.

Blindly implementing what the PM tells you to implement is an awful position to be in, and results in terrible UX and bored/annoyed engineers.

The engineers and UX designers should be driving the product boat. The PM (if there is one) should be relaying business priorities, and relaying back the technical/design context necessary to choose those business priorities.

If given the choice, I'd ditch a product manager every single time and replace them with:

* A UX/UI designer.

* Engineers interested in user experience

* Lead engineering architects

* A project manager to keep tabs on priorities and scheduling.
I really don't see the point of seasteads - escaping the law is not really feasible (you'll need supplies from a country, and if you do anything the US or other nearby countries don't like, you'll be cut off or heck, even torpedoed). There's plenty of land to build a small city on, much cheaper.

Even if you want a private island for your getaways, you can buy a big yacht for cheaper, anyway. Heck, even if you want to create a criminal haven, it's cheaper and easier to do it in some third world country by bribing everyone (Pablo Escobar and Cuba is a great example)...
LG Optimus Link P698 with Two Sim Card
Misleading headline, it is only temporarily closed.

I assume it was effecting their Google rank, otherwise they would have left the old one open.
But actually the most annoying thing is the huge amount of broken links; they should host the plugins themselfs.
Good move. Reputation is far more important than people getting easy access to useful tools.

Don't get me wrong - it's their fair right to shut down a site they own. It's just highlighting a particular set of priorities they seem to have.
http://www.losethos.com/text/BIBLE.TXT

100000 lines

17 bits (coin tosses)

Riddle: How many does it take to prove God. You answer and I'll tell you if you're right.
Wouldn't it be better to open the new plugin site then close the old one?
What I don't like about OA5 is that it assumes everyone is able to work at the same pace at the same time during the day throughout the day. All my best thinking is really in the afternoon and evenings. Always has been.

Maybe I can hack my biological clock to be better in the morning. Dunno. For now, my brain doesn't seem to start focusing until about 10am, and then it doesn't seem to really get into gear until an hour or two later. With that in mind, it's really difficult for me to get my work done with people who want OA5. I suppose it would be fine if they're OA5, but they don't force it on me.
well, outside the startup community, there is a whole world of people who work a boring job so they can raise a happy family, or play with powerboats, or whatever. less productive, sure, but nobody really cares outside of a meritocracy. and who are we to say they are less happy.
"THE Pilgrims who set out from England on the Mayflower to escape an intolerant, over-mighty government and build a new society were lucky to find plenty of land in the New World on which to build it." -- I love how the English think of the American colonial settlers versus how Americans do.
Some of the confusion here arises from not clearly differentiating between legal and moral obligations. It's perfectly reasonable to ensure that the legal strings attached to a piece of software are as few as possible (BSD/MIT/ISC, the Unlicense, or the WTFPL), but still encourage the community to hold themselves to higher moral standards regarding e.g. attribution and contributing back to a project.
PHP YII CookBook review
I'm still waiting to be able to drive my car with my iPhone :(

This is fairly obvious when someone says it to you, but I guess you've got to think of it first.

Though this might change if manufacturers figure out a way to keep charging for expensive devices, but at the moment they've little incentive to upgrade an old product and the longer development cycle will obviously lead to 'dumber' tech on launch.
Sure. But if you expect that everyone should engage in mediocre speech, just because you don't know whether you should respect them or not, the result is kind of a sucky world.
Just writing code? I spend several minutes a day.

Just thinking about it? Oh, a good 8 hours a day.

How much do I actually get done? Nothing, and I am such a horrible programmer.
This is actually why product managers drive me batty; they're neither a software engineer OR a UX engineer, so they don't actually know how to build the product, nor do they have the design skills to create a great UX.

The job you describe here would be infinitely better suited to a UX engineer that has experience and knowledge necessary to build great user experiences, and a lead technical engineering architect.

The idea that engineers/UX designers can't translate business/compliance requirements into engineering/UX requirements is laughable. The truth is that they're the ones best suited to do so, because they're entirely capable of understanding both the business/compliance requirements and the constraints under which they must be implemented in UX/engineering.
I guess they'll have to learn skills that are useful outside of Kodak. If they never did so in their whole life, they never had a career in the first place, just a dependence.
Much of the commentary on seasteading is underinformed. It doesn't have to be "libertarian", as the concept can just as equally be used to build states for progressives, or North Korean refugees, or any displaced or oppressed people.

The engineering issues exist, but cruise ships are a pretty good proof-of-concept. Cruise ships show that we can get stable, luxurious accomodations at a per-day cost that is on par with an expensive hotel (2-3X SF Bay Area daily rent). The only question is the extent to which we can improve on that.

Hacker News will get a lot out of the full Seasteading book, which anticipates most arguments and goes through many interesting details, from structural engineering through power, water, food, and cost.

http://seasteading.org/book_beta/full_book_beta.html
The problem that stops a lot of people is that they see something cool and they want to do it too. The problem is that you can't just start off writing a GUI app from nothing. You have to get the basics down first.

For software you first have to understand the basics of procedural programming and write simple programs that run in the terminal. When I learned C++ I first learned simple 'cout >> "whatever"' programs with if statements. Knowing this kept me from being frustrated because I understood I had to climb the proverbial "ladder".

I'm a web guy and I'm able to make some pretty cool interactive stuff now but as a beginner I had trouble changing background colors and floating elements in a row.

That's the thing that stops people. They're frustrated because there's no easy way to learn how to do the things they see and want to copy without learning the absolute basics first. Patience is a serious virtue when you're a programmer.
I imagine there's a market out there for hardware "plugins", to upgrade connectivity and functionality of these expensive, dumb systems.

Imagine a small, lightweight raspberryPI type device that can plug into your car, or boat, or into the back of your fridge, that has Wifi and Bluetooth and provides whatever functionality you need. As technology advances, all you need to do is upgrade the small plugin, and not the entire car.

Just a thought...
Although WordPress' repo uses SVN (I prefer Git), it runs really smoothly. Something like that would be great for jQuery, but you wouldn't need the whole update feature set.
Finally. It would be great for the end user and plugin authors if they (jquery.com) curates the plugins themselves. I'm sure a lot more exploration will happen on their site vs scouring the web. I know I've never relied on their old plugin site to find anything.
I've said it before, but I really think Microsoft would be a completely different (and better) company if Microsoft Research was a bigger part of their product development. Just look at the insane stuff they're doing with Kinect, for instance.
It's not misleading; it says 'shutters' not 'shut'. As in how you'd close a shop overnight by pulling the shutters down..
Can we cut out the ad hominems for a moment? This is not about being a sissy; not about getting your feelings hurt.

These kinds of diatribes get tiresome real fast. The information density is inversely proportional to the amount of foul-mouthing going on. It makes me not want to read it, just like I don't like sieving through toxic mud to find some specks of gold. It's unnecessary and doesn't add anything. It merely detracts from what was achieved and makes it less awesome.

First you had some gold, now you've covered it in toxic mud before giving it to me. And don't give me "be grateful anyway, otherwise you would have had nothing". You don't cover what you give to beggars or your favorite charity in toxic mud either. It's extremely uncivilized and everything will say you're an asshole if you do. This is no different.

Thanks Ted, love the code. Too bad about the toxic waste you've covered it in.
I'd just like to point out to both you and the parent mmaunder said Program manager/product manager, not Project Manager. But if he means a PM, then fair enough.

Anyone who thinks a good PM isn't worth their weight in gold is seriously la-la and probably hasn't worked with one.
Let no one ever come to you without leaving better or happier
Not only that, but the linked to page also says "shutters."
Charles's blog is basically a stream-of-consciousness brain dump. He's not trying to convince you or anyone else, trust me.
Wow, this is pretty interesting. Perhaps you should approach Interpol and see if they would be interested in funding further development?
http://www.interpol.int/en
I love that they were able to patent a naturally-occurring organism. We need more systems in place like that so that the entirety of nature can be locked up behind patent license fees and legal protections to keep the rest of humanity from benefiting.
I'm going to disagree with "getting things done". Three words: IBM Global Services.