skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't count on computer expertise being infinitely available even after AI is invented. They won't be infinitely intelligent; we will still need to give the programming AIs some sort of spec, which will need to be written by people who understand how the AI thinks. If nothing else, there will need to be people who understand it well enough to make sure it's actually serving peoples' interests.

More likely, there would be a gradual transfer of control to increasingly sophisticated AIs, paralleling our current/past move to higher-level languages.
You assume of course that this research leads to a vaccine that's 100% effective and distributed to the entire population of the planet.

You miss the point that some people can't have the flu vaccine because of auto immune disease susceptibility. Also X percent of the population will not get the vaccination for other reasons.

So this is more like [Sophos|Symantec|Kaspersky] creating a super Windows virus then offering to print the source code in order to "further" research.

Just like with nuclear technology, we can't put this genie back in the bottle.

Just because we can do something, does that always mean we should?
I share your skepticism of bit coin. But if you haven't read the article, don't comment.
At least someone will be able to store the full specification of the format, or a reference implemetation, along the file that is going to be preserved. It's nothing more, in fact, than one document that refers to another in that the only way to get all the information is to decode both.

You can't store the full spec of a format that's not fully documentes nor keep a runnable reference implementation that has only a binary executable (unless you also preserve the computer it runs on). But then you have turtles all the way down.
So you think Google should fuck over millions of people to protest Congress potentially fucking over millions of people??
"expected" doesn't necessarily mean "required". Unless one of the things they have participants sign when they agree to do the program lays out specific penalties for refusing the job offer or leaving before 18 months, they're not required to do anything. And if such a clause does exist, there absolutely should be a lower bound on the salary, benefits, etc. in that contract, so that they know they're not agreeing to work for minimum wage for 18 months.
I've always been amazed that with all the effort to keep "dangerous" objects off the plane, they still hand out aluminum soda cans which can easily be crushed/bent/torn into quite dangerously sharp forms. Why bother carrying a weapon on board when they're provided free of charge in flight?
Wily + Python &gt; Emacs + Lisp?
Are those views really opposing? Do people who ask for more software engineering want it to replace hard CS or augment it?
I think that one of the key things in the article that people a overlooking is the part about finding someone that you and the candidate know in common. He's not advocating just randomly calling people from the candidates LinkedIn connections, but trying to find someone you both know in common that you could speak to in confidence. My guess is the article got edited down a bit too much and didn't make this key point clear enough.

FWIW to the people who are commenting that they are highly turned off by this tactic... I know Brian Halligan and have worked with him twice (the last time being at HubSpot), he's a very professional and ethical guy overall (IMO) and I don't think he'd recommend doing something that put a candidates current employment in jeopardy. He is also not the only person I know who uses this approach. I've known several people to take this approach, and I've also personally been contacted by people who trust me, in order for those folks to get an unbiased back channel on candidates they were hiring.
No. That doesn't make sense. See my comment above.

You have to guarantee 100% effective vaccines with 100% distribution.
He is talking about someone who has taken traditional martial arts (Karate, Kempo, Tae Kwan Do, etc).

I started out taking those, and even got a black belt, but in the end I knew nothing other than how to do some kata and dance around a ring with my opponent trading "blows". The only thing of value I learned there was balance, and even that training was mediocre.

So his analogy of "school trained martial artist" is very apt. I know a whole bunch of guys like this who would get their ass handed to them in a real fight with anyone of even minor real-world fighting experience.

On the other hand, a school trained street fighter would have an advantage over an untrained street fighter, all other things being equal.

Of course anyone trained for professional fighting (UFC et al) receives training with substance (techniques that are useful in the real world, and LOTS of actual combat). I'm not sure if there's a CS equivalent to this.
I think the downvotes may be because you don't note the difference between saying you support a thing and actually pushing something through.

It's quite easy to say you support something that will never get to the floor and score political points - many politicians use this technique to score points with their "base." Ron Paul, in particular, has a number of professed views which are untested. Until Mr. Paul has enough political capital to disband the TSA and does so, it's disingenuous to credit with doing it.
One way to thwart this: make your LinkedIn connections visible to you alone. http://min.us/mlinkedinconnections (shared connections are not hidden).
Luckily, the source code for LibreOffice is not a secret.
I'm not sure if I'm in the majority but I'd find this annoying. If I dropped out of your 12 step sign-up process at step 4, don't bug me with emails about it, make your damn process simpler.

Further, I basically don't even open unsolicited email unless it's from a person (person, not company) I know. It's like ads on a web page, it hardly even registers. If I get enough of it from one sender to take notice, it's more likely than not that I'm not going to be happy.
To me, this should almost always be the most interesting possibility. You could do this on the side and use it to get some enthusiasm back into your coding. This option also has the most financial upside if you can do something which takes off.

This option also gives you the best job security. There is no job security in a job, only building your own business will put you in total control over your destiny.

Also consider that the same sorts of issues could pop up wherever you land, along with additional issues that you won't know about until you actually get to that different job.

Otherwise, it seems like a bit of a coin toss. Maybe browse through LinkedIn to see if you can get in touch with people working in your target industries. See if they can further expand on your list of pros and cons.
Even you aren't cross platform personally (e.g. you don't have a Mac and a PC at work or an Android phone or ...) Dropbox lets you share files and folders with other Dropbox users. Unless you're confident that you'll never want to share with someone on a different platform (which only sounds realistic if you never want to share at all), that's important even if your personal environment is homogenous.

I'd guess that most Dropbox users share something (though I haven't seen statistics on that) so they are probably less threatened by vendor-specific solutions than you might think. I suspect Dropbox is more threatened by services like Amazon Cloud Drive (especially since Amazon is an infrastructure provider for them) than they are by anything Apple or Microsoft has planned.
That's an argument for learning C, but not for learning C as a first language. Studying assembler or chip design or even particle physics will also help you understand what the computer is 'actually doing', but it doesn't mean that's the best place to start learning how to program.
Manager's compensation is mostly bonus-based the higher you go, in the guise of "hitting your yearly targets." Senior Mgr is about 10% to 25% of base salary. Director is about 15% to 40%. VP is certainly 30% to 80%. CEO might solely depend on bonus to get the big windfall, like stock price hitting certain level.
I think you will find if you start adding design pattern modules or methodology modules. The people on the side of cs will moan about it being watered down.

If you don't add them, the people on the side of software engineering, will say it's not relevant to business needs.

If you try to compromise they both moan about university not being relevant...
Helping your users understand Facebook Connect
But then you're bringing opinion into the law. If the jurors on one trial think that 30% isn't fair, but jurors on another trial think that it is fair, you haven't got a fair system anymore. Isn't the law based on justice and fairness?

And this doesn't only apply to tax laws. There could be a difference of opinion on other cases too.

While the law nullification idea is a good idea in theory, it starts to break down in practice.
The issue isn't explaining it. The issue is it needing an explanation at all.
I think people should be aware that this goes on, in the form of hiring managers saying "this candidate worked at X, my buddy/coworker/neighbor worked at X, I wonder what their opinion of this candidate is".

I would hope that people who do this only call people they know well and trust to keep the discussion confidential (or at worst, tell the candidate "hey, your prospective employer asked what I thought of you, they must be getting serious about hiring you").

On the other hand, I agree that doing this kind of reference-seeking with total strangers is really creepy, and stupid. If someone I didn't know called me out of the blue this way, I'd definitely tell my friend "your prospective employer called me, did you give my name as a reference?".

Still, the first kind of reference-checking is a good reason to do your best to leave every job on good terms (not just with your boss, but with coworkers as well), if at all possible. You never know who might talk to whom down the road.
All the more reason to avoid the problem altogether and not create unreadable documents in Office.

Seriously: it's not like someone won't be able to buy a copy of LibreOffice. OTOH, a government should avoid mandating the use of proprietary solutions because they exclude people who can't pay for them.
> Today is the golden age? Not to people who’ve been doing this for a few years.

Things seem to have turned on a dime. Around the subprime mortgage crisis (Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September 2008) things were looking dire. However around now (December 2011) things are looking much better. Experienced devs in New York / Seattle / Silicon Valley / Los Angeles are making more than you think. I've even heard that devs fresh out of school in Boston can make $140K.
I attribute that confusion to the fact that the term "Computer Science" is used as a facade for both Computing Science (a branch of mathematics), and the skills necessary to create and deploy software systems (which most of the time doesn't even require "engineering" math).

It's like grouping "Industrial Design" and "Theoretical Physics" under the term "Physics", if "Industrial Design" also included "Product Managment".
So true. One more e-mail from the service which i don't care can turn my ignorance to "anger". And yes, there is something called bad marketing.
Windows. Which makes everything a bit worse.
That's an interesting perspective. It really is hard to think of when things have been better, overall, for developers, but there is still a lot of stuff that stinks. I think the factors discussed in the article make it merely a matter of time when your (and my, for what it's worth) vision is fulfilled. The pressure caused by more people entering the field will force something to give. At our increasing rate of technological development and replacement, it could take just a couple years to take over once someone set it off.

While I'm here, if we have One Hardware Architecture To Rule Them All, why do you think we would need a new VM?
CoffeeScript is a subset of JavaScript with bindings to an alternate syntax (CoffeeScript). John's suggestion is an enforced subset of JavaScript, with the advantage that (some) JavaScript in the wild is understandable; error messages are in terms of the source language (very helpful, more so for beginners); and yields a skill with greater marketability (so far).

Why not use the same subset as CoffeeScript? In some cases, this simply forbids some constructs; in other cases it allows a construct, but only in certain contexts.

A mathematically precise but implementation-unfriendly definition is: only allow the subset of JavaScript that is the compilation of some CoffeeScript program.
The relationship may be public, but the knowledge that I'm job-hunting should not be. In a similar way, the hiring manager knows who I work for now, but expect them not to tell my employer that I'm job hunting.
Next, the web page told me it detected a new thermostat near by. Cool! To verify it had the right one, I needed to go over to my newly installed thermostat and hit the button to confirm that my thermostat was indeed the one attempting a connection.

Er... How does that work?

The thermostat connects over wifi to their servers, the server sees that a thermostat connected from the same IP as the browser, so it offers that as a potentially owned thermostat? Is there some in-browser magic where it's probing the local network for thermostats?

If it's the former, and you're in a condo behind a shared building IP, are you offered all the Nest thermostats of your neighbors?
Dropbox is pre-installed on many Android phones, for example:
http://geektech.in/archives/6318 (which comes with extra free storage up to 5GB for HTC users).

Pre-installing on PCs is possible, though my quick Googling didn't turn up anyone doing it. Pre-installation on Apple devices is unlikely, of course.
They're placebo controlled. It would be a colossal waste of money to do it any other way. Besides being methodologically unsound, the trials wouldn't be recognized by the FDA or Health Canada.

The University of Rochester has also been working on HIV vaccines for many years. They're always recruiting subjects. The posters are interesting because you can see what stage this particular vaccine is at based on who they're looking for. If they're looking for married, middle-age straight non-injection-drug-users, it's safety trial. If they're looking for young single MSMs or injection drug users, then you know that vaccine has progressed to the efficacy trials.

http://www.rochestervictoryalliance.org/

The 'non-vaccinated' group he speaks of is the placebo group. The reason he mentions it 'head off' anyone assuming they would test it by exposing people to HIV.
The difference is that in the biological case the virus comes up by itself without the need for too much human intervention or 'source code". We already know that more then one group already managed to come up with a killer strain by (basically) just exposing the virus to ferrets in a cage.

A malicious virologist already knows enough to try to replicate the experiment in his own secret lab so censoring the information will just make it hard for the good researchers to do their job.
Or use a language where '-' is allowed in identifiers. '-' looks better than '_' anyway.

Personally, I decided a while ago that I spend such a disproportionate amount of time writing code that its worth my while to customise my keyboard layout to make writing code quicker and easier. I now use colemak with caps lock mapped to control and left control mapped to backspace. I also mapped alt-gr to hard to reach symbols (everything except those that are already on the main keyboard), and since I can tap alt-gr with my right thumb real easy, I can now type symbols like - = ( ) ! + * _ & @ ! 0 and others with ease (the listed symbols are the easiest symbols for me because I have them mapped to my left hand while my right hand presses alt-gr).

I spent ages debating with myself if its worth using a non-standard layout that I won't have on other computers, but in the end I figured I do so much coding on my own computer that if I had done this years ago (I used to think its not worthwhile), I would have saved a lot of effort.

Some people say that thinking about code is the slow part, not typing, but the way I see it is that the faster I can type code the more down-time I have for the thinking, the faster I can experiment in a REPL and the faster I finish mundane typing tasks where I don't need time to think.

I am now also planning on relearning my vi/vim commands to speed up my editing even more as I have forgotten a lot of what I knew a few years ago when I used vim a lot.
Here is a follow up post and video response to Paul's article: http://www.getspotta.com/user-retention-as-a-service-lifecyc...

I agree with Patio11 - even a super simple implementation with minimal business rules is still better than zero communication.
This sounds more like the original iTerm than the newer iTerm2 to me. They're separate projects.
Lambda calculus with Church encoding in C
You are being modded down because the 65% is ahead of their original schedule. This means they are investing less public money than originally planned in the migration and spending less in Microsoft licenses than they would be had the project been behind schedule.
It still doesn't make any sense. Just because Brian knows some person doesn't mean he necessarily knows potential problems in mentioning the candidates name (unless it's always Brian's BFF -- but I suspect it's really just some person who Brian happened to have some degree of contact with in the past decade).

Why does this need to be blind at all? If there's someone that Brian would like to talk to, just ask the candidate, "I saw from LinkedIn you know Sheila. I'm good friends with Sheila. Would it be OK for me to contact her as a reference, or would that pose any problem for you?"

And I think it's also on Brian's shoulders to make clear why Sheila provides values. "Sheila is someone I've worked with in the past and value her opinion." Brian should also give you the option of giving her heads up, otherwise Sheila may view the cold-call from Brian as you dropping the ball.

All in all, just seems like a bad idea. And frankly, I'd really like to see the data that shows he's gotten better hires from this.
I wonder why there are so many task applications out there? I hope people refrain from being all "oh god, not anotherone, :rolls eyes:" because it's really interesting. The weird thing is that usually when there are such a huge variety of choices that do the same thing a clear winner emerges but as far as I can tell there are still a lot of very popular task apps. More than us usual for any one genre of app for there not be some clear winners. Even if we just count the popular ones there's still a ton.

I'm thinking it's because there's an incredibly huge variety of ways that people get things done by using them and each somehow have such subtle nuances that maybe we can infer that the basics of task management or to-do lists are the same but people have very subtle differences in what's effective for them. They seem to be so subtle that 2 task apps that are the same in every way on the surface can actually be vastly different depending on who you ask. I don't know but it's really interesting to me.
What? The attackers had an easier time because hijackings didn't usually involve flying into a building / killing everyone on board.

Prior to 9/11 most hijackings were about taking hostages, flying to a friendly country, then awaiting your ransom. As a passenger, your job was just to sit tight, don't do anything stupid, and wait for the resolution. The hijackers didn't have to socially engineer anything, they just relied on the assumptions of the time.

After 9/11, passengers got more aggressive. The shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were shut down and restrained by alert passengers.
This seems the cheapest way to ensure the use of open formats.
My response: http://blogkinnetic.blogspot.com/2011/12/on-civic-decay-of-u...
Bitcoin’s Comeback: Should Western Union Be Afraid?
The patent debate is too polarized: there are good and bad patents
I wonder if this trend will be contained to the UK looking forward. With MITx et al, in my opinion, this could be the beginning of an interesting trend. Technology has only begun to affect education.
Yes, too much is asked of them. In my mind, the solution is to just ask less, specifically ask them to primarily be teachers. This does have implications for grad programs and I don't know what, but it would certainly clean up undergraduate education.
The Tower: purpose and meaning in life
It almost certainly is illegal in Europe under a variety of different laws ranging from data protection to breach of confidence.

The important takeaway here is that if you're going to do it you should clear it with the candidate first.
Facebook's Goal: To Be a Blue Chip
There is no split. LibreOffice is clearly the successor and OpenOffice is clearly the legacy project. Oracle abandoned it long before donating it to the Apache Foundation.
Seeing as how one of the arguments for teaching JavaScript first is that it lets you teach about prototypical inheritance before the students get used to class-based inheritance, the complexity of simulating a class in JavaScript is probably not the best objection to using it instead of CoffeeScript. If you teach them CoffeeScript, then you will teach them class-based inheritance just like everywhere else, and miss out on the prototype paradigm.
I'm actually hoping some apprentice or self taught developers take the "Introduction to algorithm analysis" course from MITX if it's on offer. It's probably one most relevant cs style modules for software developers.
The Problem with Implicit Scoping in CoffeeScript
This is not indicative of the type of employer-employee relationship I would wish for, from either side of the table. You're presuming an awful lot to spend someone's social capital, without consent, for the express purpose of soliciting negative comments about them.

Suppose a candidate did a reverse background check on Hubspot by cold-calling an investor or customer, quietly, to solicit dirt on the company prior to evaluating a job offer? That strikes me as either a) too socially unaware to function as a professional or alternatively b) borderline sociopathic.
Twitter to open source Android security tech
Actually, that's a good point. The UK government has setup their universities to be disrupted by higher quality courses that are not under their jurisdiction.
Look Natural with Lace Front Wigs
Indeed, selective application of the law is a tyranny in itself, and the public gets awfully bent out of shape when police officers try it.
Explaining Why Women Hate Pickup Artists Using a Starcraft Metaphor
Design and methodology can be learned, but are hard to teach.

And they are even harder to teach inside science or engineering schools.
And a new startup offers a hosted IndexTank service in 3,2,1...

For anyone looking for a job at LinkedIn, making impactful contributions to this project could be a way in.
The whole idea of having jurors is to bring opinion of peers into making judgement about the case.

Of course it's better to make a system that would be consistently fair (e.g. keep taxes at the level vast majority of society supports it). But if two available options are "not fair" and "not always fair" - I'd pick "not always fair".
This may seem like nitpicking, but I am always worried when I look at a website and the blog hasn't been updated for months. Even a short "Hey guys! We're working on stuff!" would assuage my fears that you've turned into a zombiecorp. =)
There is no placebo group, it would be highly unethical to do so. Half the sample population gets the treatment half of it doesn't with the option to get the treatment once trial finishes. Changes in behavior due to treatment are accounted via survey pre-treatment and at measuring intervals.