skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think programming in its current form will become similar to unskilled labor. The important part about the examples at the beginning of the article (construction, factory workers) is that there were engineers (smart experts) behind the innovation that simplified a task so that an unskilled laborer could do it.

Can programming become so dumbed down that anyone could do it? Sure, there are plenty of tools out there that are "App Makers" for whatever platform/genre you want. But are those tools churning out apps that make a company? I haven't seen one.

The thing about software is that it is a ton of small pieces put together to create something new and unique. Factory workers put together a ton of small pieces, but to create something that has already been invented. A car, for example, has a specification created by smart people and put together by unskilled workers and machines.
Yes, I "use" IFTTT regularly, but I barely ever use the website.

If I had to guess on a business model, maybe adding ads to the notifications?
Pot, meet kettle.

This is a discussion forum for the purpose of discussing the validity of both an article and people's opinions. This is not a dinner party or a coffee meet up between two friends. You don't know me, I don't know you, and in my comment, "you" is abstract.

This is nothing like the same.
totally agree on that one :)
I seem to recall some pretty clear-headed comments on this site and others questioning late stage venture funds buying into these "frothy valuations" and whether they would be able to get the returns that venture partners expect.

It seems that, at least for now, those returns have not been up to an acceptable level.
Twitter has about 5 "pages" on their whole website. From a template perspective it's the MOST simple kind of website you can build. So, there's that.
love it! great way to ring in 2012 by doing good for someone else
From my point of view, the 3 important points on SOPA, and your grade on them:

1) This will kill innovation in the US, hurting job growth.

Mentioned

2) This will not prevent rogue sites from operating on the internet, meaning we pay the cost of #1 without any real gain

Not mentioned at all

3) There are good technical reasons why this is a bad idea

Not mentioned at all.
Just sell, not targeted.
A fine mess - a random walk with Pi.
"And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+
post about the article than the article itself, because,
and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump
through hoops." Hoops like reading the article?"

The hoops I think he is talking about here is having to typically set up an account on a third-party site to comment. I've not commented on a blog post or article because I don't feel like figuring out a username/password (and then remembering it), doing the typical confirmation steps, etc., just to give some feedback. Some have Facebook integration to save you a step but I, like others, don't particularly like having every comment I ever make aggregated by Facebook.
This has been updated with new information that confirms the Linux Developer Network will not be returning.
It keeps code out of the views.

...and put it in controllers, which is terrible for large-scale organization. I would hate to see what their back-end looks like.
Despite my differences with much of the Republican party platform, one thing that they are damn good at and I respect them for is an ability to communicate with their target base.

Where's there's a hot topic issue, the Republicans will come out in lockstep with voices on the same wavelength. They use clear and simple language with a single antagonist. In the really big battles they even coin phrases like 'Obamacare', 'Death tax', & 'energy exploration', that succinctly convey their point of view. Each of those phrases will be used repeatedly by every Republican on TV, until their opponents (Democrats) even adopt the same language they've invented.

This why I like that 'shoplifter in the store' analogy. Its pretty simple and relatable to just about anyone. On the topic of language though, the opponents of SOPA should be creating their own word/phrase. If we refer to SOPA as 'online piracy', then we've already conceded more ground that we need to.
Nitpick: sizeof(RString) + length may overflow size_t.
Android Income Report #8
IE Number 1 Browser of 2011, Followed by Firefox & Chrome
I think you're confusing legal "precedent" with the colloquial meaning of the word.

Isn't it obvious that I meant "precedent" in the sense of "a jury found this expert's testimony to be credible once, and therefore is likely to do so again"?

Seems like the "for future defense lawyers" should have been enough of a clue to head off the pedantic hair-splitting.
I really like your comment about more money being spent on legislation than innovation. I really wish this could be emphasized because this models the real cost of this bill. Should web companies invest more in technology or lawyers? A better service or stricter laws?
You could hack markdown support into the HN code base. It's open source. And once you've written it, you should have a decent chance of lobbying for its inclusion into the copy running news.ycombinator.com
TJ's goal (in my view) is to make a really unopinionated way for node to interact with the web in a modern way, standardizing things like routes, sessions, etc. Matador would provide some opinion on top of Express to standardize file locations, or do a Rails-like inference of inflection perhaps. (I haven't looked deeply).

I wrote my own version of this last year, and found that it was a really good learning experience, but I didn't think it was worth publishing publicly. However, there is definitely room for a scaffolded MVC prototyping framework on top of Express, imo.
It was really strong! However, since that's not the most constructive line, I'll try to point out a few things :)

1) Some would recommend not saying "I think" or "I feel" in interview situations. You're the expert -- what you say is fact and the truth. It simply is, not what "you think." I know this is a belligerent, but his is a big issue, so don't forget to pull out the rhetorical stops. However, "we think" may work in these instances. It's congenial, yet conveys that you have the backing of many (and you do, quite frankly), and that you are a thought leader.

2) You need to begin to build some sort of presence in Washington. You're well positioned to do so, and it's the most likely way to stop SOPA/PIPA. Get meetings with as many elected official there as you can, and educate them. It's what Big Media does, and its how they wrote SOPA/PIPA. If you don't think our policymakers know enough about the internet, teach them -- they're smart people, all in all. IIRC you had some success with individual meetings during the first SOPA/PIPA hearings, so you know what I mean. Bloomberg interviews, boycotts, and blackouts are incredibly valuable, but they all pale in comparison to meetings with people who vote on the policy.

Point 2 will of course prompt the question "How the heck is Alexis supposed to meet with these guys, cmon?" My answer: you're an entrepreneur. Hustle. Do what it takes :)
I was only counting the one page after logging in, which does everything. It's how web apps work.
Ask HN: What is a great training program for scrum/agile?
Guile manual has nice details about data representation:

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Data-Repr...

Tagging:
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Faster-In...

Another interesting technique is NaN-tagging (used in LuaJIT): http://wingolog.org/archives/2011/05/18/value-representation...
I agree with you: what we think of as 'pro' programming -- writing large programs in formal languages and running it past an interpreter/compiler -- is probably only something the few will really get into.

However, there's a couple of exceptions to this idea I'm not sure how to handle.

MS EXCEL : It's a programming experience, of a sort, and is incredibly popular. I think it uses similar skills to writing code, but is just much more 'gentle' on the brain. There's a programming nature in excel formulae;

=SUM(A3:A14) / COUNT(A3:A14)

if you see what I mean...

BASIC : Back in the 80's, everyone and his dog had a go at BASIC programming. Most of my friends and their dads got their hands dirty typing in programs from magazines. It suggests that getting lots of people involved in simple languages might be feasible.
It depends on the type of sales. Selling two sided markets is much, much harder. Through in required analysis and it takes a lot.

Examples:
Real estate Brokerage &

Investment banking

Etc.

I am intrigued by the idea of no commissions in some if not all sales jobs. If the person isn't selling you can fire them. If they do well in the managers judgment you can bonus them. While it is subjective, almost all business decisions are. A good manager is good at making good subjective decisions.
thinking of my family and friends. I owe them so much. 2012 is the year!
When your new gig sucks
"replace" is a strong word

exactly the word I intended to use: but "sooner or later" can be a long time coming. I know POP still exists, hell, gopher still exists but I'd say it's been replaced in all practical terms.

every provider that supports IMAP still has to support POP3

In what sense - do you mean practically, or in some technical way?

for a new protocol to replace SMTP or even augment it, it would have to be designed, refined...

Right, but I restricted this to client-server. Any protocol you like can replace SMTP for client-server, simply by taking messages from the client, then sending them on via SMTP. This is how Courier provides mail sending via IMAP connections.

maybe it's the rate of change in things like HTML and CSS over the past few years that gives the false impression of being so easy to do.

It's not easy, and it won't be quick. But I like many slow, difficult things, I expect it to happen at some point. In fact there's already a draft RFC to for RESTful HTTP mail retrieval: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dusseault-httpmail-00
Sure, though I'd argue that maybe you're too shortsighted. If you were one of the few literate people at the time of Gutenberg, you might have a good start on everyone else...yet if that kind of literacy ratio never improved within a generation, I'd argue that you might have ended up poorer. Especially if you had the hankering to be more than just a reader...few literate people means few reasons to write books/pamphlets.
The size of the strings for that range of numbers. So, e.g. all of the strings starting with "twenty" will have that length of string (here, 6) * 10, plus the "one" in "twentyone", etc. The "one", "two", "three", etc have the same length whether they're preceded by "twenty" or "thirty".

Account for the repeated strings "hundred", "thousand" or "million" and what follows them and you'll get the magic numbers above.
lol thanks, I'm so tired that I read (and then typed) pinboard as Pinterest. heh
With that said, you obviously know little about Mustache and how to use it thus not contributing anything meaningful.

I recommend you check out Chris Wanstrath's mustache library for Ruby: https://github.com/defunkt/mustache#readme
I actually do know offhand that I use the Taylor series to calculate it, and that the Carmack method works by using a couple tricks of binary floating point format to do a really good starting point and then run the Taylor series through a single round of iteration. I've also implemented it myself before since library methods were too slow. This probably puts me in the top 0.001% of developers world wide in terms of what I happen to have memorized and from personal experience about square roots. However, I don't offhand remember the details at all and wouldn't pretend to. I would never use this an an interview question because it doesn't test for anything at all. 99% of candidates would have no clue regardless of skill level, and of the 1% who knew anything, most would be because they happened to study the right "interview tricks" site while cramming for the interview. So I still think these sorts of questions are absolutely terrible for the purpose of finding competent developers.
I like vim, use it daily for editing configs and such, and used to use gvim as my main text editor. Its ubiquity or usefulness is not disputed by anyone. I don't think that modes are stupid (though I don't prefer modes myself).

However, when developing locally on a relatively modern machine it does not feel any faster at performing basic tasks than other text editors. vim being optimized to run over 300 baud connections is not an advantage in what many consider normal, daily use.
who cares Rails.
No - instead of allocating memory on the heap for the C character array aka "string", Ruby is the text itself directly in the RString object.

These short strings would actually NOT have COW optimization because they're structs and cloning one would clone its embedded string as well (as there are no pointers involved in < 24 byte strings).
Nice idea, with one big flaw: nobody will trust it. Either at first, or when it starts getting too big...
Email is not going to die. It will evolve. Just like how websites and browsers have evolved over the past 10 years.
Dropbox has two types of authorization, entire dropbox level and app-folder level. IFTTT allows you to type in a full dropbox path instead of being restricted to /ifttt, so it requests the full access. It would be nice if they offered you the choice, and then if you picked the app-folder, the paths only allowed /ifttt.

It also looks like DropBox doesn't have access levels beyond that. If you have access, you can use any of the API, upload / download / delete / etc.
Ask HN: Am I wrong in advising my brother against university for programming?
My brother is deciding on schools he wants to attend. He is looking at University of Toronto for Computer Science. He isn't exactly sure what kind of programming he wants to do yet.

Am I wrong in advising him against going to university for computer science (he wants to code)?

Universities when it comes to CS are hardcore math (my brother says he doesn't mind math). On top of hectic schedules, you have huge tuition fees. And when it comes to coding, real world experience is king (in my experience at least).

What advice would HN give someone looking to go to university/college for programming?
3.0.x is more different from 2.3 than 3.1 is to 3.0.
I do not think this is accurate either. Just because something is possible (and it is a big IF to say that it is possible to reach 100% automation, economy wide) does not mean that it will end up being that way.

Consider, let's say, manufacturing. We have pretty much nailed down the details of how to automate a factory. Still, we do not see that the world manufacturing has been dominated by the most technologically advanced countries. When you automate, you have to pay upfront for your robots (with a ROI measured in years). With human operators, you defer payment until after you have collected the benefits of their labor (in terms of finished product inventory, not revenue). Not that it has not been tried, car companies tried to pull it off in the 70's, because in the books it looks like the robot is an asset, while the payroll is a liability. But they all discovered the hard way that cash is king and have been struggling with imminent bankruptcy ever since.

Instead, the big powerhouses are less advanced countries with large pools of young workers and weak labor laws. There a manufacturer can get started with much less capital and pay as it goes, instead of building these huge, high-maintenance, illiquid capital investments. And when the market shifts (and it always does) they can retool an pivot much faster too.

Apply the same logic to economic activities where bussiness processes are not throughly documented or even understood (like crafts and professions), or those which depend on contingent uncontrollable factors (like agriculture), and you will see that the idea of a fully automated society is beyond human reach.

Maybe if we manage to build a super-intelligence to solve all these problems for us, we may have a chance, or maybe there are fundamental limits that just cannot be overcome. But in either case, as of today, I think this is more science-fiction than actual science.
Well, that may be true to an extent. The other day I was working with some code that was adequate for most purposes, but didn't meet my rigorous standards (hence: attention to detail and thinking through every aspect of the issue).

So I put on my "old age and treachery" hat, aka my puzzle solving hat, and came up with a better solution one that was:

shorter

simpler

more robust

The experienced programmers I know call this cheating, hence the "old age and treachery" (from "old age and treachery beat youth and beauty every time").

Smarts, puzzle solving and intelligence are all a critical part of that. And that's the thing that is the 10x multiplier that makes all your 'average' (median) programmers look distinctly below 'average' (mean).
I had a N900 and used to write lots of code in nano. It had python, ruby and PHP and was a great tool for quickly coding ideas or scraping and grepping web APIs. It ran vi and emacs too but I never really used them.

Now I have an Android device that's 5x faster and 10 more usable as a phone but I've only written about 10 lines of code in total on it's virtual keyboard. Hoping my next phone combines the best of both worlds.
If you don't mind my asking, I am curious if you got the job also while living remotely or did you live in northern California, got the job and then later moved out of state to work remotely? I'm currently out of state, looking to move back to California as its where I'm from so I'm wondering if there is a possibility for finding a job where I work remotely which would certainly make the move a lot smoother, already have a job there.
Not really. RString operates in the same way std::string does - it has a character array and it has a member variable denoting the length.

It's not null-terminated. You can store a sequence of nulls and that will not affect the result of std::string.size()

In C, you'll be forgiven for thinking it was null terminated, because attempting to assign a std::string a value from a null-containing array of characters would terminate the copy upon reaching the null, but that's only because the original char array is null-terminated when read as a C string.

However, you can manually construct a std::string with \0 sequences in the middle and that will not terminate the string, nor affect the separate length calculation. The same applies for Ruby's RString.

So that was the reason they're not null-terminated. Now the reason why they technically are (i.e. the reason NULLs are stored at the end of the string) is for compatibility and optimization. At the cost of one byte per string (for the trailing \0), we get instant compatibility with non-RStrng/std::string functions. If a function needs a C string, we can just pass the internal pointer to the character array - no need to copy the string to a temporary buffer and append a null.

Therefore, while null-termination is absolutely NOT required when dealing with an exclusively counted-length implementation of C strings (a la RString, CString, std::string, etc.) if you can just pass the pointer and the length separately, it would be a ridiculously foolish optimization for a general string implementation to NOT have the option of directly exposing the underlying null-terminated string to any functions that need it, with the caveat that null-containing counted strings will obviously terminate sooner than expected.
Fearless Youth: Prozac Extinguishes Anxiety by Rejuvenating the Brain
Ha ha, you had to wear a tie for the exchange floor.

Also, wadsworth constant applies.
In the common case, selling someone $50,000 of licenses is a $50,000 win for the company.

That actually sounds like a very uncommon case. Even fully client-side software has variable costs in the form of support costs.

Support costs aren't relevant to your parent's example, but they do imply another misalignment of incentives. If a salesperson's commission is based on revenue alone, she'll just as soon sell to a costly, high-maintenance customer as to a profitable, low-maintenance one.
Seems that they are only using TransUnion. The one thing I've never been able to find is a place where you can pay for a full credit report from all 3 agencies WITHOUT getting automatically enrolled in some monthly monitoring BS. Credit Karma - I will gladly hand over some money if you guys offer a clean cut transaction on a full report from all 3.

But on another note, this is the first credit site that makes me feel like I don't have to take a shower after visiting.
Chemistry, Engineering, Mathematics, etc. all existed before coding. So far, the number of people willing to do hard 'mental' tasks has been pretty low. More than a few people I have known haven't gotten into working with their brain that much until later in life, once they decide that the types of jobs generally available to the unskilled aren't what they want to do.

3 months to learn to code Java? I shudder to think of think kind of code those places produce.

Maybe people can learn to make database queries maybe, but most problems I've been asked to solve quickly morph and start requiring a lot more to get working, even to accomplish tasks that seem 'simple' on the surface.

If coding was simple to learn, UML->code would work flawlessly (as in a tool that generates code from UML). I don't think this has proven to be the case.
s/vary/very/

Sorry! Can't edit it now, either. :$
http://porkrind.org/a2/?disk=montezuma_etc
My advice, though I don't have a CS degree, is that it's better to have it and not need it, that need it and not have it. Sometimes you need a piece of paper. I could get incredibly solid in my skills, but it will always throw up a red flag that I don't have a related degree. It's simply harder for the average person to prove "related experience" even with OSS contributions when they could check off a box by having a degree.

Also, have him investigate multiple CS programs. Not all degrees are alike. Some are heavy theory, as you said, and some place an emphasis on software engineering.

As for debt, it's comparatively these days to get a moderate to high paying job in CS. If you have a degree.
This is also a wrinkle that comes up managing sales organizations, which is why sales account managers often get different comp rates for different products.

Again, just two issues I have here:

(1) Dev incentive comp and sales incentive comp aren't particularly comparable.

(2) Huge compensation for the best sales managers is an economic reality, not a philosophical issue, and if you're not going to compensate variably, you're shifting a lot of risk from the sales manager back onto the company.
This is just a helpful tip and not a criticism. Amazon has a very bad reputation among skilled developers and most are avoiding you for that reason.
Here is what Alexis seemed to be saying in the interview.

- SOPA is bad for websites that rely on user-generated-content (and entrepreneurs like him)

- We (i.e. tech community) intimidated GoDaddy and forced them to back away from their support for SOPA

- One guy made a million dollars by requesting donations on PayPal instead of demanding payments from all users. This is a great example of innovation. The private sector should innovate like this guy (i.e. they should rely on business models that request payments, not require payments)

I realize that SOPA has zero support on HN and that my criticism of Alexis' interview-responses won't be popular. However, imo, a better approach to win public support would be to come up with specific solutions for the copyright problem and also acknowledge that copyright holders do have some legitimate concerns.