skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One common thing about all those jobs is that they've all been automated in parts and continue to be more and more automated. So you may be right that for some reason not every job can be automated 100%, but that doesn't save those jobs from automation. See how happy 9/10 laid off zookeepers are when you tell them "Hey, at least we kept one of you to run the machines!"

Even if you can only get to a mere 50% from some baseline, that's half the previous work force blown away that was previously required. Those laid off will have to find another field quick. It's not easy to change careers and it's not easy to go from a mostly-labor job to a mostly-thinking job. (I'm being fairly broad with labor and thinking here--e.g. I consider someone whose job is to input handwritten form data all day to be a labor job even though they sit at a computer for 8 hours, and a professional artist to be a thinking job even though it's probably better categorized as a creative job.)

Since mostly-labor jobs are the easiest so far to automate large portions of, those jobs are at the highest risk. Programming is the last bastion of a large supply of available jobs until we have AI smart enough to write most of the programs people want, it seems sensible to have a sizable subset of the population at least somewhat knowledgeable on the matter that they have a chance at switching to a programming job if their current one goes sour for any reason (like outsourcing), not just automation.
Even assuming it is hard (I don't know, haven't looked into it), it wouldn't disprove the point. Sure there are hard problems in programming. But normal programmers will never be exposed to them. There are also hard problems in medicine, like curing HIV, but most physicians will never attempt them.
It would be great if the author could actually write a description of how IZ's algorithm works. The C++ source is fairly complex and has no comments whatsoever.
Elections: just as irrational as human behavior in general
How Apple's '1984' Ad Was Almost Canceled
And perhaps talent; the unenforceability of non-competes seems to be a game changer. It's clearly a unique advantage for California.
https://www.jiffybox.de/ is excellent.
Not really, the same with any organization - if the people who made the decisions lose face, they will double down before sunk costs.

The comparison in this case might have the prosecutor go after some lesser charge just to stick anything in order to justify the huge operation in the first place.
FWIW, my brother its an industrial electrician and programs regularly for his job.
You can even sell to (up to 35) non-accredited investors, as long as you in good faith believe that they are "sophisticated" and understand the investment, and you provide them with some additional required financial disclosures. Afaict, most startups avoid that though, mostly because of worries that having non-accredited investors might complicate future financing rounds.
With A Little Help: Digital Lysenkoism
Will Facebook be the next Yahoo?
I'm not familiar with the NYC or Boston startup scene, but I think that arguing that any city is going to overtake SV anytime soon is naive (as the OP found out himself).

SV or, more correctly the greater Bay Area, is to tech entrepreneurship as LA is to movies. Sure, you can become a star in NYC or somewhere else but everybody just knows that if you want to increase your chances, you've gotta go to LA. As Shawn Mullins says in Lullaby for LA:

it's hard to play a gig in this town
and keep a straight face
seems like everyone here's got a plan
it's kind of like Nashville with a tan

Well, SV is "kind of like LA with a pwn" (I'm trying to rhyme, too). Just as any waiter or waitress and everybody's neighbor in LA wants to make it big in the movies, so it is in SV. The buzz of ambition in the air can be unsettling to many people.

Interestingly, the movie industry started in NYC, then moved to LA in the 1910s and 20s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States#Ori...). Read that part of the Wikipedia article carefully, as many of the reasons for SV's dominance are pretty much the same.
The laziness level that can be achieved with vim's modal editing still surpasses that of most editors. When you're used to vim and you have to use something else, you even become disappointed when you have to reach for the arrow keys. hjkl is far too convenient. Heck, I hardly use backspace anymore even.
The original comment said: What do any of these educated and skilled people need with programming?

You said: ... almost all of these professions could benefit from at least programming in R.

"Need" != "Benefit From". There are innate benefits from learning anything, including programming. That does not equate to a profession having a need for programming.
Happy with? Ho ho I'm never happy ;)

Look, I'm not going to say I love SAP BW - I loathe the costly bohemoth it has become, and I hate even more the so-called experts who are just out of business school with no CS knowledge, and those consultants who are "in it for the money". That stinks and there are many many of them.

But whenever I look at any competitive BI system, on a technical level SAP BW is way ahead of the game in so many areas. I can't even begin to list them properly:

Near code-ess datawarehouse

Follows the Kimball method to-the-letter

A truly usefull way of snow-flaking

and an astonishing delta load mechanism

source database independent scripting (if necessary)

Having said that only 1 client in the last 14 years has ever implemented SAP BW correctly and cleanly, and (incredibly) with no data load errors for 2 years. So I know how good it can be with the right person at the top (me;) it just costs the earth.

So to answer your question, the rest just look like very hard work, and almost all are by-and-large script instensive, which in the long run is unmaintainable because the business cannot understand it. And that is the whole purpose of a good warehouse - in my view - it needs to present a model that mirrors the business processes.
Murdoch’s Tweets | Bombtune
Absolutely - even those of us (like me - disclaimer: I work at Typemock) know that there is a time and a place for unit tests and TDD (not the same thing).

In fact, we wrote about this before http://bitly.com/zdyJfl

We're hosting a webinar on Wednesday about different kinds of testing and when a unit test is appropriate and when another kind of test, like an integration test, may be a better choice - http://bitly.com/xeYSYg.

Unit tests have a time and place. There are times in which they are a must if you want to reduce technical debt and test your code - both if you're writing mission critical stuff or even when you're writing the latest social sharing app (remember the Fail Whale? We all hate that!). But, no, you don't need TDD on greenfield code all the time and you shouldn't have to write tests for logic.
I don't think it makes sense to compare this to Backbone.js, which is more of a library than framework.
No, no, those are todo list apps.

Besides, we're still in the first to second generation of js rich client frameworks. All this crazy amount of experimentation is great; it'll settle down more towards the fourth to fifth generation.
Disrupting the roaming mobile data market
And that the landlord admits to coming into your house daily to read through all your mail and documents in order to sell you stuff. And then follows you around town to catalog what you buy, what videos you watch, who are your friends, what are they doing, and what information you're looking for, among other things because, you know, this will all make it a better experience for you.
A new Tech-blog that actually looks nice
C++ definitely also needs unit testing - even with untestable code (even when it's bad code, though not always, it may be easier to test it using something like Isolator++, rather than rewrite greenfield from scratch).
Past work experience with XHTML, CSS
How Easily Credit Cards Can Be Read Through Clothes And Wallets
"""the purpose of intellectual property law is to promote the creation of works"""

Perhaps the whole problem would go (almost) away if IP terms were made a reasonable length again. No, I don't think so, either, but it should still happen. Copyright started at 14 years in the US. As distribution got better, it should have gotten shorter not longer.

Maybe we really are reaching a point that IP should not be protected by law anymore. Coca Cola has kept their formula secret for over a hundred years. Many companies do not patent certain pieces of information, preferring to keep them trade secrets. The fashion industry never had IP protection (beyond trademarks that apply to everybody).

This would mean 37 Signals can get angry about somebody using their design (like they (any clothing designer) did) but they would have no legal recourse to do anything. I don't know if 37 Signals has any legal plans, but it would surprise me (a lot...who wants that kind of distracting mess? Oh, wait, Apple seems to). Personally, as much as I love my iPhone, I couldn't care less if Cupertino no longer had a foundation (outside of trademark, which still has value, IMO) to sue over the iPad's and iPhone's design.
Android Trojans downloaded by millions, still on Android Market
I don't know, I think there have been some high-profile cases where a lot of time and money was spent by the government, but the result was either no conviction, or a conviction of a much lesser charge.

Now, since as you say, this was a large multi-national operation, I don't know if all those charged will be extradited to the USA, or if they'll be tried in other countries. I really have no idea about laws & procedures around the globe, but if they are extradited to the USA, I wouldn't count the MegaUpload folks out just yet. It's probably very dependent on how much of their assets are frozen, which will affect how much of their money they can spend on legal representation. (I say unfortunately, because it seems to me that in an ideal justice system, everyone should have the same level [high!] of representation, rather than some being able to "buy" better lawyers).
For comparison, here is /usr/bin/false from my Solaris box:

$ cat /usr/bin/false
#!/usr/bin/sh
# Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
# All Rights Reserved

# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
# The copyright notice above does not evidence any
# actual or intended publication of such source code.

#ident "@(#)false.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.3 */
exit 255

You'll notice the slight difference with `true`.
Abstract Dark theme for Windows 7..
The author wrote a post about how NYC will overtake SV after only visiting SV for job interviews. They are an "aspiring VC" and think Sand Hill Road is underwhelming. I am still blown away by SHR, and the density of power. It's also a lot different when you're going for crucial meetings on SHR, and not just driving through.
How to improve ANYTHING: 'apply machine learning and stuff like that'
Feds give OK to deleting Megaupload user files starting Thursday
This is precisely why there is a separation between the executive and judicial branches of government. Unfortunately I do agree they're not as separate as we might wish.
Tipler cylinder - time travel posited in the serious litrature.
I'd argue that we're in the third generation already.
I'm an introvert. [1] Additionally, I cannot concentrate in a noisy, distracting environment. I was told -- ad nauseum -- this was my "problem" and that I needed to accommodate and "adapt" to the noise around me. Ultimately, after several decades of doing my best to do so, I burned out -- hard.

Now, "the press" is telling us that "introversion" is good. If it was more than lip service to the latest trend -- fad -- I might be encouraged. But I doubt very much that it is.

In my mind, all these "introverts rule" articles can fuck off and die. Because it's just not true. The world is full of loudmouthed, bullying assholes. And the worst part is when they manage to turn you against yourself.

If you are an introvert. If you need peace and quiet to concentrate. The best thing is NOT to support those who try to stuff you into a cube, or who blast the stereo at all hours because "college is a party".

Get away, so that you can think. And keep in mind that they will step on you and use you if they can. So, don't let them. Be kind to yourself. And to your friends. And to those who truly respect you. But fuck the "touchy feely" propaganda from the media.

1. I get along just fine with people -- in fact, I'm often considered quite "nice" and people seem to enjoy spending time with me, particularly if they and the setting are not overwhelmingly aggressive. I enjoy spending time with them, too. So, I'm not asocial.
The TV on Your Shirt
How about Samurai? Admittedly it's not as quick as PayPal's "immediate" deposit, but maybe 2 days[1] is quick enough?

Disclaimer: I've never used Samurai, or any other payment gateway. Just did a quick search because I was curious.

[1]https://feefighters.zendesk.com/entries/20659152-how-long-wi...
By DHS? They can't even spell Twitter right.
Hyper and deep attention
Because vim has a lot of commands which are to do with navigation, with standard editing controls you would either press the left arrow a bunch of times while watching the prompt and stop when it's in the correct place. Then you would enter the comma and repeat the process going right.

(I know you can use home/end or ctrl to jump over words, however often these aren't always applicable and often still need visual feedback)

In vim it's significantly easier to jump to the desired point on the line with fewer key strokes and no need for a visual feedback loop.

In short; it's not the fact you can use the keyboard to navigate, rather it's the fact that you can navigate efficiently with the keyboard without having to think about the position of the cursor.
The sentiment that due process was not followed has come up multiple times. Is that what you mean by "well followed procedures"? If so, how did they violate due process? I am unaware of any way that they did. (Note that I am using "due process" to mean "due process as dictated by law" not "what I think is fair" or "the way I think things should be.")

This article is really about the merits of the case, which is separate from the question of following due process upon arrest and indictment.
Aha, that went over my head. Apologies! In that case: excellent point.
Meet the NYC Teacher Who Gets Paid $100K to Not Teach
She is general council for a company that would really like a 'hey we tried' interpretation of the DMCA [1] and only a 'Non Resident Fellow', so I'm not sure I would read the posting as having the full editorial weight of Stanford Law.

[1] http://www.vibe.com/content/worldstarhiphop-exposed-truth-be...
Next steps in the nymwars: suggestions for Google+
That's the C runtime starting up and finishing. That amount of overhead is incurred by (nearly) any program; in fact, worse overhead is incurred using the Sun method of having an empty file, because you have to run the more complex /bin/sh (or equivalent) instead of just a trivial compiled program.

ltrace gives a better view of what the program itself (as opposed to the runtime) is doing.
I relied on wasitup and would have paid for it. But I'm in the same position with Calepin. It's just too much work getting periodical payments running for a pet project. Waiting for Stripe EU. Rumor has it GreenQloud might be coming up with a payment solution in this space too though, with very competitive rates.

Anyway -- signed up for pingdom.com and it looks solid enough.
You know, I hear tech people saying stuff like this all the time but the question I would ask is: designed badly compared to what?

Compared to what it would look like if a human designed it. I took a course in math biology, and learned how a few of these subsystems work. A particular gene regulatory network I studied (can't recall the details, it was >5 years ago) looked like the following:

B, C = (False, False)
A = get_input()
if A:
B = True
if B:
C = True
if C:
do_something_interesting()

There were literally 2 pointless intermediary steps which evolution was pretty much incapable of removing. It was also unnecessary - in some different type of bacteria, the network fit the obvious pattern (I'd give a citation, but my math bio textbook is in a storage compartment halfway around the world from me):

A = get_input()
if A:
do_something_interesting()

You see nonsense like this all over biology.

The debate over intelligent design is clearly over. If you want to argue for creationism, you need to argue that god is a drooling retard who starts a project, forgets what he is doing, and uses the pieces to finish a completely different task.
There is a flip side to that- talent has a habit of leaving companies very quickly in SV. I have read (but can't remember where, which is annoying) that NYC hasn't quite reached those levels yet.
THE TRUE MEANING OF FRIENDSHIP
384kbit (48kB/s) is plenty? You are kidding, right?
MegaUpload ran a net profit margin of around 40%. Hosting anywhere else probably would have wiped a lot of that out. Their main competitive advantage was download speeds in the USA - if you read online comments there was constant bitching about the speeds of other sites vs Megaupload.

But forget the download servers being hosted in Virginia - what is much much worse is that they hosted their email servers at the same colo. This entire case and almost all of the evidence is built up around the contents of that email server. The feds obtained a secret warrant to get the details and most of the facts in the indictment are based on what they found.

I wrote about this here:

http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/how-megaupload-was-investiga...

I hope this case makes it to a trial because I would like to find out what probable cause was used to obtain the warrant to handover the email server.
It's happened many times before. Anderson Consulting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen), then one of the "Big 5" accounting companies, suffered a "sentence first, verdict afterwords" execution when they were prosecuted for their putative crimes in the Enron debacle.

The reversal by the Supreme Court a few years later was cold comfort to the shell of the company that was left, the 85,000 people it once employed, the partners who lost the value of their holdings in the company, etc.

(And this hysteria lead to Sar-Box, which just happened to be the final nail in the coffin of the traditional IPO startup exit except for a very few massive successes.)
After an experience like that, I doubt I'd ever want to return to the US. Makes me terribly ashamed of my country, for sure.
I may have took "have need for" a bit liberally I guess. But if a field can be improved by applying science, I take that is there being a need for that. Even if nobody is yet doing it like that (although the fact I could think of those off the cuff like that probably means that there is somebody somewhere in the world more knowledgable of that field who is already doing it)
Factoring in excess cash, Apple is trading at the same levels of Dell and HP
ppl may have multiple works, besides they may find it fun.
Nothing, the problem is not with reality (of course :-). The problem is that most people seem to think about freedom as something positive. You can only create freedom for Joe by coercing Jane to not violate it. This enables the kind of scenario that the parent to my original comment describes.
Having Trouble Getting Yourself To Write? Here are some tips
Aeolus is different from OpenStack.

. Aeolus is GUI for controlling and migrating workloads across heterogeneous clouds. eg. Start your loads running on AWS, migrate them to Rackspace or another OpenStack cloud.

. OpenStack is a (kind of) open source equivalent of AWS, so you can run a private or public cloud on your own equipment.

As for Red Hat's involvement. Well, code and contributions talk. Hot air from Microsoft and others, walks ...
The role of sales in a tech startup
Knowing multiplication tables by heart is never necessary for understanding exciting problems; the exciting problems are not dependent on your arbitrary culturally-contingent choice of numeric base! I had discovered the commutative and associative properties of multiplication long before memorizing multiplication tables in fourth grade, and historically speaking, they were known long before the adoption of place-value numerical systems.
What do you mean by "no judge in his sound mind will let all charges go"? Do you mean that no judge would dismiss the charges before trial? I agree that is unlikely, but it's a rare thing for a judge to do that.

But outside of that, it's not up to the judge. It's a criminal case, and they will be tried by a jury. If they're convicted, the judge will determine their sentence. But it's not up to the judge to determine their guilt. (Unless the defendants forgo a jury trial and elect for a trial by judge, but I doubt they will.)
You were really stretching on some of these. Sure, there will be software to assist any of these professions but that doesn't mean all the people in the profession should become programmers. You're conflating the need of an individual professional to learn to program with the ability of software to impact the industry that individual works in.

Firefighters, for example. Modeling & predicting fire sounds great, but should that be the job of a firefighter or a programmer/statistician who works for the fire department?

That said, I think you're right to call out the parent – many of these jobs should require programming or already do. Many artists & musicians rely heavily on an ability to write software. The group of professions producing food & drink will benefit from automation, but only so much as the professionals using those automation tools understand and can control them.

Programming ability is rapidly moving into all kinds of areas, but to assume that it must end up in every area seems almost as narrow minded as ignoring the impact it's currently having.
It is rather hard to tie down context from 140 characters. Even non-technical users could figure that one out.
Building a Data Science Team at a Startup - An Engineering Perspective
The report mentioned (http://www.cse.nd.edu/Reports/2008/TR-2008-13.pdf) is great for getting up to speed on many issues related to processor design.
1. CoffeeScript produces very readable JS. Not the same as handwritten, but close enough.

2. This is a framework. You are less likely to be debugging into it, unlike your own client-side libs written in CoffeeScript (which you mention doesn't bother you).

I don't agree with avoiding a library because it is written in CS.
Noise really disturbs me too and actually so does movement in my peripheral vision. Over time I have resorted to working for about 45mins - 1 hour 45 minutes at home in the morning before heading to work. I use that time to bring my days tasks to a near solved status. Once I reach that state I can "finish" the tasks off at office inspite of the distractions.
And every WWI soldier believed he'd make it through the barbed wire and machine gun bullets, otherwise none of them would stick around.

I guess the difference is, finding out the hard way that you burnt through all your funding and have to look for another job is hardly comparable to getting shot. And some of them (at least, enough to make the VC firms stick around) do succeed.
Where Have All The Bootstraps Gone?
Where to do get your newsfeed from?
Traffic and housing prices is another good reason, but if you left for the Valley, you did not really escape that.
Very slick. They've basically taken the Lilypad (http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad) and beefed it up.

The USB HID support is quite cool, too.

Meanwhile, Lilypads are US $20; anyone looking to play with this kind of stuff can jump in already without spending a fortune. Sparkfun has assorted wearable/washable sensors that should no doubt be usable with the Flora too.
Mathematically Correct Breakfast:  How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves