skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Total elimination is not plausible, but de-skilling certainly is. It is already happening.

Anywhere a technique becomes standardised, reuse then simplifies programming. For example: relational databases -- developers don't have to create data storage systems anymore (mostly), they just use what exists. And there are many other similar pieces all over, especially with the rise of the net and web and open-source.

But one of the results is probably growth in usage, and that would then increase the need for developers, of all levels. So perhaps de-skilling, as a means to reduce need for programmers, won't actually work.
Where you are right now, is nothing more than your _own_ decisions and responses to the environment around you.
Your system sounds like Cog http://nedbatchelder.com/code/cog except with lisp instead of python.
Me, my wife and my friends; particularly the non-paycheck dependant ones.
In development mode, yes. We look at every controller and form a routing tree.

In deployment mode that routing tree is serialized and cached. Only a single (matching) controller is then touched. Unserializing the data structure is extremely fast and finding a match is roughly an O(log n) operation.
So do nuclear weapons I suppose.
Nickel-Zinc Rechargeable Batteries Make Their Debut
The Man Who Owns the News
I agree. When used properly, credit cards are unbelievably useful for consumers & businesses alike. The blame should lie on the person who makes the poor decisions with the credit cards, not the credit cards themselves.
i like the idea of investor "bidding" but of course it seems like a hard task keeping everything honest.

the whole concept seems burdened "legally" so to speak.

would be neat to see something like this fly, though
Next Big Thing Award 2009 Applications Open
The MPG illusion
Meet Dr House's caring alter ego
Nuclear Industry Growing Without Federal Handouts
Kind of interesting, but really it would have been a safe prediction even without the supposed leak.

Now if there is a leak concerning the mythical OS X Netbook, I'm all ears...
Maybe with this update they'll kindly address the following:

* When I run front row, and one of my kids accidentally presses a key it doesn't understand, don't exit frontrow!!! How is that a sane decision? I'd expect that sort of idiocy from MS Media center. Not from Apple.

* For the love of god please fix the idiotically bad Dolby 5.1 support (Or lack of it). Trying to get 5.1 output is ridiculously hard unless you stuff an actual DVD in the thing.

Apart from those 2 issues, I'm pretty pleased with my mac mini, higher resolution output wouldn't hurt, and the wireless keyboard could do with a little trackpad, but can't think of much else.
Parsing is complicated, as the author admits. It is also a problem well-understood by the field in general, though, and once it is learned is not a major obstacle. Setting up a parser, though, can involve a lot of easy but tedious work, depending on the language.

Following a language specification requires precise attention to detail, and understanding of the whole process helps a lot.

For a sufficiently complex language, writing code to manipulate the AST requires ability to hold a lot of data in your head at one time, or some really good visualizing tools.

Code-generation from AST can easily require a lot of effort, even when it is not especially difficult (and it can be difficult).

Optimization is difficult.

Error reporting is difficult.
What, no SNUSP?
Most style guides have something like the following:
(taken from Princeton's style guide)

Don't say “he” when referring to an unspecified person. Instead, recast the sentence into the plural, or avoid the use of pronouns altogether.

Example: Each student is expected to turn in his paper by the deadline.
Better: Students are expected to turn in their papers by the deadline.
I really enjoyed the part about how regardless of how you feel about if mathematics / physics is subjective / objective, it doesn't limit ones ability to excel in the field. I think this point is missed quite frequently.
1) Awful title. This is not really an article about "how you are staffing your start-up", it's an article about "start-ups should hire more sysadmins".

2) Awful central point (about the sysadmins). Early start-ups are staffed primarily with developers because developers are what start-ups need early on, before the product is launched. Put it this way: if you have a lion running after you to eat you, carrying some extra water and food might be very wise for the later part of your trip, but is completely irrelevant at this point in time, and you're better off throwing it to the ground to run faster. First, you have to escape the lion, or get the start-up off the ground and get users to love it. Until then, every penny spent on "problems that will hurt you later" is wasted.

Start-ups must be super-optimised in that manner, unless they're floating in an ocean of cash - but that's not the case of most start-ups, and that has other problems.

3) More awful points: "They’ve also given very little thought to how to enable their workforce to communicate". If your stealth-mode technology start-up needs to give thought to how to enable its workforce to communicate, you're fucked. Pack your bags and do something better with your time, stop wasting your money.

4) "they’ve either assumed that systems folks’ jobs are so easy that it can be handled by the developers" >> If the 2-3 developers in your pre-launch start-up aren't capable of sorting out their own development environment, you're fucked. See point above. If you've got a lot more than 2-3 at this point in time, you're probably fucked too.

5) Hiring someone that specialises in X isn't the only way to do X. Huge fallacy here that because "start-ups don't hire specialised sysadmins", therefore "they don't care about systems administration". That's utter bullshit. Good start-up developers are generalists and can do anything that needs to be done. Those who can't, aren't good start-up developers.

In short, this article is a fantastic example of premature optimisation applied to start-up hiring strategy.
Thanks for your feedback. I agree -- this biggest hurdle is creating the legal framework for it.

Generally, it seems to me like a natural progression. Web startups don't need VC in many cases -- they need funding closer to 20,000 than 2,000,000, and that would lower the due diligence somewhat, allowing more deals to be made. Angels are location-centric, but web startups are happening everywhere.

This would change things so that if some web startup only needs 20,000, it's a matter of 200 people around the world who believe in their idea enough to put in $100. Plus the valuation would be more market-driven.
I also won't store my backups in anything but my own S3 buckets (they are encrypted, privacy is not the issue). Is duplicity stable in your opinion? I am usually one to use alpha/beta software etc. but this is a long term need. I am a big rdiff-backup fan, this looks like a good alternative to my current strategy.

My current strategy is a little lame but works quite well: rsync daily to my home server and about once or twice a week an EC2 instance is fired up with elastic block store attachment and the home server does rdiff-backup to it.
The Mac Mini is long overdue for something, but I'd be less surprised to see something in the same ballpark, but new. They've left the mini alone too long for just a simple update.
OP has it backwards. What he calls "bad", I call "good".

You shouldn't have to worry about things like systems administration, email, and scaling from the start. If you are, you're probably not focused on the most important things and may well run out of runway before you ever really need them.

OTOH, if you focus on your app and your customers and are so successful that your infrastructure can no longer support you: what a great problem to have.
Anyone read it? Is it worth reading? 44 pages is pretty lengthy if it's just the usual masturbatory self-improvement stuff (but I'm willing to believe that it's not, if someone can summarise why it is better than the other stuff)...
Last.fm's director of tech operations on scaling
I can fully understand that; you're just missing the point. You're not looking for hard answers in the humanities, while accepting the fact that there's worth in things other than hard answers.

History courses can do a lot to improve your ability to recognize patterns in past events or behavior. It also imparts a great deal of knowledge that requires intellectual growth and expansion.

Philosophy courses can help you argue a point better, because it's so easy for someone to question your assumptions since everything is so wishy-washy and up in the air and you can't really assume anything. It's really quite frustrating, I can understand how this field feels circuitous and useless.

Religious studies help you understand religious people a little better, and see some worth in some forms of religion. Most of all, it will hopefully help you understand your own life better. Most atheists seem to think religious people are categorically stupid, and while there are plenty of stupid religious people around, there are a good deal of pretty wise religious people.

Foreign language courses, coupled with some sort of interaction with natives, help you to see the world in other peoples' eyes in a much more direct way than monolingual study.

Also, all of these studies can be just plain fun, and tons more fascinating than a CS lecture about problems people have solved ages ago. Not everything has to be strictly utilitarian.

I can see how it's really hard to see how humanities advance anything, if you are so short-sighted that material and technological progress is the only measure of human worth. Sometimes it's important for people to be educated in the human condition, both for their worth and for others.
Good question. That made me think a bit. Because I'm not unsatisfied with what I'm doing now and because I'm not confident that I would be effective in that field, at least not for a long time. I took the original question as more of if you weren't doing what you were doing now and you could do anything in the world, what would it be? Also, I agree with etal's comment about the legwork and planning. It takes a lot of effort and frictional costs to get out of one situation and into another. I don't know. It's something to think about.
And let me guess - comes with Mini DisplayPort. And no new Displays yet (or adaptors).
Simpsonian Science
Subscribed, looks promising.

Don't like the banner, too much screen real-estate lost, also the give-your-email-and-we'll-send-you-a-password-thing is getting kinda old.
John Ousterhout retires from Tcl Core Team
Idiomag’s API goes live
This is a purely fantasy question, right? In that case, off the top of my head: Peter Norvig, Fabrice Bellard, Bill Joy, Alan Kay, Chris Lattner (LLVM). These are just people who are my hacking idols and have a long history of actually getting extremely impressive stuff done.
I think slavery might be making a comeback sixty or so years from now. And I mean large-scale slavery, unlike the 26 million slaves there are now. I mean slavery in the billions. Robots might make it very easy.
Very slippery slope. If overt warfare becomes obsolete, civilians might be the only targets.
The new Mini DisplayPort adapters are insanely expensive. Since I need one for my external monitor as well as presenting on a projector, I dropped a total of $60 on the DVI and VGA adapters. Even worse for those who have to power their 30" screens with $100 adapters. :/
Booking.com donates to The Perl Foundation
My current startup lost a developer and I jumped in and have been writing code (I'm the CEO/Founder). We're hiring another developer (C#/WPF if anybody is interested), but may put that on hold because we found a perfect fit COO-type who could be the first hire for support.

We're targeting a well-established business vertical and support is an important component of our offering. We had been planning on hiring a more entry-level person and keeping more of the resources focused on development, but I can keep coding until we hit beta and we can push that hire back a bit.
ltns, edw519 :-) Where have you been lately?

Good to see we agree on something for once.
Bear in mind that to many investors, having both a CEO and a COO in an early start-up is a bit of a warning flag.

Still, if support really is so central to your business, that might make sense.
I'd really love to see an explanation of the structure of the credit card / payments industry in terms of what roles different corporations play, who are the major players in each role, and how they make money. I understand there are networks like Visa, which seem to basically administer account number namespaces and perform some role in clearing payments between banks and merchants. There are also payment processors, who contract with those networks and provide services (card scanners, online payments, etc) to merchants. And there are lending banks, who pay the merchants (via their processors, I guess) and bill the consumer as they would for any loan.

My guess is that at one or more levels of this industry, there is an effective cartel: if you want to offer a credit card that's better for merchants, or consumers, or just run more efficiently, you're unlikely to be able to buy your way in. It does seem ludicrous that 1% to 3% of your purchases (or, from the merchant's side, revenue) goes somewhere into Visaland instantly; this seems like a massive privatized tax in return for administering an electronic payments system which might not be that difficult to replace today.
H.264 Licensing Terms
If people rented apartments, and every month, the landlord was able to increase or decrease the ammount he charged for rent based on your "risk," people would riot.

And, yes, money is rented via credit cards, but every purchase that I make with a credit card is in effect subject to a variable cost, because the interest rate that I'm being charged varies. So, I might buy a $1000 computer, thinking that I'll pay it off in on year at %10.

If my interest rate suddenly goes up to %29, I'm now paying closer to $1300 for the computer that I was planning on paying $1100 for.

And, furthermore, I have little recourse when my interest rates go up. I say that it's only because of the obscurity of the terms that people put up with this. If the same thing happened to people's car payments or rent payments, they'd be up in arms.
That's why I'm never really worried by some specific country out East getting a few nukes. Good ol' MAD ensures they'll be turned into a glass parking lot as soon as they so much as breathe on the launch button.

Obviously it becomes an issue when individual terrorists can get their hands on nukes, because then there's no country to flatten in response to such an atrocity.

All of this is under the assumption that war is a necessity.
Without guns and bombs I think the conflict would have ended sooner. Well trained armed forces using bow and arrow are extremely effective to the point where untrained forces have little chance of winning. For a historical example consider what the mongol army did and how long it took. The reason why insurgency and non traditional warfare has become effective is how little training someone needs to use hit and run tactics and a gun.

PS: Picture a tank using a balista and protected by bow and arrow. It's not rapid fire but without guns / high explosives it's just about as hard to stop.
Apple's enterprise "goal": be able to sell a compelling "smart enterprise" toolkit that "just works", and is a near-
complete top-to-bottom solution.

What this would wind up looking like: all employees have company-issued iphones (or iphone-like devices, if more form factors become available), company-issued apple laptops, and there's a couple xserves in a closet somewhere.

The xserves give the company integrated calendaring-and-task-management that just works, along with a platform for running whatever internal webapps, file serving, and related tasks.

The iphones are smoothly synced up to the company calendar, and possibly are running some in-house applications (eg: for a logistics company, the data-entry software the delivery guys use to note when and where stuff got delivered). Because these iphones are company-issued the company has some backdoors to the iphone's drm layer; this adds a layer of security to the devices in the event that an employee loses the phone and/or attempts to go rogue.

The laptops play nice with everything else.

Currently you can cobble together an equivalently-functional system with a combination of exchange, blackberries or windows mobile devices, and a lot of custom development and system integration; this is very doable once you're large enough to have a dedicated IT staff, but is often out of reach for small-or-midsize businesses.

Apple would like to be able to make this a turnkey system: you pays your money, and get an integrated phone/email/calendaring/collaboration environment; plug it in, set it up, and you're done, and no more sourcing your combined it-and-telecom services from many different vendors.

Target customers would include schools, medical and professional offices, and anyplace else where there's a huge gain from more-efficient scheduling and communications but not necessarily a lot of ability to develop in-house grade-A technical staff; fortune-500 types might also benefit, but wouldn't be the direct target.

Apple's biggest holdup here is email: they've licensed a lot of what you need to work with exchange, but they don't currently offer any way to run exchange yourself, and they don't have a competing product...ical is nice, but it's not exchange.

Until the email-server issue is sorted out, I can't see apple officially trying to enter this market.

It's worth noting: even in the event this succeeds, the xserve is never going to make sense as a beige-box replacement; it'd just be a major component of an integrated vertical solution.
IPod Nano 2G Black Canvas Sport Case Speck 
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>the lispish syntax is just for the prototype phase

That's what they said about Lisp itself. Let's hope it's just as true.
Instead of ranting on his blog, how about writing a nice letter to the editor? Newspapers screw things up all the time. I'm sure they would either a) defend the original story, or 2) issue a retraction.

Instead he wants to have a one-sided conversation. WSJ journal readers deserve better, and his blog readers deserve better. Do the right thing instead of trying to make everything into something that's bigger than what it is.
"The industry also got an unintended boost from President Carter. In 1980, as part of a short-lived effort to tame inflation, the White House imposed a freeze on soliciting new credit card accounts. The freeze only lasted for a few months, but it was long enough for credit card companies to introduce a new concept -- the $20 annual fee -- without inciting mass defections."

So this is an oligopoly, and behaves accordingly. Of course it charges sellers extra, charges high interest rates, and all that other shit; they don't allow more entrants into their market.
I've skimmed the first parts. You set a timer and do your stuff, which was planned on the start of the day. Then you think about it and make graphs.

Seems good, but I won't promise that I will fully read it later :p
condensed version:

1. use a kitchen timer

2. minimize interruptions

3. work in iterations of 25 minutes with 5 minute breaks

4. change it up sometimes longer or shorter breaks longer or shorter work chunks.

5. plan your day

6. change your plans as needed.

That's pretty much it.

//Pomodoro=tomato
//his first kitchen timer was shaped like one.
Please wake me up when MacBooks start shipping with a matte 4:3 UXGA display.
Or when nations use terrorists and other non-state actors (such as mercenaries) to launch attacks without taking ownership.

When you had 5 nuclear powers, it was pretty easy to figure out who was bombing you. When you have 25, MAD doesn't work any more. Somewhere in between the word "mutual" loses cohesion. (unless you plan on bombing every nuclear country in the world in response to any nuclear attack, which seems politically a no-no)
IMHO this is a false dichotomy.

Anyway, I understood your original point to be "Fortune favors the brave" and I replied that this is cool because I can compete with my big brass balls ;-) I don't necessarily have to be as smart as my competitors.
Apple's 24" cinema display supports Mini DisplayPort and they have already released a Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI/VGA adapter.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB382?mco=Mjc5MTU3OQ

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB570?mco=MTkzODk0NQ

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB572?mco=MTkzODk0Nw
Or in the words of Mr. Kahr:

"You know -- 'transparency card,' 'rock solid card' -- whatever it may be. I don't believe that that would succeed."
What about the fortress/siege process. You know it took months to take a single fortress back in those days, but nowadays if it's surrounded, the battle is over.
I have a last gen Macbook Pro. So what I really need is a DVI to Mini DisplayPort.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Robots will enslave humans, humans will use robots to enslave other humans, or robots will become our slaves?
A better graphics chip and easier user-upgradeability would be nice. Even if they had to make the unit a little taller, it would be a good tradeoff.
Dump Internet Explorer. You are Vulnerable.
I don't understand your logic. Why would you want to respond to mass death by imposing mass death? Why would you want to 'flatten' a country? Whatever the reason for a nuclear attack, it was not decided by a country, it was decided by a small group of people. Destroying an entire country of 10 or 20 million would be a barbaric and completely counter-productive answer to a nuclear strike.
Serious security flaw found in IE
Just to lob a grenade into this discussion, you often can't really sue; lawsuits take years to resolve and cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue. You have to be out very real money, and have a strong chance of being able to recover it in 3 years (when the company is likely to be dead), for it to even be rational to take something to court.

One place where you absolutely can muck things up as a jilted common stock holder is during M&A activity; I've seen a couple deals screwed over legal issues that looked minor to me at the time.
Hey, swombat. If I'm not writing text here, then I'm writing code somewhere else. (Either way, I'm a hacker at a keyboard.)

When I read your comment here, I thought how much better you said the same thing.

I don't remember disagreeing with you much, now I have an excuse to explore searchyc later today :-)
We live in a capitalist society where a sizable portion of our GDP is derived from defense spending. I'm afraid the rules were doomed from the start.
That is the problem. One of the central tenants of relativity is that what reference frames we choose is irrelevant as long as we account for all the relativistic effects. In you analysis, whatever that may be, you have two twins which separate, move around, and then return to the same reference frame and your result is apparently dependent on which twin's reference frame you are using. That is a contradiction. Thus the need to account for the acceleration that one of the twins experiences w.r.t. the rest of the universe.
Use another data structure to track connections by liveness, which you can measure by timestamping on each RX event. Relax the requirement that an connection idle timeout of 60 seconds must fire in exactly 60,000 milliseconds; 60, 61, 65, nobody cares.
The base interest rate in the UK is at a 57 year low at the moment, so UK banks might not be the best place to store $5 million ;)