skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish someone would reply instead of just downvoting, so I can at least see if I've made myself clear.

It used to be that for most tasks a superuser, a real ace of an admin, used to do, they would NOT write new programs: instead they would stitch together old ones.

I wish I could find it but am having trouble just now, but there was an experiment done among various programming groups completing the same task. You had people doing it in various scripting languages, C++, Java, whatever.

The way I recall (again, having trouble finding this), the team or person/approach that won handily was the one using Unix from the standard commandline interface (e.g. bash) - no scripting or programming at all! Where instead of writing a program to do it all, the person or group simply used standard Unix tools, piping them together etc, until the problem was solved. This approach was by far the fastest.

I'm saying, these days on the web we don't really have the same thing when you develop a new application. We don't have a "Unix of the web" - though, again, AWS and Amazon's ambitions on e.g. payment, database, etc, seem to be vaguely in that direction - which is far more productive than writing a piece of software.

No matter how productive -- HOW PRODUCTIVE! - you are at writing a script to bill a user ten dollars, you can never -- NEVER! -- be as fast as typing "| bill 10.00" where "bill" takes an email address on standard input. That Unix program does not exist.

The way the web is developing, it does not look like it will exist. This was my point. I guarantee you that typing "| bill 10.00" is nearly ten thousand times as fast as writing any program in any programming language that does that.

Unix works because someone took the time to write programs that can be stitched together at the command prompt (or from a script). The Internet just doesn't work that way.

The blog post I'm referring to ends with:
"Is that just the way things must be, that geniuses are in short supply and ordinary intelligence doesn’t scale efficiently? How much better could we do with available talent if took a better approach to developing software?"

I say, the problem is that the geniuses are no longer creating the "Unix programs" of the web. They are writing software, i.e. lines of code, they are not writing web "utilities".

If all the geniuses got together and gave me the top thousand things you need an API for, and instead worked on making them a set of small, modular Unix commands, then I would be literally ten thousand times more productive than now.

I could literally do in 20 seconds of typing what I can do in two days.
Yes, but you can un-void it by plugging your CD drive back in. Note that replacing the hard drive voids the warranty as well.
MongoDB: Night of the Living Dead Ops
MongoDB users often ask about the “killed” field in db.currentOp() output. For example, if you’ve run db.killOp(), you might see something like:
Dan Snow, Historian: I hate to say this, but apps do beat books
>As I did so, the short asian guard said very intently at me, in a way he was trying to assert his authoritative role, and said gruffly "GOOD MORNING" and glared at me as I walked by - so I continued staring at him.

If that were my job -to guard a bank or whatever, I too would eye everyone with suspicion, as my default behavior. If I were a greeter, on the other hand, I would trust everyone as my default behavior.

Maybe it's just me, but if I were getting paid to guard, I would at least try to do so. I don't mean I would be a dick to everyone, but I would certainly "watch" as many people as walked into my field of vision.

I'm not sure acting relaxed and friendly and being off-guard would serve me in the capacity of being a guard. (Altho' I'm open to being corrected, if this assumption is incorrect).
CS != IT. I think a lot of people have begun to think that it is. The core difference is that the foundations of CS change at about the same pace as a discipline like Formal Logic from Philosophy/Mathematics (that's where CS has a lot of formal roots). IT's core varies a lot more, as it's a younger discipline with less formal and more varied roots than Computer Science. Granted, this is all ideals, there are bad CS programs that teach you the wrong stuff, and there are stellar IT programs that teach you to change with the times, but, ideally speaking the two are quite dissimilar in their foundations.
Machine Learning Overview Slides and Project Ideas
Are all college educations equal? I suspect not. I attended a lower tier institution, and I'm pretty sure that someone graduating from MIT or Stanford probably had a more rigorous education than I did (if for no other reason than the quality of the peers was so much higher).

So I'd argue that we haven't watered down the collegiate experience, particularly on the high end. We've simply opened the doors to higher education on the lower end and made that attainable to a lot more students.

I can't imagine that more education for a greater number people is a bad thing. I think it's a very good thing. If I have to choose between a secretary with a degree and one without, give me the one who has the degree. I know that they probably have the capacity to learn quickly at the very least. That's what a bachelors degree really is in my view, a certification that you know how to learn more than anything else.
Cool, I'm hearing "too many words/distractions".

I'm curious about the sequence of questions in your head when you land on a site like this. For me it's:

1. What are the problems I'd be solving?

2. Who would I be working with?

3+. Location? Perks? Job desc?
Initial feedback - It's a fairly clean page, but it's cluttered, and a little disorganized.

My eye is immediately drawn to the giant orange banner. So it takes me a second to adjust and start looking around. Finally I notice "Positions Available", but it's at the bottom right - literally one of the last places my eye naturally falls. I then need to scroll down to see the whole list, but it sort of blends in with the rest of the page.

I like how you've got a bunch of fun shots of your office, and of the team having a good time (it sure looks like a nice place to work, and the Seaport is a nice enough area, transportation and lunch/afterwork-wise that it would enticing for someone who wanted a job in the city), but to me I had to actually work a little bit to find the content I cared about on the page, so my interest fades fast.

If I had a suggestion for you, it would be to reduce the huge banner, and maybe re-organize the page. Make the actual job listings more front and center, and put the stuff detailing how great your team is below it - or on a seperate page that you actively pimp out from your job postings page... (Now that you've seen the jobs, check out why you should work here! sort of thing).

But I'm no design specialist. So maybe I'm way off base here. Good luck with the company, that sounds like a cool space to be in.
I was just on the Chrome Dev hangout watching some of the latest mobile devtools features demo'd. These are also really neat - ability to set resolution, simulate user agent, simulate touch events, and dock devtools to the right (so you don't have problems with it becoming too narrow when making the browser thin).
Yes, I had it bookmarked. Actually, I had bookmarked a particular subtree of the comments tree, but repeated following of the "parent" link should get you the whole tree. The particular subtree is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585181
Is it possible that power-saver is spinning down the hard-disk?
Do you know of an example of someone taking someone else's unfinished project and running with it?

(And just to be clear, I'm not trolling -- I'm actually asking.)
This is cool, but when I get a link for a folder, I don't see any way for the person that receives the link to easily download all of the files in the folder. The Dropbox page about this feature says "no more zip files"[1], but without the ability to download an entire folder at once, I'll still need zip files.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/links/features
I would be shocked if the battery life increased by more than 3% because idol is almost identical and CPU's don't eat that much power to begin with. If you actually use the GPU your better off with a cheaper CPU and a dedicated graphics card from a power, cost, and performance standpoint.

Anyway, as long as Intel has such a significant performance lead and still charges reasonable prices it's mostly moot. I just wish they where still hungry for more.
Great point, my lawyer has saved me much more than she costs because she alerts me to things I had no idea I was even doing incorrectly. Things like an audit waiver so I don't have to pay an auditor to audit my own companies' finances.

Its not about how much a lawyer costs, its about how much they make you.
We've all been writing a hundred varieties of this same thing for years which is why Alex is championing this "one correct way" so we can all move on to arguing about something else.
150 Resources for Tech Startups
Why does Alex's Heroku redirect to Twitter? I tried testing a couple of projects he hosts there and it strangely asks for my Twitter credentials.
You seem to equate their requiring a degree with a person being able to perform the task. Just because they require a degree as a filter it does not mean that it is a constant that a person must hold degree X to perform task Y. This is not the case, what is the case is that Google requires a degree as a filter, nothing more nothing less. There are many people lacking degrees or degrees in that specialty that can competently perform the task.

For example I can hack a Bosch Common Rail onto an older diesel engine and build a custom ECU for it. I have no formal experience in EE or Mechanical Engineering but I am confident that I could work on the self driving cars at Google. Would they hire me, no because I don't have a degree in that field, does that mean that I cannot do it, no. I am confident that I could get a job tomorrow with a performance diesel product vendor, that is doing just as complicated development in their niche, should I chose to. Some companies, specifically smaller companies have the time to deeply investigate the candidates, larger companies on the other hand many times have to rely on filters. But don't mistake those filters as an indication of quality or superiority, they are rather administrative processes, nothing more nothing less.
These are some rather extroverted traditions.
That's incoherent.

If you accept the claims of

> People regularly say they translated their system from language A to language B and got 10-100 times code-size reductions.

then it's clearly false at least for first systems that

> there is essential complexity in software, and it is the dominant factor.
The downside is it slows filesystem access down across the board until the caches get repopulated. So sure, go ahead and use it if you like having a slow filesystem.

Caches exist for a reason. Deleting them willy-nilly tends to be a bad idea.
I don't think using virtualenv to jam everything into a big deb file is really a best practice.

But at the end of the day, I do have to do a lot of that with application deployment, but I try to only go as far as packaging libraries (ie. gems, jars, python equiv) in the rpm/deb file.

RHEL 6 is python 2.6.6, btw.

What happens when there are vulns for your stack?
Agreed. A bit too much going on. A little more organization would go far. It was a few minutes before I knew exactly what I was looking at, and most importantly, with minimal effort, I still do not know what positions are open.
Tech in the House: CISPA Faces Congress
MacBook Pro, 8GB, leave it running for weeks: No performance problems at all.

People say "Get and SSD", well, I've had 2 SSDs and 4 SSD failures (one drive failed three times, the other once and its replacement is still going.)

So, I'm all spinning rust here. 1.5 Terabytes of rust in my Macbook Pro and the only time I have a beach ball is trying to launch Team Fortress (but I blame valve for that).

I have massive, MASSIVE Final Cut and Aperture libraries. I leave the machine up for weeks. I leave Time Machine running all the time- there isn't even a slowdown when time machine is backing up.

My hard drives are encrypted with full disk encryption which means not only am I running spinning rust but its encrypted rust which means every read has to be decrypted.

No slowdowns or beach balls. Sure the occasional poorly written program will have a beach ball, and rendering video takes awhile, but that's to be expected.

Yet people constantly say that Lion sucks? Really? And they have these more beefy machines with more RAM?

Something doesn't add up here.
HTC One S with T-Mobile avilable in USA(Price $199) from 25th April
Adobe Foundation Announces New Million Dollar Creativity Scholarship
I apologize if it appears that I implied that it was, that was not my intent. My intent was to highlight that their are bad CS and IT programs out there, and that may be what is coloring the perspective of the original poster.
Indeed. And I would add

- site layout changing and breaking your scraping logic. I'm not sure how common this is today, but I was scraping hundreds of commerce sites in 2001, each having several (often 5 but sometimes 50) different product page layouts for different sections, each with its own field names, fields, and crazyness, for a total of a few thousand different "scraping logics" (each just 5-10 lines long, but each had to be individually maintained). Now, every day just two (out of a few thousands) broke, but to keep everything robust, you had to (a) be able to tell which one broke, and (b) fix it within a reasonable time frame. Neither of these is simple.

- sites that depend nontrivially on JavaScript. That gives you the choice of either (a) reverse engineering the javascript, and making your scraper figure out all the details the same way the javascript would, or (b) use something like phantomjs or e.g. a controlled IE session to let the javascript run and then take the data from the DOM. (a) is more efficient, more work but was (unexpectedly for me) much more stable. (b) is less work upfront, more maintenance, and a LOT more resource intensive.

- sites whose traffic management system you trip while scraping. Many will block you, some actively (with an error message, so you know what is happening), some will just keep you hanging or throttle you down to a few hundred bytes/second all of a sudden, with no explanation and no one to contact. Amazon contacted us when they figured we were scraping (we weren't hiding anything and doing it with a logged in user that had contact details), and were cool about it.

- sites that randomly break and stop in the middle of a page. Happens much more than you'd think; When using the site, you just reload or interact with a half-loaded page. You could, of course, still scrape a half-loaded page - but what if only 20/23 of the items you need are there? What if the site is stateful, and reloading that page would cause a state change you do not want?
"Startups rarely compete in the same markets."

How about SpaceX? They've already accomplished what no government in the world has been able to do. How about startups emerging in the energy, scientific, and education spaces? It's not all photo sharing, geo-tagging, social engagement rah rah. The discontent is obvious on HN over real problems not being addressed and companies are now beginning to emerge. Not only is it socially pragmatic, but as you so clearly detailed, it's mind-numbingly lucrative.

If you perform a technical service encumbered with vast inefficiencies, your lunch will be eaten in time. It's not a matter of if but when. Just because there are all sorts of barriers to entry right now because of government contracts, regulations, etc, that allow you to offer a solution right now that is cost effective because it's less messed up than the system you address, does not guarantee those walls will not be chipped away, bit by bit, by more innovative, smarter, cost effective ways of doing things.

Enjoy it while it lasts.
Amen and amen. I'm not even a professional programmer and I think this is the future. excellent post.
Unlock More Entrepreneurship In Your City
Finding the right people to work is hard, FounderDating is expanding their network by letting the community tell them where there is demand. Then, connecting them.
Social Media and The Law: So You Want to Sue Your Social Network?
Thanks for this! I'm still reading the dissertation and haven't gotten to the end yet, but so far it seems to me like what it would be like to "program in ANTLR", so to speak; except that OMeta looks easier to understand and use.
Here's a very good summary of the changes in the GPU
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT042212225...
Quantum Rainbow Photon Gun Unveiled
Not worrying about algorithm performance and memory management means one of two things 1) you are making a prototype and couldnt care less, 2) you are a shit developer.

I'm still in college and the only time I don't give a hoot about either of those things is for class work when I am not peanlized for it. But anything that goes to production has as small of a footprint as possible. But that may be because I know all of my stuff runs out of an ec2-micro and not on a $100/hr sever cluster.
Don't underestimate the benefit of physical presence. When I need something now, it is a huge benefit to be able to walk into Fastenal and buy it on the spot. Also, metal is heavy, again using Fastenal as an example, I can order online and pickup instore without paying shipping. Prices are higher than onlinemetals.com, or speedymetals.com but the convenience and no shipping cost often trumps that.
The more power you give someone, the more you have to keep an eye on them so they don't abuse that power.

So I hope this spreads to the other states. It should be a federal law. All citizens should have the right to record police officers in public. We pay for them. They're job is to protect us. They are given a lot of freedom and power. And if they step over a line they should be punished the same way we would if we step over a line. Besides, photographing or recording people in public is perfectly legal.

I always thought it was stupid how Britney Spears can be hounded day and night by paparazzi or the news can play your frantic 911 call, violating your privacy when you most expect and need it, yet in Illinois you record one officer while he's giving you a ticket and you get sent to jail with rapists, robbers, and crack heads.
At work I'm on I5 and I7 stuff and never use all that (I'm one of the few here on HN that isn't a programmer). At home, I was going to put in a 2600K at the last build but there was that whole chipset recall problem and I needed something in quick so I went back a generation and got the core2quad - 8 gig of ram. usage pattern is really office applications and a few specialized plot applications (Igor). after I added the SSD, and a newish video card the CPU is just not the problem. frankly.. there is no problem. so no incentive to upgrade.

When I started using computers heavily in the 90's you were lucky to get a year out of a machine before it was just too slow to do the tasks you needed. For me, those days died when the P4 came out. Unless your super CPU bound like compiling - you just don't need it for basic office stuff.
FB’s Amended S-1: 500M Mobile Users, Paid $300M Cash + 23M Shares For Instagram
Uh... how so? I mean, I understand you're argument: you're basically saying that the sample size is too low because of these two outliers and that the aggregate burn rate is much less. Which is true, but IMHO completely misses the point.

The goal here isn't to measure the burn rate with precision, it's to figure out what the risk is of Facebook running out of money. And in that context, dropping a quarter of everything you have, without warning, on two very large purchases of questionable[1] real value seems like a really important data point to me.

[1] Lest I be misunderstood, I'm not saying that they are without value. I'm saying that the value isn't at all obvious even to expert observers -- two weeks ago, had someone suggested that facebook buy a $1B photo startup or $550 worth of patents from Microsoft they probably would have been laughed at.
Well, as long as such purchases aren't ongoing...
Hmm. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but my McMaster catalog had way more stepper motors in it than the website does?
Meanwhile, in five years, Linus had Linux 2.0

Obviously the goals are a bit different, but if this group really has a 100x better software development process, why aren't we using it right now?

My own theory is that the distance from "this pile of prototype code I just wrote looks promising!" and "here's a robust, maintainable system" is where the 100x is hiding.
Thank you. Any suggestions on how I can do that within a month? Or where I can get info on how to do so? I am currently on a tablet and having trouble using my webhosting interface, though for something like this (i.e. a short term project) I could use a computer at the library for anything I can't do on my tablet.
The Board Of Directors: AVC Guest Post From Matt Blumberg
That's a good point. It's been many years since I ordered from McMaster and I didn't remember shipping always being overnight.
After seeing so many "dump and run" code drops on sourceforge, and now on github

I think the big difference between the two sites is that it's much easier for these types of projects to gain momentum and continue being updated on GitHub.

On SourceForge, a project would linger with no activity, bugs and feature requests would pile up, and creating a new project for a fork was a pain. I've checked out project CVS/SVN trees from SourceForge to fix things and since the projects looked dead, I never contributed the patches anywhere. I certainly wasn't going to create a new SourceForge project just to host my one patch. The few times I've created bugs for the patches, they never got any attention.

With GitHub, it's much easier to fork a repo, fix a bug, and push the fix back up for everyone to see, even if it never gets turned into a pull request or accepted upstream, lingering in your own git repo never to be touched again. Since GitHub shows your fork on the original project's fork tree, it's easy for other users to find your fork with your bugfix and continue that momentum by forking your fork, fixing their own bug, and so on.
This is the first time I've heard of Quick Sync. Sounds useful.

It's only supported on Windows, with a proprietary SDK. No documentation. Yay...
Literally two days after I said this, Juan released a new version of Cuis.
The Structure of Fun: Learning from Super Mario 3D Land's Director
> OS X is wonderful

ROFL