skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I don't think the US has a mandated maximum number of hours you can work your employees; if it did a lot of start-ups couldn't exist.

Actually, if there were such laws, no other valley startup could have a competitive advantage of working more hours, so I don't see why any startups couln't exist.

The effect of those laws would be to essentially level the playing field, so what matters is the end product, not how much you overwork your employees...

It could even make the quality of the end product better --since programmers would afford to pay more attention to detail instead of churning out code exhausted and dazzed from lack of proper sleep.
I tend to do this. Mainly because literally everything smartphone shaped frustrates the living shit out of me.

Ironically I've had a Lumia 710 for about 3 months now and I have literally zero things to complain about.
Google releases full details of FCC investigation into Street View WiFi snooping
Using Capsicum For Sandboxing
Koders, but it's not great.
The Linux problem is a limitation of Linux. (I worked on some similar code in Chrome, which only works 90% and is full of workarounds and hacks.)
+1, like so many other things these days... access is so critical:
a) in a developing country, access = access to education tools (like stanford's online courses, udemy, etc.)
b) in developed countries, access = access to tools that can serve as "force multipliers" in terms of enabling creativity, understanding, low cost entrepreneurship

tl;dr: we are living in the Age of Access.
Ask HN: computer dating, but for jobs--does it exist?
You're probably familiar with the concept of computer dating: You fill out an extremely detailed questionnaire and some complex solver finds potential mates that are (in theory) highly suitable matches. (Or at least, this is how I imagine it, not having done it myself.)

It seem like this would be useful for matching job candidates to employment positions. Do sites like this exist? Current methods for matching seem inefficient and produce seriously suboptimal solutions. Is there a better way?
The referenced article states:

"'Everything got put on hold for a generation,' while civilization digested the Internet and figured out what it could be used for.'"

So I still don't know the full context of the conversation, but that makes a lot more sense.
The big question more precisely, is at what profit threshold dollar amount does it start making sense to do it
"Listen to so-and-so interview Steve Wozniak" is hardly what I'd call interesting reading, and I do not want to listen to a bunch of people say "Umm" for an hour and a half just to get five minutes worth of information. It's nothing to do with ADD even — it's just that I have only 16 waking hours in my day, and even fewer free, so that isn't a good use of them. Putting information in text format adds value.
Guess one of the problems is that it takes often a decade before a technology is mature and 'domesticated' by its users. You see sth on engadget and think you'll have it in your hands the next day but it takes years before you see it again so you have the feeling it takes ages before sth changes.

On a related note: it always strikes me that people devote a lot of time and money to sports and celebrities while cool tech is ignored. Imagine that all that time/money was devoted to science...
GrabEdgar: Instant SEC Filing Lookup
currently a lot of the market players are focused on grasping a part of your attention. essentially there is a constant battle raging inside of you trying to figure out which of all those mental stimuli you should give in to. if you as an individual don't learn to refrain from such distilled indulgence (social media, fast food, pornography) you might as well get lost in the 21st century (and end up void of any free will)... and that's a dangerous outlook (remember Huxley's brave new world?)
Huh, your comment makes me wonder if I should look for contract work doing C++ development. I haven't done it seriously since the last millennium, and basically I've learned to program since then [0], but I know all the stuff you're talking about cold. (Except mutable, which took me a few seconds to remember, and then I looked it up to be sure.)

It's just that I feel like higher-level languages like Ruby, Python, or JS are so much more productive for most things, most of the time, despite things like Rachelbythebay's interesting set of posts about hacking together stuff in C++ [1].

But, aside from things like that, I guess there are some domains where C++ is a viable option and Lua or whatever still isn't. And it sounds to me like the average quality of C++ has gone up since I was doing it, to the point that most people have read Alexandrescu and never call delete explicitly, so it might not be quite so painful?

Should I be taking advantage of being one of the Fat Guys Who Know C++? [2]

[0]: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...
[1]: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/14/blort/
[2]: http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-v...
>Many developers at work don't know how, don't want to learn, and don't want to use any system that's not github.

Huh? What on earth do you mean? You mean that they can't figure out that instead of going to the GitHub repo, copy and pasting into `git clone something.github.com` they need to clone a different URL? Sounds like your fellow employees are... uh... not that stellar.
High-Low Tech – DIY Cellphone
This reminds me of a story from a few years back. In short, the greatest minds of a generation are selling advertising (or are scamming investors). Who's left after that?
I'm not saying I agree with all of it in practice, but there's a strong argument against your thoughts here, especially in principle.

The military keeps foreigners from invading/suicide bombing and thus creates stability which lets you make money. Social safety nets including welfare, social security, etc, create the same sort of stability since there's less of a likelihood a starving person or angry elderly woman will rob you, etc, etc.
Tell me its safe when they have more longitudinal studies.
What is the purpose of a newspaper?
Agreed; I smiled when I got to the end and reached the big fat "You should follow on Twitter".
The set of skills existed before it had a trendy job title so you can have the experience even if it was called something else. This is true of most of the people currently working as data scientists. In a similar vein, I was designing big data systems years before "big data" became a term or trendy. For any particular odd skill mix you can come up with, there are people with that skill mix who are already doing a similar job. But usually people do not intentionally build that skill mix until it becomes an official job title and career path in the eyes of the public so it is a very small pool of people.

In the case of modern data scientists, having strong applied mathematics and programming skills is about halfway to where you need to be and a good starting point. The demand has temporarily grown much faster than the convertible talent pool can develop the additional set of skills required.
- Maybe the jetpack won't be needed because the internet makes it easier to do work without the need to commute (a way of work familiar to many HN readers i guess).

- The mars colony would prove a point more than being a revolution nowadays (same reason why we don't return to the moon much often).

- We 're not really worried about lack of energy sources either, because our sun will be bright enough for long, and the relevant science is known for almost a century

- Our chores been taken care by technology enough it seems, so we 're now feeding our brains. It's not very visible externally as the industrial transformation of the earth was, but the human brain has been upgraded significantly and irreversibly by the instant access to all the world's information.

I thought the article would be about why internet innovation is not that so fast paced anymore... i was wrong.
Industrial Ambient for programming
>Having owned an Apple Airport Express, I can assure you that it's just as dangerous and badly designed. Mine actually blew a cap and melted.

That's a personal anecdote. Not an assurance. You attribute it to "bad design" but that would mean that most or lots of those would "blow a cap and melt". This is not reported.

So it's most probably a faulty unit or a bad run, rather than a bad design. A faulty unit or a bad run can happen even to the most well designed hardware.
I actually disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article. I recently had the same realisation that the article author did: that much more innovation seemed to have happened in the years 1870-2010 than the years 1972-2012. http://blog.i.saac.me/post/based-on-the-exhaustion-of-opport...

I also degree with the people saying that the current legal system is the problem; in fact I don't think there's any way to speed up innovation at all. I think we're started to reach the limit of wealth-generating opportunities. The train, the telegraph, electricity, cars, factories -- these revolutionised people's lives. I think we're now getting close to peak "innovation" -- it's getting harder and harder to find new ways to seriously improve people's lives.
Smartphones and the internet have changed people's lives, too, but they're only major changes of the last few decades.

Now, a fair response might be -- we still don't have a cure for cancer! We still haven't colonised space! We still haven't built an AI! Nanorobots! 3D printing! And people are working on all those problems. And technologically, yes, they're much more complex and advanced than anything built in the industrial revolution.

But look at it from an economic point of view -- and I'm talking about the foundation of economics. Economics is based on value; human value. Stuff people want, as pg said.

I want a box on my desk that can print useful objects, but probably not as much as my great-great-grandfather wanted to be able to heat his home without having to burn things. We want a cure for cancer, but not as much as past generations wanted a cure for cholera, typhoid or the bubonic plague.

That's why processers keep getting faster but economic growth keeps slowing. Technology advances exponentially, but human wealth grows logistically. The natural limit is the limit of human happiness. Example: World economic growth is mostly driven by developing countries playing catch up to the West's living standards. Heck, even Adam Smith himself said that economic growth would only last a few centuries.

I guess each new iPhone app or Facebook game does make people marginally happier, the entertainment value does have economic value. But again, this is scraping the barrel of value creation. Are there still ways to majorly improve people's lives out there? Possibly, we're definitely not in utopia yet, but I think we'll need a new definition of wealth to get there.

I should really write up the above ideas into a proper blog post soon. Would be interested to hear people's opinions first.
This is what he's really complaining about:

> More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth.

It seems like an old-fashioned viewpoint to conflate innovation and creativity with economic growth. If we're seeing more innovation, we must be spending more money, right? Well ... not so fast. Consider a classic Internet innovation, the search engine. It opens up worlds upon worlds of information to the common person's fingertips. But it only rarely convinces people to buy something extra. (It does make buying things easier, which is a big reason that ad revenues are so big, but it probably doesn't grow consumption all that much[0].)

For a better example, look at Wikipedia. Direct economic impact, measured in GDP growth? Hard to say. But it's tough to argue that Wikipedia isn't an awesome example of human creativity and collaboration, or that it hasn't made a big positive impact.

My argument: the Internet era has just made us more efficient. We can do more with less money. Economic growth is not desirable in and of itself -- only when it is a signal of increasing quality of life. The Internet has enabled greatly increased quality of life without an increase in spending.

[0] (edit) Wild guess on my part. Could be wrong.
"As of September 24, 2011 and September 25, 2010, $54.3 billion and $30.8 billion, respectively, of the Company’s cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were held by foreign subsidiaries and are generally based in U.S. dollar-denominated holdings. Amounts held by foreign subsidiaries are generally subject to U.S. income taxation on repatriation to the U.S."

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/1826229879x0xS11...

These tactics don't exempt corporations from US federal taxation, they just serve to delay when the taxes are payable. Apple owes US federal income taxes on the earnings of its foreign subsidiaries that is payable upon repatriation of the cash to the US. Accordingly, Apple and has booked an $8.9 billion liability for the taxes it owes on the unremitted earnings of foreign subsidiaries. Unless Congress moves forward with a "repatriation holiday," that liability will remain until Apple brings back the cash to the US to fund domestic investment or to return to shareholders and pays the US taxes it owes.
(Note: I'm one of the developers of CircuitLab.) We've been in touch with the group at MIT that designed the browser-based circuit simulator for their online 6.002x course, but there is no official relationship between the two projects at this time.
What exactly looks "horrid"? Looks like a fairly standard professional circuit, with plenty of good insulation...
Bullshit. This utopian claptrap shows how out of touch nerds have become with reality. Everyone is being tricked into liking things - they like them, you don't, get over yourself, there is no conspiracy.
This mindset isn't good for business. You are trying to force people to stop using IE.

If your user base is all techies, it might work (which I doubt, because most wouldn't be using IE). But, it's keeping out almost 50% of your users.
Vinyl Revival Causes Discord
Tilt-shift minecraft shader (video)
They are entered manually by the artist or label.
Conjoined Twins aka Siamese Twins, Strange Nature
Good article. I just skimmed it for the interesting parts, but I think it looked pretty thought provoking.
The attitude towards pornography here is immediately dismissive and negative. By far the biggest movement in porn since the internet is 'amateur'. Unrecognized here as direct reflection of human sexuality, movement away from fantasy to authenticity.

I think the point of the article is that all media is entertainment, and journalism has lost it's informant pretense. A legit point, I don't care for porn bashing though.
I had a genuine Nokia-charger go total armageddon on me once. Never charge your phone while you sleep, it might be the last thing you ever do. Regardless if it is "fake" or "genuine".
Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields.

We haven't?

What proportion of the electricity supplied in your country came from renewable sources 30 years ago?

How much did we know about human genetics and, for example, the potential of stem cells, 30 years ago?

If I wanted to go to Paris 30 years ago, it required a flight or a boat trip, not to mention the connections to and from the airport or ferry port on either end. Today I can walk to my local railway station in a few minutes, take a train down to London, walk to the station next door, take another train that goes under a tunnel all the way under the English Channel, and get off that train in Paris.

I think some people claim innovation isn't happening just because it's happening too slowly for them to notice in their everyday lives.
The way I look at it, anyone who indulges in porn isn't going to be a competitive threat to me or take my job. Why? Because they're preoccupied, lack self control and settle for fantasy over reality.
Inertia scrolling and auto-hide scrollbars are both features that are easily disabled system-wide in the Lion System Preferences (General for scrollbar visibility, Universal Access -> Mouse & Trackpad -> Trackpad Options for inertia scrolling).
I usually hop on my motorcycle and hit the road for a bit. You would be surprised how much thinking you can get done and it doesn't feel like thinking!

I never knew this would be a hidden benefit when I learned to ride last year.
Are they just running Google search on there?
> Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to.

It is estimated that less than half of the world uses the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage. Having traveled the third world a bit, there are definitely huge swaths of civilization today that have not used the internet, and for whom even electricity is a luxury. Just because you have been greatly affected by the internet doesn't mean everyone has.

Reading HN while working in a non-tech field (by HN standards) I constantly notice techies projecting their hyper-connected, Reddit/Facebook/Foursquare-filtered bubble onto others. Not everyone gives a damn about internet startups. Most people don't think "engineer" means "computer programmer." Seventy-five percent of the US uses landline telephones and I bet even more have never heard of Yelp. It's actually a low-tech world out there.
Definitely not true. The first LDAP implementation was published in 1993, and was worked on for a while before that internally at the University of Michigan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Howes

The first real browser, Mosaic, was released the same year.

Eventually Howes went to Netscape, but Netscape didn't exist until 1994, and Howes didn't join them until 1996
Bans should only happen for hacking multiplayer games. It's quite rude to kick out paying customers for screwing with anything else.
Hmph. Having tried to use SNMP on occasion, I always assumed S was for Sinister. Or perhaps Special.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3572836

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573186

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573447

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573694 <- Lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3579009

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3604253

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605611

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3612278

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3644133

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3724433
The thing is, not everyone is being tricked into liking things. In fact, opinion polls consistently show that most people don't like a lot of the factors I mentioned. The problem is that the people who supposedly represent the rest of us often don't behave in a way that truly reflects what the general public wants, because the inherent pressures in today's political and media complex push them in other directions.
Yes, in the same way that "breathing" and "drinking water" are the top two priorities for my life.
>The niche popularity of Smalltalk (and other key languages) reveals more about the mentality of people comprising the computing ecosystem than it does the languages.

I disagree. If it reveals anything is that the language itself is small part of the equation. People avoid Smalltalk for historical reasons, not because of their mentality. What historical reasons?

1) Smalltalk was slow at the time it had to catch on, and cpus/memories weren't up to par. C++ gave far better results with the same equipment.

2) Smalltalk vendors charged an arm and a leg.

3) Smalltalk image environment wasn't easily integrated with other workflows.

4) Smalltalk vendors were in competition for the market, instead of trying to grow it and have a smaller slice of a much larger pie.

5) The UIs were horrible.
EBook Review – Guide to: Learning Iteration and Generators in Python
> ... that send a signal to space to locate us ...

Pedants corner: No they don't. Satellites in space broadcast a signal and the phones pick up multiple signals using incredibly precise timers (speed of light matters) to work out the position.
It is perhaps worth noting that 12/24V DC is just as deadly as 120/240V AC. There's naught deadly in voltage, it's the wattage that electrocutes you. A static shock is 6kV, as I recall, but the amperage is low enough that it doesn't hurt at all.

I'm a little sketchy on the details (been a while since I studied this sort of thing) but I can personally attest to losing muscle control in my right arm on a 6V circuit using only a standard (1Ah?) alarm battery.
porn is like fast-food. I.e. good quantity, bad quality.
We have not dealt with the social effects of advertising-driven television, much less the Internet.

Empirically, change DID slow down a great deal with the advent of the Internet. If you listen to the hope buried in the regret of Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" ( which specifically refers to the Usenet postings of Publius ) can you feel anything but a great sadness for what might have been? Remember Usenet? It was amazing, for a while. Then they turned away...
The 4th paragraph is strikingly similar to an exchange between the characters Josh and Leo on The West Wing:

Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.

Josh Lyman: The personal computer...

Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
The short answer is yes.

As several folks have pointed out, the real answer is that it depends more on you (what skills you've cultivated, what projects you've been involved in) than the degree itself. I have met a number of folks with physics degrees who are amazing at CS stuff.

I myself did a BS in math & physics, a PhD in physics, and during all that time did lots of various sorts of computational data and modeling work. I now teach college level computer science.
Animals Petition: Maximum for Darius Ewing for Setting Justice on Fire
It's funny; I started thinking about his examples and except for the TED talks (which for me complement but haven't replaced reading), the only kind of porn I'm exposed to is actual pornography. I don't really spend a lot of time with the others (commercial radio and MacDonalds are particularly unpleasant).

I also don't get when he says

If you’re a vegetarian… Well, you’re shit out of luck.

and then two paragraphs later he inverts that by saying the other stuff is still out there. And, in my opinion, it's not just "still out there" - there's actually more of such content available.
Since fullscreen and disappearing scroll bars both suck, and inertial scrolling appears to work fine for me, this article is moot.
I'm a woman and a developer at Stripe. I don't see how welcoming women as well as men into the engineering -- and every other -- team at our company can reasonably be called "lying" or "dishonest." No, we can't singlehandedly change the gender ratios in the valley, but we can and will try to make our hiring process as good and fair as possible.
Datomic database functions
Every time a community I'm part of goes and redesigns their site it sucks hard. Really hard. Please Paul, do not listen to the designgeneers on here. This place is just fine the way it is!
Amen brother. Preach it.

A parallel article could be written on how Firefox is the best browser because careful attention has been paid not not ruining the user experience by implementing widely acknowledged design errors in Lion.
And overly sensitive to criticism.
Show HN: Ratings, the Missing YouTube Side Panel Ratings
It is a good educational resource. I know I just taught a one day course in basic circuits and I would have used this instead of SolveElec.