skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A race car driver is a very different thing from a driver. There are also restrictions placed on who can be a race car driver. It sounds like what you are really saying is that programmers need to be certified by a professional trade organization, following a period of 2-6 years of education and apprenticeship, enforced by law. After all, that is what separates doctors, dentists, lawyers, and accountants from other professions. (Race car drivers have contracts and other measures to enforce exclusivity, as racing is generally illegal except on dedicated courses or in licensed races.)

Programming is a skill/trade. It is not a profession. That is a good thing. If programming were a profession, it would not be open to everyone to learn and do.
Yeah it works great for the lucky people who work at Microsoft and Google. Maybe not so great for most other industries.
UPDATE from RMAN666 (who posted this question): Thank you all for the suggestions and comments. I've already learned a lot from them and it's only been two hours! I need to learn more about RDBMS and Rails' association commands. The links you provided will really help. I now realize this is probably more of an intermediate topic than an advanced topic :-)
I don't really see you citing any facts, just a lot of opinion. I guess saying G+ has millions of users is a fact with a rather large caveat. Google makes it very hard to avoid a G+ membership if you want to use other Google services.

Elitism does not define greatness and simple does not mean idiotic. The iPod was successful because it was simple in usage, but it was not idiotic.
Apparently Google will supply the SSL keys.
Thank you. After reviewing a few of the answers, I realize this (better understanding of RDBMS) is where I need to focus.
That's nice to hear, I guess. I play with a lot of this stuff and still feel intermediate.
If the memory is going to go unused otherwise, why the hell not?
When looking at it from a start up point of view...isn't is possible to emulate most (all?) of the lessons you learn from grad school in the start up environment?
great article that clearly articulates js prototypes. I'd have to disagree with ender7 though, I think JS prototypes are not a "poorly-designed system" they're just different from classical forms of OOP inheritance. And contrarily, I would recommend anyone to delve deeper into prototypes - an alternative method to class based OOP.
Thank you Toshio!
The truth is that all your money has already been stolen from the banks but we pretend it's still there via devaluing savings via money printing in an attempt to maintain the illusion each time the banking debt pyramid is about to collapse.
I signed up for access, but no love yet.
Eliezer's unfriendly AI does not need to be smarter necessarily, just better armed.
Online threat — but SWAT team raids wrong house
I wonder how they develop the code for these systems. You'd hope it might be something approaching the standards, rigours, and processes of the people who write the Space Shuttle code, but I have the sad feeling it probably isn't.
Wow! That's a super awesome resource. Thank you!
New Project Folder Layout - bringing code and documents together
Actually the TV show is called Lila Laune Bär and not Lina Laune Bär. I don't know why I picked Lina instead...
Report: Full upgrades to Windows 8 only from Windows 7
but it's readable, right?
I imagine it can retract its landing gear. It was probably left down for the test; one less thing to fail.
Thanks, marcelojnk. Looking at Spree now.
Right, though all wallets are reachable/stealable with sufficient compute power. This is partially why it's always a good idea to split up your holdings into many wallets.
NewsDaily: "Blade Runner" still subject of scientists' debate
cmon its not complete horseshit, getting to know somebody not just through their written or spoken idea but their facial expressions, their scent, their subtle body language is all meaningfully a part of our cognitive experience. Just because those things haven't necessarily been incorporated into cutting edge technology does not make them less relevant. We're all very impressed with ourselves for making cool gizmos that do wonderful things, but the backslapping and focus we have on our own achievements doesn't lessen the importance of the parts of our experience that nobody has even begun to effectively tackle. There are parts of human interaction that are not replaced by technology, at least not in its presence or near-future form. Period.

I did read your post, I disagree that the tune out will ever end, its just how it's read by others will culturally shift. you're still gonna be withdrawing your mental presence from the space, an externally triggered space-out.
This is a humor column.
Can you clarify? I assume you mean that you withdraw announcements and you see BGP convergence in about 6 seconds?
Netflix has confirmed that they would like the option to migrate to from Amazon. https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222294/Netflix_open...
There's this really great thing called a CDN that can be used to keep your "Web Site" up at all times, even if your source servers are down. It doesn't help your web app, but its better than looking like you've dissapeared from the planet.
It's a legal term of art. Search around for the "make-whole doctrine".
Code Spelunking Redux
The problem with just using a simple CDN (i.e. one without proper ESI support like CloudFront) is that for dynamic content is cached at a fixed TTL per URI, which for 'apps' is likely to be very short. This means your content will expire and then be retried from the origin...which would be down.

However for static or near static sites, it's perfect - just make sure your TTL is correct :-)
The weekend peaks have gradually shifted from Firefox to Chrome. Opera and Safari also have it to a lesser extent, but Firefox has completely lost the pattern.

See http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20080701-2012053....

What I find puzzling is the stable amplitude of the weekend shift (~5%) despite IE's lost of popularity.

Note also that Firefox is once again growing (slower than Chrome, but still).
Actually IE has huge leads in South Korea and China, who are among the top internet users. The Microsoft blog post linked above has the root cause here: StatCounter has outsized representation for India and Turkey, both which see heavy Chrome use, and doesn't adjust its overall numbers to account for this (a fact which they are open about, but it diminishes the relevance of their overall number).
I believe that is incorrect. There is something special about oil, and it is that you can't find it everywhere (at least not as cheaply as you can in Saudi Arabia and Iraq) and it is pretty much the only thing that we run our transportation sector on right now, so it is needed everywhere.

With electricity, it doesn't matter what the source is. If your electricity comes from wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, whatever.. You can generate it where you are. Or you can use local coal/gas/biomass/biogas resources. But electric cars can be run on whatever, while gasoline cars can only run on oil (first generation biofuels used now are now very energy positive, if at all, so they don't count).
It still could be much better designed though, compareed to othe rprototipical languages. Prototypes cannot be explicitly accessed or mutated, Object.create wasn't even part of the standard and the whole syntax with function constructors and having to set the prototype property is a very ugly hack.
ahh, more weapons! the one solution to all problems in the world that requires the least brain capacity. congrats.
I don't care what my audience gets up to. If I'm less interesting than their browser, that's my problem, not theirs. If I'm half interesting but they need a distraction, then I'd much rather have them pay half attention while on their laptop than pay full attention and finish up my talk bored to tears.
Files will never go away. It all depends on the abstraction level that you view the term 'file'. Humans are files, a self contained unit of information (with built in copy semantics!) they have meta data (hair color, eye color, height, age etc). My point is that there will always be a container object of a sequence of bytes of data. Whether that's an mp3 file or a hummingbird, they are still files.

A more meaningful question might be to challenge the notion of a hierarchical file system. The web has managed fine without one, so possibly search across a flat collection is a better metaphor. There are numerous others.

There are, however, interesting possibilities that make files less conspicuous, apple are experimenting with this, where there are pipes between apps, I open a photo, send it to snapseed, pipe it on to tumblr. At no point am I confronted with a file save dialog. Obviously it's a file under the covers, but that's just an abstraction. Files themselves are abstractions. There's really no such thing as an mp3 file, it's just a sequence of bytes we can interpret as one.
Dev Bootcamp Week 3 Recap
Typically, no. In my experience, anyone who hires you for the cert over experience, you don't actually want to work for. Using the cert as a conversation tool will usually get you shunned by people who work on whatever you're certified in day to day.

Yes, the certs are often hard to attain, but for the most part experience trumps them all and the only thing a cert proves is that you had time to read the books and take the tests.

The one exception I make is for Cisco/Juniper certs, if you have a cert you can jump ahead in the support queue. This could potentially save you hours/days in the dealing with support and is generally worth it in terms of time for you and your employer.
> The onus of understanding what your product actually is, is not on the user.

I find this a little odd. In the specific case of Google+, I'm not seeing much need for people understanding what it actually is. I mean, sure, that lack of understanding will curtail a large group of users from using it... except that the deep integration with the rest of Google's products minimize any need for explicit usage.

It really depends on what Google itself wants with the product. Yes, the whole "active users" thing is a serious dodge if the goal is to compare it to Facebook or rate the level of engagement or what not... but that kind of thinking also changes how developers imagine the product and contributes to the way they prioritize features internally. In the long run, I suspect that's more useful than getting good press.
Web APIs change on the whim of the provider and have no permanent basis to build on. No one benefits from pretending that web APIs are as stable, composable, or as powerful as proper files.

I italicized proper there because my real point is that you're simply defining yourself the win with the word "proper" and not comparing like to like. You can win any comparison by accounting for only the good of one proposition and only the bad of the other, but that's not a valid argument. If, for instance, we ask our web API to have some sort of assurance that it'll be there next year... hell, next week... suddenly "proper web API" turns out to resolve to absolutely no concrete noun at all. (How "proper" would you have called the Twitter API last week? You know, back just before Twitter started shutting huge swathes of third party apps out of it?)

But that's just one definition. The truth is you need the right tool for the job.

It is all, in the end, just bits. The bits don't have color [1], and they don't acquire color by being in a web API instead of a file.

[1]: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
This might be overkill for you, but at a certain point I just set down for a few days and read The Rails 3 Way front to cover. It's a reference of sorts and it's very complete (afaik). I marked all the things I hadn't known or thought was interesting and made a point of using then right away. It was really dry at times but turned out to be well worth it.

http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Edition-Addison-Wesley-Professio...
Least ways not in an offensive manner. Though that could be a faulty assumption, we (the US) haven't had any real military attacks on our soil in a while.
UTC vs UT1 and Leap Seconds
Dude, have you ever considered doing anything other than cheerleading MS and hating on Google. I have never seen a single post by you on here or Slashdot that was not either defending MS or being negative towards Google in some way. How pathetic.
I guess I should've included the advice of "make your main page static and use a good CDN", because they both help you a lot in the long run.
Apptopus, Inc. needs your help with CollabraCam
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I haven't used any others, but off the top of my head, I'm aware of Zeo and Fitbit. Find the Amazon pages for those, and more competitors will show up as recommendations.
marked 'to read this weekend'. looks very interesting.
Passport to hell: why thin client desktops must die
Op-ed: HP's new Passport "Internet Monitor" triggers pent-up thin client rage.
Except that all the non-social properties of Facebook are non-existent.
CryptAByte author here.

The fundamental issue is whether you can trust server-side encryption. Theoretically you're right that you cannot absolutely trust my service to do what it says it does. And I would not trust it relative to client-side software either.

So, I would suggest that everyone use offline encryption, and my service exposes an API with offline encryption that works seamlessly with server-side encryption: https://cryptabyte.com/Service

Furthermore, I'm working on desktop apps which will do the encryption offline: https://cryptabyte.com/Home/Apps

But, for the average, non-technical user, the choice may be between not using encryption at all or relying on a poorly secured desktop environment and using my service. In that case, it may be more desirable to use my service than the alternative.

Regarding key strength, my hope is that most people do not enter a password, allowing the software to generate it for them. For the self-destructing emails (https://cryptabyte.com/SelfDestruct), I do not allow entering the password, but generate a secure, 32 character passphrase.
I believe PG's essay is first of all too long, there are two or three interesting ideas in it and some libertarian propaganda pieces.

In the first part, he argues about different levels in skill which supposedly generate different levels of income. The argument works well for sport stars: A football team, that draws a crowd of 50,000 to a home match every two weeks, produces something like $25,000 per week per player. By contrast a slightly worse player who is never playing in a big league will at best generate 1/10th or 1/100th of this numbers. The crucial point here is, that the players are exploiting their personal skill to do this.
By contrast in the case of an CEO, the immediate value is created by workers. ( The guys in the factory who actually assemble a product, not by R&D and not by the CEO himself). The CEO is merely responsible for creating an environment were the workers can effectively create value. Therefore the wage is not only based on his personal skill, but also on the skill of others.

The later sections of the essay are sometimes simply a libertarian straw man ( The Daddy Model of Wealth), sometimes very good ( in particular the second half of "The Lever of Technology").
Yeah, exactly. Check this "visual proof that employees are still required to use Internet Explorer at work" post I did a while back:

http://clemesha.posterous.com/you-must-use-internet-explorer...
I'm not sure that if the author tried to write an article that did nothing but reinforce stereo-types he could have done a better job of doing so.

I read that article and I don't think anything in the article surprised me.

Immigrant working for next to nothing? Check.
Middle class family living paycheck to paycheck in middle america? Check.
Millionaire who drops 100k for a business manager? Check.
Dot.Com millionaire who takes everyone he can on his private jet? Check
"Self-Made Man" who doesn't want to pay more taxes? Check.
write,write,write....say something really fast...write,write,write

I need the 'for dummies' version
"They?" Aren't you a co-founder?

http://angel.co/targeter-app
I see Google+ as the foundation of Google Glass.
Just think about it: Google Glass + Google Now + Google+ makes sense.
People complain that there isn't much to do now, but I bet that it'll be a lot different come Glass.
The "scalability" thing isnt about adding some ram or getting a larger proc. It's about adding a few dozen (or hundred) instances in minutes. Or getting hosts turned up in 7 different regions. Anyone can do that right now with AWS, let me know how your Equinox negotiations go for the next month.

Yes white boxes are cheap. Site negotiations, design, procurement, networking, operations, and maintenance are expensive in dollars and time. Personally I run "a bunch" of physical sites across the globe. It would be waaaay easier to be able to turn up rackspace/aws/google instances as needed.
You realize that Google Talk has been around since 2005, right?
How to Hire an Oracle DBA
DBAs are in short supply, at least the good ones. Learn to sift the knowledgeable from the not so...
Could you give more details of these multiple opportunities where "her managers offered her promotions, etc."? I don't have a copy of the book myself so can't check, but looking around on the web it sure doesn't look as if that's the case.
Just to add to this: Some people are not good candidates for contact lenses. (And I am still not fond of the various surgeries, having had a relative experience significant problems from one despite the technique involved having a better general prognosis than other techniques and the surgery having been executed by an excellent doctor.)

We are likely not a significant market segment, but I'll reiterate in case a relevant Googler happens by this thread.

P.S. If you eventually want to market abroad (outside the U.S.), then we will become a significant market segment.
Redefining Success and Celebrating the Unremarkable
I was really worried at this guy managing to be so poorly educated for the power he has (see: his SuperPAC contributions). I know this was a long time ago and he is old now, but he must have interacted with a lot of poorer people, especially when he had to earn money to pay for college, some of whom must have been generous in their own way. It takes a high level of magical thinking to think he was the only one to give the kind of selfless help that Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal recommends.
Aside: "all-or-nothing" thinking has been described as a cognitive distortion, which can lead to depression and other problems. In the interview, he frames the failure as an test flight, from which they are learning - so it is not "nothing" (despite the loss of satellites and people's ashes). Choosing this frame has worked well for him, just as it has in treating depression.
"I explicitly say that variation in productivity is only one source of variation in income [...] where does that income come from? Who made the wealth it represents?"

This shows the same problem -- productivity (effort) of the individual is not identical with wealth creation (earnings) and hence the two have different consequences for the individual's compensation and its justification.

A person (your CEO) who is a 100x more productive (which I do have difficulty conceiving) does not necessarily generate 100x more wealth. Jobs was replaced by Tim Cook, and Apple continues to create astonishing amounts of wealth. Is that because Cook is actually as productive as Jobs? Was Jobs in fact replaceable?

No, it's actually that the wealth created by Apple was attributable to Apple. Yes, it took a particular person to start Apple and forge it into a wealth-creating machine, but that forms a different kind of compensation argument.

Sever that link between an individual's productivity/effort and the earnings of their company, and it becomes vastly harder to justify a CEO earning 100x more than an employee.

I realise the difference is subtle, and that's why it's often missed. But the output of a person and the output of a thing they created are not identical, and you can't conflate the output of the creation with the creator's effort.
Twitter Should 'Memorialize' Our Accounts when We Die
Elon is awesome, but the founders of NASA contracting companies, intel, car companies, etc didn't reach bill gates levels of wealth.
I haven't used any other prototypical languages so I can't say how js compares... Can you give me the best prototypical language? - I'd like to check it out and see for myself. Still, as far as shimming up a clean cross browser API prototyping is extremely usefull.
Not only from the point of the adversaries, but to anyone who's thought about the actual role each "side" is playing. But don't worry fellow Americans, just keep supporting the intractable and autonomous government.
In The Terminator, Skynet is supposed to have achieved sentience and turned against its masters. But if you look at something like this from the point of view of someone in a part of the world where the political structure is not aligned with US hegemony, the difference between an advanced AI which has "turned" and a robotic army that is ultimately still controlled by humans is probably academic. I suppose that in the latter scenario there is still in theory some humanity to appeal to, but I somehow doubt that's what's running through your head when you're being chased by a faceless killing machine.

Then again, a closed-cockpit jet fighter isn't exactly a cuddly sight regardless.
Er, s/one of the/one of the best/ :)
China blocks access to Bloomberg and Businessweek sites
I would think that certs would be useful in signaling commitment for people wanting to join that workforce.