skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open source will eventually kill wages. Why?

Why would I pay a software engineer lots of money to write an entire system when I can get the engineered parts for free and hire a software mechanic (IE: less skill and less pay) to make the changes?

I've already worked at a few companies where we should have had 3 or 4 developers and only had me because of open source software.

This is why I plan on running a business that utilizes it rather than a career that depends on it.
Yea right. I'll take the doctor, pilot, and engineer who 'wasted' their time on memorizing formulas and 'over studying' over the lazy, entitlement, 'just enough' professional any day.
Clever but impractical.
I make less than in 2007. I must be doing something wrong.
As long as Tech Company are not willing to out-source them (which is already happening, everything can be outsourced). there is not one profession that cannot be out-sourced. Is it good on the long run? well global business are not tied to a local consumer base anymore , so i guess it is for them , and consumers do not care.
I call B.S. on this. Marco and Gruber are effectively Apple shills, but more clever than one like MG.

Gruber and Marco are tactical in their praise of non-MS products. They'll praise something they think has no chance of threatening Apple. Despite Android's flaws, there's also tons of stuff in it worth praising, but you'll rarely (if ever) hear them say a peep about Android.

Likewise, Surface is a LOT more threatening than Windows Phone. They don't view it as a cute toy, but rather a serious threat to the iPad.

Don't you find it the least bit odd that Marco does a story about his experience at the MS store, with pictures of an empty store and never references any of the stories that talked about full stores?

If Marco and Gruber actually like a new Windows device it likely means they don't think it will sell much. If they think it has potential, they'll find a way to bash it.
And the way Windows RT's walled garden works?
Caminhar com o poeta Wordsworth - Lake District em Inglaterra
Does that suggest indefinitely? "Bubble 2.0" was already being talked about by 2004. Which puts only a 2-4 year lull in incomes out of a 15-20 year span.
Tagxt Update: Alert system is now operational.
Beady-eyed?
Programming bubble will pop. Automated Machine learning is taking over. Even at google, Jeff Dean has recently stated that his Perceptual AI project is aimed at reducing feature engineering in their machine learning projects. In plain terms this means eliminating the need for programming in their search engines and other machine learning focused projects like google now and google goggles (the mobile app, not google glass). The only programmers left will be to manage cloud computing infrastructure and front end programmers. As things like siri and google now take off, front end programmers will also be in less demand. Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are also increasingly focusing on machine learning. Automated analysis of text will take over the role of sql databases as demonstrated in IBM watson. In manufacturing, the role of programming also diminishing as vision guided robots like Baxter by Rodney Brooks's team take off.

All this is a good thing though, programming is slow and data is agile, as talked about by Peter Norvig in his startup school 2008 speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNjJTgXujno

Startups should aim at doing as little programming as possible and leaving it to data crunching.
I believe it makes sense, in the context of Windows. They want users to feel as if they're in a comfortable and familiar environment.
You just discovered transitoriness of being.
Yes -- that's me on the left and Eitan on the right in the Firefox hoodies. (I updated the post to mention this in a caption.)
Is it possible to create a world like in the movie Matrix?
I love the the virtual reality techonology and it's about to become my job. So, I always wanted to disguss this topic and I think this is a good place to do.
Like it though I can only understand part of it. It's really nice to see tutorials about compilers.
I think Ask Ubuntu is good; of course, you need to watch the reputation of answerers.
That is a good point, and most other professions that require continuing education are similarly well-paid (healthcare, law, accounting, engineering). What sets programming apart is that in these other fields, continuing education is compulsory in many cases, so everyone has to do it (license renewals may depend on it). In programming, if I don't keep learning, I won't get better jobs or salary increases.
That wasn't what he said, though.
This is really cool for sure. I can see how it's useful for teaching JavaScript concepts or doing analysis on code. Good job!
Good morning. You've triggered my "I have a political stake in my comment stance" detector. Are you perchance someone residing in not-U.S. who wants these magic outsourced jobs?
That's a bit of a strawman. I never said external accountability was unnecessary.

Using standardized testing of students for teacher evaluation, without accounting for variation in students (both random and orchestrated) will not bring better teachers into public schools.
There are just not so many Linux users over there.
There are bakeries that can decorate cake using inkjet or screen-printing machines (with edible dyes, of course) but the logo on this cake was hand-painted.
In some sense I agree with you. Not specifically the 135 years ago, but the idea of real time global communication in general is magical. But we had that with radio/tv (mostly) 30 years ago, just without as many channels as today. The magic to me today is that a) it's something I can contribute to, on equal footing as anyone else, b) it's done with technology that I can actually understand and contribute to.

At the same time, much of the 'magic' feeling I used to get has turned in to 'eh', just because it's such an ingrained part of life now. I remember my grandfather telling a story of taking a polaroid photo of ... his parents? (or in-laws, I can't remember), then taking the photo to the other room to let it dry/develop for the 2 mins or so it took, then taking it back to show them, and seeing how amazed they looked at it. IIRC I think that was the 60s when that happened. But my memory of the story is now hazy, and I think his was a bit when he told me it to me :)
The New and Final CSS3 Linear and Radial Gradients Syntax
My take on the Adapteva Parallella
One day, we'll recover sound from vibrations recorded in paint and mortar.
It's the president's fault! The TV said so.
Mine will be using a digital radio front end to simultaneously decode a large number of frequencies and monitor them for content.
We need multidimensional labor pool analysis though. There isn't "programmer" vs. "non-programmer." There's a stair step pool from "programmer who is among the best in the world in multiple areas" to "programmer who posts every minor problem on stackoverflow for free answers because they can't think."

The problem isn't the supply of people who believe they are programmers. The problem is the supply of amazing people who do things we don't even have words for, but we end up calling "programming" anyway.
If the only thing MS can do is play catch up with Apple and even copy their store designs than they're truly losers.

Writing this from a Windows PC.
http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.slide#11

> Pain

> What makes large-scale development hard with C++ or Java (at least):

None of the points apply to Java.
For anyone wondering, the current oldest playable audio recordings were produced by the phonautograph (1857)[1], which was made for studying acoustics. They were write-only until 2008, when they became playable via computers. There's a sample on Youtube. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0fhEpxrFvo
camus' comment didn't trigger any detector here but yours clearly did.
If russians do indeed explicitly prefer social stability to free speech and media, then it must be an artifact of a troubled past and one where the divide between rich and poor has always been wider than europe and the americas. I think it's ingrained into their whole culture really, this kind of slave mentality which is similar almost to a serf who wouldn't dare attempt to gain his freedom for fear of starving once he'd gained it.
If you aren't 25 and living in San Francisco making over $125,000 per year, then yes, you are doing something wrong.

Get younger, move, and/or compromise your beliefs to work on moronic projects throwing money to the wind.
It depends where you are. I made very good money 2003 to 2008, and I was living in Virginia, in the USA. Then the recession hit. I had 6 months of no work. Then I moved to New York. I have made good money since the beginning of 2010. There is high demand in New York, but I know my friends in Virginia still have to struggle. This recession has redistributed the jobs geographically.
Andy Greenberg, Author, "This Machine Kills Secrets"
Except that this is not about Zuckerberg. Regardless of what Zuckerberg has done or has not done this guy tried to defraud others to the tune of several billion bucks. It doesn't require any other elements than him and his actions.
That's a good point and I could see how it could be troublesome for some. For me, I like the simplified interface. The design is a driving factor for me, rather than features.
The author glanced over the fact that "software is eating the world", and I think that therein lies another factor - the constant demand for more software.

As software becomes more complex and critical, more companies need not just people who can code, but mature engineers (http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...). Meanwhile the path for more of those to appear in the global economy involves waiting for the standard of living to rise across the world, more people to grow up in such an environment, get their education and at least 10,000 hours of experience.
Facebook Tries To Silence Blogger To Cover Up User Data Scandal
Noted in a sibling comment, not being able to drag mail is a bummer. And on further exploration I definitely miss being able to search. But selecting it and moving it isn't too bad, and I can use mail.google.com when I need to -- overall I'm not concerned about a lack of features for this desktop client.

My guess would be that they applied the Aol user principle to the mail app and figured you'd use Outlook if you need a more featureful application.
Either that, or people are just too busy filling it out.
Sweden imports waste from European neighbors to fuel waste-to-energy program
Julian Assange's Book 'Cypherpunks' - Freedom and the Future of the Internet
Well, one of my friends who works at Google is using Go for whatever project she's working on.
Can't upvote you enough.
The current incarnation of machine learning is nothing more than an ultra high dimensional two year old. "Here's a new item. Which pool of millions of items is this new thing like?" "Is the red square more like these other red squares or the green triangles?"

You can get pretty far extracting the math behind the meaning, but lack of meaning is still deathly apparent.

We should fix that sometime.
Already filled this in.

2 Problems with it:

For some reason in chrome on ubuntu all of the text inside the select boxes is white on white so you have to select options to read them.

They specify that they are looking for "experience linux users" so if you want to game the survey you can answer the "how many years have you used linux?" dishonestly.
Assembling components into a working system can require just as much of an engineering mindset as designing the components in the first place.
It's great to see content delivered in an alternative format to engage a different segment of watchers/listeners/readers. Has C-SPAN always provided live transcripts? In layman's terms, how is the data pulled from C-SPAN?

Edit: I misread your post. The Opened Captions servers pull CC data in via serial port. Thanks for providing a bridge to this live data.
A Review of the Surface in a Microsoft Store by Marco Arment -
Citations needed. You seem to be commenting like this on many topics (wherever its tangentially relevant). I would really like to know why you think this will happen, what you think are the most promising machine learning methods for achieving it, and who you think is going to program these machine learning methods.

I love machine learning don't get me wrong, and I'd like to see Skynet (hopefully friendly) in my lifetime, but the current state of the field does not reassure me on this matter.
>all the laptops in the MS store had a touchscreen. The Apple laptops did not.

Because Apple doesn't want it's users to get gorilla arms.
Google uses OpenFlow software defined networking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLHJUfgxEO4
as a "senior" se in latam, what i see as the biggest problem is the separation in location. i tele-commute, but it takes luck, experience and a shared culture to make it work. thankfully, i am english so share a little more, culturally, than most chileans when it comes to dealing with gringos. even so, most job offers i receive drop as soon as i mention telecommuting.

and i don't think the problems of telecommuting are going to change for a while - reproducing physical presence is hard.

what will change sooner is the rise of internal markets (and development) in these countries. the people there want software too, and local companies may be able to win out in some way (eg more sensitive to market requirements, lower prices). once that happens, then the same software may start to be sold in the usa.

so demand will be lowered, eventually, but the process is indirect. cheaper programmers will write code for local companies; competition from the code they write will drive down the demand for code produced in the usa, and so lower programmer demand and salaries there.

the "passion argument" is bullshit. i know plenty of passionate chilean programmers. they're not just in it for the money.
Perhaps most people use 64 bit on their servers nowadays.

Judging by the rate of releases of minor versions of Go, I bet it will be fixed in about two months from now. They are certanly aware of the issue.
Regarding the author's company, HappyFunCorp, perhaps they should do a little bit more moderation on their site if they're really trying to hire. They have a section of their site called "happy thoughts" where anyone can submit text. Here are a few gems:

>when one black guy does something and then other black guys go "OH DAMMMMNNNNN"

>blowing my load in someone's mouth

>jiggly breasts
> coyly calling the competition (iPad) a tablet, rather than name it

Kind of like putting a picture of a Nexus 7 on the screen and calling it "a competitor's tablet"? This isn't trolling, it's the way advertising has worked throughout the history of people trying to get other people to buy stuff.
Better hardware? How is the surface's harware better? Not even if we put aside the shitty screen.
That seems like the 'too big to fail' argument once used in favor of the established banks, albeit simplified.

Advertisers and bankers may be unpleasant allies and we've never wondered what life would be like without them, so let's try it and find out.
Off the shelf problems may have off the shelf solutions.

However, solving unique problems (which may have value in solving them) do not have off the shelf solutions.

Valve just launched a beta of their Steam client for Linux. There was nowhere for them to just download and use it from- since it was a unique problem.
Web Hosting: Why Amazon Isn’t Making It Any Better
"Research" is about producing new knowledge about something, which in this case is programming computers.

The slide on the problems that the Go system solves points out things the solving of which is unlikely to yield significant new knowledge in the domain. Yet solving those problems does improve the lives of programmers and so is a valuable engineering contribution.

For some problems, they do reuse techniques that are at least two decades old. Putting import information in compilation units at the head to speed up compilation was already done in Turbo Pascal and is available in Free Pascal today. They also did take up CSP as a concurrency model.

"Do they think the point of Haskell isn't to make programming easier?"

The point of Haskell was stated by the community much early on -- that they'd try to "avoid success at all costs". "Making programming easier" isn't even a clearly definable research goal I think. Easier for who? .. for which problems? .. on which kinds of machines and environments? Haskell, as I see it, is a platform for experimenting with new techniques and asking "what if?" questions. A sandbox to play in. If it happens to make certain kinds of programming tasks easy and elegant, that's a by product.
IE has dealt with different architectures since its very beginning, as has Windows. Recall that Windows so far ran on x86, x86-64, IA64, DEC Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and ARM (and I probably forgot a few). Also they re-used the Trident Engine whenever they needed a browser on another device, so ARM isn't exactly new to them (Windows Phone) or even other platforms (XBox 360 is PowerPC).
I don't necessarily disagree that it's flimsy, but intolerance is fairly common around my community. Racism is on the decline by the younger generation, but it's by no means invisible or gone.

The presence of prejudices in the South (assuming other states/communities are still largely similar to mine) could support the argument that people still feel the need to protect themselves (because prejudice results in distrust of those one is prejudiced against).
Wikipedia calls it archaeoacoustics [1], and I've seen it called paleoacoustics elsewhere. There was a hoax in 2006 involving sound from Pompeii. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics

[2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.h...

edit: fixed an autocorrect typo
The padding looks large enough to me; they should have added a bit of margin.
First time I've heard the term software mechanic ... interesting, I've always thought there was a missing classification for someone who is good at reading specs/documentation and getting something configured and working (even if it takes writing a bit of code), but could never write or architect such a solution themselves.
As a Windows and Android user I feel that it wasn't.
It's as easy to buy into the church of the singularity as it is to buy into the "We'll have a million customers and $10MM/month in subscriptions within a week of launching" belief after releasing your four-years-in-stealth-mode-with-no-customer-feedback startup.

Beliefs based on other beliefs generate even further out beliefs unhinged from reality. It's not that they aren't true -- they just aren't true yet, and imagination doesn't count as ground truth (because magic doesn't exist).
I do think there are parallels between when mainstream magazines write about X as a good profession and when mainstream magazines write about investment and shares. (The latter case is infamous for predicting bubbles.)

But sure, the work market did come back. Just pity the people coming out of university at the wrong time.
The reason the Turing Test is interesting is not because Turing was famous or influential.

It would have been interesting regardless of who proposed it because - right or wrong - it caused us to think about mind and computation as possibly equivalent and forced us to think of criteria that would allow us to establish what we are dealing with. It's more along the lines of philosophy than math or physics, but since those are (other) branches of philosophy to begin with I don't see a problem with that.
Open Source Software may be drastically cheaper compared with hiring programmers to reinvent the wheel, but that very fact also enables a lot of projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

For every company that's not hiring 3-4 engineers in favor of just one guy, there may be another 3-4 companies hiring one person instead of not doing a project entirely. This is similar to what happened to the demand for computer skills when computing itself got drastically cheaper: the increase in usage more than made up for the fact that an individual task was cheaper.

Now maybe the act of tying disparate open source products together isn't the same sort of programming we did in the past (though it is software engineering). And maybe some day we'll actually finish writing all this software we're working on and it'll be good enough.
You do need somebody to develop the open sourced system in the first place. Of course having a system which is open source can have efficiency advantages as in theory as there is less need to re-invent the wheel. This doesn't necessarily seem to happen in practice though, how many competing open source web frameworks are there?

I don't think you can really say there is a correct number of developers that you "should" have. For example most of the software projects I have worked on "should" have had hundreds of developers, because we would have had to build not just the app but the surrounding infrastructure such as HTTP server , DBMS etc.

When productivity is increased by easy access to open source, the scope of projects tends to go up too. Back in 1999 a website that had some HTML text and a few images was generally good enough.

Now people want sites with social integration , full text search , streaming video etc so even though the parts are easier to fit together there are more of them.
Ask HN: How do you sell to startups?
Hi HN,

I have a service that provides user testing for startups. I have had several customers and relatively ok revenue over the past couple months. Some have even ordered tests as repeat customers.

My product has signed up over 1000 testers chomping at the bit to test websites. This is where I am fundamentally different than usertesting(com) because we are crowd sourced user testing. My testers literally compete to get the testing job (as far as who can get to it quickest).

However, I have seen my growth reach a flat line and I think it's largely because I don't portray this value to the customer on my landing page. I don't have the budget for an explainer video either. So I would like some feedback on how I can better get across the message I want to.

When my customers have actually purchased and received user feedback I have not had a disappointed customer to date. I have worked with over 350 startups so far (not all paying customers).

http://www.betapunch.com

If you would like to try it yourself I have set up a coupon code for a free user test if you purchase at least one. Enter the coupon code: hackernews
Apple now lets you pay in rupees for apps bought via Indian App Store
Because he can't say arguing with a christian.
Are you one of them?
It might be interesting to be able to slow down the visualization. Right now it all happens instantly, whereas you might be able to see the flow from one method to the next.
As long as only about 20% of the population has the ability to learn to program, programmers won't have to worry.
I once thought about a naive streaming audio compression: If the client volume is 50% or less, send only the relevant bits.
For the people without a steam account: They are asking about several hardware details (CPU, GPU, resolution, amount of monitors, RAM) and will notify "selected people" in a few days.
I find it hard to believe I'm reading this comment on Hacker News, if there was any group of people where I would expect the value of such a trove of knowledge about the past to be estimated at close to its true value.
Open source just enables the next tier of proprietary software. It's about enabling new work and only incidentally about eliminating old work.
That's a good idea, I will give it a try. Could get awkward with the async nature of JS but I will see what I can come up with.