skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost all of that is a load of horse shit.

> Engineers are required. Programmers are optional.
> To be an engineer, you have to be licensed.

No, if you want to work for the 'public good' (doing city works, verifying things that people will be using inside their body or their failure could kill someone) then you need to be licensed. An Electrical engineer does not have to be licensed.

> Engineers work for a living. Programmers do what they love to do.

No.

> Engineers generally don't do that. Teenagers don't design bridges in their spare time and then decide to pursue civil engineering as a career. Engineers always think of their job as their profession, because that's all it has ever been.

Hell yes they do [1]

> Engineering is well-understood. Programmers have no idea what they're doing.

What in the hell? Why do you think businesses have massive R&D budgets? It's because engineering is uncertain, you never know something is going to work until you try it. If you aren't failing, you aren't trying. With both professions (or hobbies).

> Engineering is real. Programming is abstract.

To an extent. This is actually kind of a complicated one, when I sit down and do the PCB layout for something, it's nothing more than programming. It's laying out logical structures in a certain order that allow me to dump part of my brain out onto a computer screen.

Programming is real in that there is interaction with humans, you can have a theory, verify or nullify it, optimize it. The same abstract structures of engineering are there, but more often then not the target stays imaginary.

If I program something in OpenSCAD, then I print it, I was programming something real. The question is not in where it comes from, it's where it goes. The final state of the problem is where it lies, sometimes engineering is abstract, and sometimes programming is real.

[1] http://www.pisymphony.com/toothpick/toothpick12.jpg

EDIT: Just so I don't come off as a (huge) jerk, and so I have something nice to say (offset the bad with a good), I encourage the author (if present) to go out and try engineering. Break out of the programming shell and test your conceptions about the world, see if they turn into misconceptions or stay true.
Google regex and you'll find plenty of resources including tools to testing patterns. You won't find much for any specific pattern but read the docs and it will be apparent what this regex does. Familiariy and competence with regex is a basic component of being a developer.
My point is we dont need yet another emulator , but tools that help dev/designer/whatever great great content for the web. Nobody wants to run legacy code forever ,and i'm sorry , but the emulator doesnt work on any of my devices. So stop wasting your time , create software that people can use, not emulators nobody's going to run.
We eventually raised from SV Angel, Floodgate, TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare (Archimedes Labs) and others. We had enough offers to raise 1M, we took only 700K.

We didn't get much feedback during the interview; Paul, Robert and Trevor didn't give us a hard time, they actually liked the product. 10 minutes feels like a minute.

But the vision we pitched them was rough around the edges. We re-branded the product and changed market positioning completely right after.
A Solar City Story
awesome! this will let us save tons of money by not forcing us to invest in solar, wind or other sustainable sources of energy! DRILL BABY DRILL!
Have you a link for that?
Not sure if this would be helpful, but I built http://nickcammarata.com/haiku/ a while ago, which has some code for calculating syllables. http://nickcammarata.com/haiku/haiku.coffee (or .js)
The iPad Mini and the cost of Retina
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write. Here you go. Hmmm, first time, adult content?

Pimp done forgot

that he was once able to rhyme a lot

He had the time to slip and slide

and if he was lucky, he got to go for a ride.

These days ain't nuttin' but foolin'

Dealin' in tricks and he hopes it's just retoolin'

Fixing himself up with money,

So one day he can taste that sweet sweet honey.

The truth is that he forgot that the street don't

Ain't no convincing the street you'll come out on top, you just won't

Better to play the slots boy

and pray that you don't get a visit from that ol' Rob Roy

Better cut your losses quick

If you see something brown and sticky, likely to be a stick

Be smart boy and get back to rhymin'

Ain't no facin' death if you xxxx up the timin'.
Communication and Life
Article forgets to mention that it was singles day in China, and Taobao did a special promotion for it. Still a good record to hol.
Sounds more like a game-charger to me!
The article is complete baloney. I worked for 3 years as a mechanical engineer for Boeing, so I know about the field. Heck, he's spectacularly wrong, especially about one point - engineers do love what they're doing. Yes, I fiddled about designing and building mechanical things as a kid (gas gokart, hot rods, electronics projects, chemistry things, etc.) and I'm hardly alone among engineers I went to college with. The main thing limiting me was lack of money and lack of fabrication skills. The first time I had access to a machine shop I tried to build a steam engine. I would have designed and built my own airplane if I had more than a few dollars to my name.

The real difference between an engineer and a technician (or programmer) is the engineer knows calculus. They'll often be doing the same work, but the engineer knows calculus and uses it, the technician applies rules of thumb.
"Are there even open source tools that allow you to get this information? I'd appreciate a pointer."

http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/
I don't know how else to put it: this is wrong. Engineering is the practical application of science to create something with utility. Building a bridge is to physics as programming is to computer science. Programmers don't typically invent new algorithms and data structures to solve a problem. They apply a novel combination of known techniques to achieve a balance of quality and cost-effectiveness. My favourite quotation:

'Anyone can build a bridge that stands, it takes and engineer to build a bridge that barely stands'

You can write code in your basement for fun. You can also build your own house. Because you can do something doesn't mean you can do it well, nor that you can do it efficiently. Engineers are particularly concerned with the latter.

Computer science is the exploratory, scientific component of the equation. CS designs and quantifies new algorithms and data structures. With the rigorous understanding computer scientists develop, an engineer can evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a given solution. A basement coder may be applying known techniques, or they may be experimenting. Whether they're trying to gain knowledge or solve a problem seems to largely define whether the task is science or engineering.

Almost every point here addresses barriers to entry, which are a modern, and certainly not integral, component of engineering. Yes, becoming a licensed engineer is hard. But engineering isn't the act of 'doing things while being a professional engineer'. It is the systematic application of engineering principles, which anyone can use. While they are using them they are, to my mind, an engineer.
This question comes up a lot. My latest formulation is that programming has elements of a all sorts of disciplines: science (debugging is often about making and then testing hypotheses), engineering, mathematics, design, art, but can't entirely be encapsulated by any of these. I usually call it a craft: "an activity involving skill in making things by hand" but like everything, this definition only partially applies (eg, the "by hand" bit).

I also like the Hunt/Thomas formulation of programming as gardening: http://www.artima.com/intv/garden.html

That nicely captures the often improvisational nature of things.
What is this I see?
This I don't understand.
Near matches, you say?
I am at your command.
But the matches don't match!
The rhymes, they are off!
What am I to do?
My brain is too soft.

Yet now I move boldly
Into a new verse
The fucking matches don't work.
Fuck this bullshit.

I could try to understand.
Study like I'm in school.
The numbers on the left.
They seem kind of cool.
But my attention can't hold.
The wide internet looms.
If I am your target,
your product is doomed.
Cache validation, on the other hand, can be quite expensive.
The context switch itself of course less so.
And here's the Cliff's Notes:

2004: McAfee sells his entire stake in his antivirus company for something like $100 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/economy/21inequal...

2004: He starts building a compound in New Mexico for aerotrekking, i.e. flying ultralight aircraft. http://www.desertexposure.com/200711/200711_mcafee_icarus.ph...

2006: His nephew dies in an aerotrekking accident.

2007: He's getting major press coverage for his aerotrekking and his band of "Sky Gypsies". http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2008/06/aerotrekking...

2009: The financial crash supposedly wipes out most of his wealth, reducing his net worth to $4 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/economy/21inequal...

2010: He relocates to Belize. He is supposedly studying quorum-sensing in rainforest plants with a brilliant young doctor. http://www.fastcompany.com/1615167/plagued-lawsuits-mcafee-f...

May 2012: McAfee's house is raided and he's charged with running a meth-lab and possessing illegal firearms. Than the charges are dropped. But he goes on the run for a few days anyway. http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/05/meth-labs-and-dead-dogs-how...

8 November 2012: Oops! Turns out he moved to Belize and planted the rumor that he lost 96% of his wealth to avoid possible damages in case he loses the civil lawsuits against him in the US related to his nephew's death. Oh, and now he hangs out with known gangsters. http://gizmodo.com/5958877/secrets-schemes-and-lots-of-guns-...

12 November 2012: McAfee is wanted in connection with the murder of his neighbor. http://gizmodo.com/5959812/john-mcafee-wanted-for-murder
that's the point , you cant keep up with the latest flash version = fail . You cant get good performances = fail , you cant run it on old browsers that dont have flash = fail .
Nobody needs that. This has already been done , all the projects have failed. If i had skills i would not waste my time trying to fit a triangle in a star , i would develop tools to make perfect fitting stars. That's what people want.
What I love on android is I can just strike-through any privilege I don't want an app to have, like internet access. This might be a cyanogenmod-only feature though.
Taobao is fantastic for buying anything China makes (which is almost everything). It is part auction house, part business-to-business sales. There are even quite a few services to get around the language barrier.

A word of caution, if something goes wrong your money is almost certainly lost. Sometimes the firm that you bought it from has folded (I've had this happen in the time it took to deliver the order) to the seller sending bricks. It is buyer beware to the extreme but usually for the price you are paying you can afford to lose the occasional shipment and still save money.
Ask HN: Help me advertise a job for my small bootstrapped startup
Hi Hacker News,

I am looking to hire a developer for my small bootstrapped startup. We have been around 1.5 years, are now a team of 5 and are growing pretty quickly.

We are looking to hire a developer (iOS, Rails or Front End), you can see the details here http://www.redguava.com.au/amazing-developer-job-rails-or-ios-or-front-end/.

I was just hoping you might help vote this up so it can get some attention and help me find someone.

Thanks!

Joel
Founder - Red Guava
Although Karmas are known to catch fire on many occasions, including while submerged in water (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/fisker-fire-new-jersey/).
But nobody cares about those. Motortrend and Car & Driver are the big ones.
This is wonderful!

What API/dataset are you using for the rhymes?
Facebook Tests Ranked Comments to Boost Engagement
Gallery of Computer Scientists (Photographed by Bertrand Meyer)
A better question is why is this story here at all?
Haruki Murakami:

1Q84 -- title's a nod to Orwellian dystopia; awesome mystery with a dash of sci-fi that takes place in a parallel universe sort of Tokyo; the English editon's 3 books in one so it's quite looong

Wind Up Bird Chronicle -- another 3-books-in-one psychological thriller, but the plotline's really just a device for telling the story of the Soviet-Japan border clashes during WWII and the atrocities committed by both sides; I loved the story but it's long and really weird, even for Murakami

Hardboiled Wonderland And The End Of The World -- really fun and imaginative book about a guy who can encrypt data by passing it through his subconsciousness, and ends up getting stuck there himself; I think this was the book that made Murakami famous in the US
>(In comparison, Facebook uses a programming language called AJAX that taxes servers less.)
Wow, I didn't know how the scrolling worked until I looked at my scroll bar. It's neat! A great sense of design.
Most of the arguments are BS, but so far I found the following the stupidiest thing I've ever heard about this topic:

> When our finally product is built, it requires no manufacturing. It is merely a string of bytes. Theoretically, a monkey sitting at the keyboard might accidentally of typed the same string. The product we build cannot be touched or held. It will be worthless in just a few years.

A phone can be touched and held and yet it's also worthless in a few years. More worthless than f.ex. fly by wire software which will still work on aircrafts in those few years. Or ECU. Or gearboxes. Or microwaves. Most applications of various device firmware and machine operations software is legacy and guess what - it works. And contrary to material and moving parts, which must be replaced even if they work flawlessly, software can theoretically outlive it without any updates because it doesn't wear out.

Also, applying the infinite monkey theorem won't get you anywhere, ever.
Ugh... This article was hard to read.
Can you link to sources on instances of special ops using this tainted meat tactic?
"With the internet it would be easier than ever for OWS to get their message out, but they're not."

Really? You honestly believe they're not? How?

There are hundreds of occupy websites, hundreds of Twitter accounts (some with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers), facebook pages and groups (again with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers). There are online radio shows, there are hundreds of livestreams, printed newsletters, wheatpasting, banner drops, overpass light brigades, thousands of different posters, and more. What would convince you that occupy is trying to get their message out? What tactic aren't they using that would make you take the effort seriously? Or are you speaking based on something other than a sincere assessment of the movement?
I have no experience with Heroku, but I would definitely recommend Dotcloud. I run my webapp, iphone and android app with the same backend on dotcloud and I can scale it up or down depending upon the traffic. Except for a few minor issues the service is holding up pretty good.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing, as it turns out there is a 'professional' Data Processing exam as well but few programmers take it, just like few of the engineers designing tech have a PE certification. Out of all the engineers at Intel when I joined in the way back time, the only ones who had PE after their names were the ones doing certifications (UL, FCC, EMI, etc).

That said, programming shares a lot of characteristics with 'art.' I expect that a large number of programmers have no 'process' to go from requirements to running code, rather they sit down and start coding until it works.

Interestingly enough this bit me when getting my first performance review at Intel, I was charged with writing a driver for a new graphics chip and since the chip had a little RISC engine on it for doing things like bitblt I wrote a mini-assembler, compiler, and linker to compile graphics operations. My manager marked me down for 'sand bagging' and when I inquired what he meant he explained that he had observed me sitting around, reading usenet, and basically goofing off for three months and then I sat down and wrote all the software less than a month. He complained that rather than bullshit about how long it was going to take to write I should have just written it and used the other three months to do work. Of course what ensued was me trying to explain that for 3 months I was trying to figure out how it needed to be written and then once that was all known actually writing it was trivial.

What I took away from that was that HW engineering had great milestones for things like circuit design, PCB layout, first films, first boards, design verification, manufacturing verification, production. But software only had, uuhhhhh, blam here it is.

I related that story to a friend who introduced me to a sculpture artist. She had the same 'process' except she would look at a rock for a month and then one weekend chip off all the parts of the rock that weren't part of the sculpture, but she had to 'see' it first before she could start chipping. Art. Not engineering.
I don't know. I found out the hard way that being too good a "team player" will hurt you. People would just shove work to you or to your team. Or take resources from you in the guise of good for the team.

One time in a prior company, an important database/server was under my team's responsibility. Another team needed processing power and asked to borrow some capacity before they ordered their own hardware. Being a team player I agreed since it's good for the company. But over time their processing had huge impact on my tasks and caused performance problems. When I asked them to migrate out, it's always a low priority item, for whatever reason, budget, schedule, or whatever excuses. It took a year to kick them out. I got so fed up that I've contemplated to set up firewall rule to deny access from their machines.

Did people remember I being a team player and helped the other team and the company overall? No, they remembered my server was failing SLA due to poor performance since it's under my responsibility.
This is great. Thanks for posting it. I had some trouble with the syllable counts, but this is really useful for, well, quickly writing rhyming poetry. Good work.
TIL some people actually trust this tribe of neanderthals: http://gizmodo.com/about/
The suspense is killing us!

To others who have went through this before, do you hear back wether you get an interview or not?

Good luck everyone.
nope - taobao is a 100% online store. It's a single shop, where individuals or big brands can setup stores. AFAIK they have no physical outlets at all, and everything goes through their own custom payment portal called Zhi Fu Bao (支付报). That's why it's so incredible!
Prompted me to read about Hans Reiser. Irrational as it is, it increased the my priority to move to ZFS...
I had a similar experience during my time at MS.
I like it as a product to disrupt the market. I think the product itself is incredibly underwhelming and would agree with psychotik.
Interestingly this has been my opinion of all the projects that attempt to create a bridge between native mobile APIS and javascript like phonegap and trigger.io. Don't get me know, they've been noble useful effects, but a lot of that effort should have going into projects like WebKit and Firefox to bring those native APIs to the browsers themselves.
Loss of power can be detected by measuring combustor heat output inside the engine, which you need to do anyway to detect flame out and to adjust the engine for best efficiency.

The control software does not need to know about the different models of engine. Each engine should measure its own performance and report the results to the self-fly software.

In the case of BA 38, this was done: the aircraft automatically detected the loss of power. Unfortunately the (dumb) autopilot had used a flight profile that was unsalvageable if loss of power had occurred at that point.

The future of travel is self-controlling vehicles. We have usable self-driving cars today. Airplanes are easier to control than cars, and the aviation market has a huge pent up demand for short hop travel that cannot be met by the heavily crewed business model.
Yes. I'm a programmer who happens to be an engineer.
Google Nexus 4 Sells Out In Less Than An Hour (in Australia)
I'm a CS major in college. Students who knew what they were doing actively avoided AP CS in our high school. (I've heard many other similar stories as well)

The majority of High School "tech" teachers are utterly unqualified to teach CS.
Still though, you are comparing your experience to the whole of all programmers. Engineering itself has the characteristics of 'art'. There is still an unknown aspect to designing and developing a product even if you use a schematic or have a sane workflow.

What you and the author are speaking of is some of the unconventional aspects of programming, which come along with the drastic growth the field is going through.
This is awesome! You're definitely on to something with the whole personal help thing. In my experience teaching CS, people _always_ get stuck on something and it can be really frustrating for them.
If you're looking for suggestions: If you really want people to use this as a writing tool, make the interface itself more tranquil - the "Tranquillity" title is distracting, and the poem title typeface is awful. Not everyone who writes poetry is into that kind of frilly aesthetic. Find a few well-designed poetry books to use as design examples. A full-screen mode would be easy to implement and super useful.

Similarly, the rhyming tools are interesting, but make them hideable for anyone who is not using them. I would use a thesaurus a thousand times more often than a rhyming dictionary.

I actually like the fixed-width font but suspect many wouldn't. Maybe an option to switch between fixed-width and not. Also, I expect to be able to use the tab key to indent, but it doesn't work here.

Saving and revision control would be great.
I'd be curious to read a little more about what happened at Google, why your goals were incompatible and what the “good fight” was.
I just was about to post that as a comment! Definitely my favorite line of the entire article.
DataSift Raises $15M To Help Businesses Mine And Analyze Social Data
I'd say software architecture is closer to engineering than programming (aka coding).

But ya...not too much difference given the complexity of the SDKs these days.
I was thinking of automated trial and error using a simulator. Try a bunch of variations in the simulator and pick the one with the best simulated results.

Approaches like that are common for playing board games like chess, for finding clever transfer orbits for spacecraft, etc.
Bartender - Organize your Menu Bar Apps
Darn, I was hoping for something a bit more artsy like these chicken ones http://37signals.com/svn/posts/220-chicken-portraits
Sinofsky email to Microsoft employees
The First Kickstarter Satellites
> moon runes (Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters)

Really? You can make your economic point without making fun of several of the world's most commonly spoken languages and the people who speak them.
What way guarantees million line codebases as neat as possible?
Did Samsung buy Xerox???

(I'm kidding :])
The Austrians are 'crazy' when they inexorably link inflation to the supply of money growing faster than the demand for money, but when someone quotes Friedman on inflation, to wit: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output," heads nod, and no one calls anyone crazy.

The difference between the two views is little more than semantics.