skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adobe Software in no longer easy to pirate. From what I understand people have to go to great lengths to pirate CS6, same goes for Office 2010, a friend told me that to pirate it he had to call Microsoft and mess around with files, it's not just a keygen anymore.
I would like to point out that the Space Age futurism the author rants so much about wasn't made by the, and I quote, "techno-autistic" guys.

Most of the futuristic crap from 50 and 60 years ago was the product of some uninformed scifi authors who mixed fantasy with technology, marketers creating products of the future to create more brand-awareness (with the ironic consequence that some of those companies disappeared decades ago) and many charlatans who simply had no idea what they were talking about.

For example, food pills wasn't about a rosy cool future, the whole idea started as a theoretical last-ditch effort to curve a future global famine of catastrophic proportions caused by the at the time unprecedented increase in population. Fortunately other "techno-autistics" were able to find a way to increase crop yields (Green Revolution) which is why we still have real food instead of something closer to dry dogfood pellets.
To be pedantic as well, it doesn't strike me as particularly inaccurate. They are structured data. Why do you find that inaccurate?
The guys at gSchool believe strongly that truly learning everything online is really hard. The instructors are world class - IMO that will make all the difference.
Very valid. I just wanted people to know that I'm not unaware of how inappropriate it is. The fact that I chose to post it anyway should stand as a testament to how incredibly offensive this man's ideas are to me.
What precisely is a "literal metric fuckton of advice"?
This is great, would love to use it to keep MySQL and hive in sync. I will play around with this soon, thanks for the great gem!
This condition was satirised quite well in the old Dilbert TV series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t76R-nKhGHE&feature=play...
I think this is pretty hard for me to explain, but please try to bear with me.

My observations are as anecdotal as anyone else's, but my experience is that there is a moderate negative correlation between someone's raw analytical ability and the capacity to appreciate the kind of ambiguity that good literature carries. Of course there are those rare gems who can juggle both pretty well- Poincare or Mandelbrot for examples.

And most of my personal experiences of very high raw analytical ability comes from academia, people who made through ICPC world finals & are doing their PhDs at top schools, and not startup world- where smart people are of a somewhat different mold.

Now there is nothing negative with not appreciating a broad set of literature, or having a more deterministic/ utilitarian view of life. They are to some extent different personalities and different mindsets.

I appreciate Taleb's world view to a decent extent [1], but I used to actively keep it in my head/ life when I was in pure research/ grad-school mode. Now as I am building shit/ taking big risks, my mindset is much more generic HN'ish view. For instance, earlier I used to read substantially more poetry, literature [2] and biological papers. Now I primarily focus on my core area - stats/ML/AI etc. and general HN stuff.

[1] To the extent of corresponding with him at length

[2] If there is a single book I would suggest to you or anyone else, it would be Kolyma Tales. It is probably the most despairing/ darkest thing I have ever read and made me appreciate human nature a lot more.
Small inaccuracies are perfectly acceptable if they aid in conferring understanding to the layman.
Uranium fuels were never deployed because of cost or safety, they were deployed because various militaries funded the technology for use a) producing plutonium for weapons, and b) producing energy for large Navy customers.

Civilian nuclear energy based on the uranium fuel cycle is a spin off from a warfighter's R&D project.

Compare that with the thorium fuel cycle which does not produce weaponizable byproducts.
Neither "has truthiness". Copyright exists as a separate legal doctrine for a very simple reason:

It is materially different from theft. Enough so that making property law fit copyright is not feasible in any reasonable way.

One is based on an presumptive right of the individual to protection of their right to continued use of something.

The other is an artificial government monopoly restricting the public from exercising their right to full use of their own property, by preventing them from copying and distributing information that is legally already in their possession, and where nobody are deprived of continued use at all.
For some strange reason the Orkut network (of Google) only become popular in Brazil (mostly), and now they are even going to administrate it from the Brazil branch of Google.
I was under the [naive] impression that _every_ security check finally boils down to one JMP statement. Can you please explain what makes other programs more difficult to crack than flipping the one JMP location?
A Real-Life Pixar Desk Lamp
Cute, now synchronize it with the song ;)
Read the article -- MS is mentioned in what is probably appropriate context -- as a side issue to the great game currently underway.
No, someone wearing a uniform and whose leash it tightly held by commissioned officer is a tiny bit more appropriate. A clear and unambiguous chain of command from the sovereign state is the least you can ask for in a war. Those involved should know that they are not autonomous agents, they are instruments of power, tools, and disposable themselves.
The Plot Against the Internet
You make an extremely interesting point. Suddenly I'm starting to see a split between "the left" in America vs. traditionally socialist values, when I had always assumed the former was simply trending towards the latter.

I'm not an expert on either, but it seems like "the left" is all about equality (in the strict sense), whereas socialism is more about equity?
I'm planning to write an overview article about the various bootcamps and online courses teaching programming. If you know of any I'd appreciate pointers so I can have as broad a survey as possible.
I will never for the life of me understand why so many video game players are so insistent that video games must be art. Why does it matter?

For what it's worth, I don't think that video games can be art for reasons that are far too lengthy for the scope of a comment on here. But that doesn't mean video games can't be good things. I also like sport, newspaper articles, and good beer. Cultural artefacts don't have to be art to be good.
Upgrading RAM is something I've always done. The cost difference between getting it from Apple and getting it from New Egg or a local shop was always dramatically different.

Also, being able to upgrade the hard drive vastly improves the performance and capabilities as well. This is especially good when you can then turn around and hand off the laptop to a relative or a non-techy who will benefit from the device.

The resale value is never enough to pay for the upgrade costs, unless you are almost upgrading every time a new model comes out.
Automatic fail fast based on monitoring sounds like an awesome alternative to having latency cascade through the system and then scrambling to "fix" the problem by reducing client timeouts.
Not really. Most of the abstraction layers are there for portability. Unnecessary portability, since in the end, Nvidia decided to drop support for everything but Linux for their Tegra2 line.
And these are completely legitimate reasons to not choose CloudFlare.
Interesting!
My view is that "how to teach" is way more difficult, and therefore important, than simple subject knowledge. I can find dozens of very expert Developers, willing to teach for a good salary. However, rarely these people have the skills to teach effectively.
Can you tell us more about why Jeff is great at teaching? Examples?
Text while you walk
Gorgeous website and great domain. Keep us posted.

Your Twitter updates are a wee bit prolific, though. I'm not sure I'll want to follow one with that activity with fairly little info about the site itself. Maybe split it up into several?

I see a similar thing with other accounts filled with what I call vanity tweets retweeting mentions of themselves.
Caveat lector: I help run Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com), which is probably "the one in SF" whose name you forgot. :)

I have two thoughts.

First, there's more to learning how to be a software developer than downloading a bunch of information into your head. Most software projects fail for human reasons, not technical reasons. Giving feedback effectively, receiving feedback non-defensively, articulating your ideas to other people of varying backgrounds and skill, convincing teammates to follow your plan, inspiring your co-workers with your clarity of thought and action, etc. are all real, hard-to-learn skills that are critical to being a great software developer which. One would also be hard-pressed to learn on them on their own since each is, by definition, an interpersonal skill.

As someone who has interviewed and hired dozens of engineers, my experience is that "junior developers," as deep as their knowledge of data structures and algorithms might be, are lacking in exactly this dimension. It's the #1 reason people are afraid to hire them and dismiss as "too junior."

As a case study, Hipmunk (http://hipmunk.com), a Python shop, hired a summer student from Dev Bootcamp. He was a great developer, but they obviously didn't hire him for his mad Python skills since DBC teaches Ruby and Rails. He had no significant prior programming experience when he entered DBC.

I know, I know: anecdotal, etc. etc.

Second, when developers talk about self-learning, I think there's a huge selection bias. The way people are "meant" to learn computer science, software engineering, etc. selects for autodidacts. There are so many more dimensions to how people learn effectively.

This is coming from someone who taught himself C using K&R in high school.

The two things you said are categorically false for many people: they just don't possess the internal mental models necessary to learn how to program on their own, and don't know how to find answers. They might not even know what they're seeing is an answer, unless they've formed the question correctly.

When friends ask me what programming language they should learn, I tell them they should learn whatever programming language more of their friends know.

Social support, similarly motivated peers, role models, and even just the knowledge that they have access to expertise that can get them unstuck when they're tired and frustrated are huge factors in getting people to learn. They will be more fearless, more intrepid, and work their way up to a place where they have the confidence and skill to both learn on their own and on the job.

If you're curious about the skill level of some of the students graduating from programs like gSchool and Dev Bootcamp, here are some examples from the fall:

* http://0xfffc.tumblr.com/post/35751220092/6502-assembler-and...

* http://www.grocery48.com/

* https://gist.github.com/aafabcfadafb4563fd3e

* http://flavorite.tumblr.com/post/35185577034/behind-the-scen...

Shameless plug

Dev Bootcamp's fall cohort graduates next week, and December 7th is our hiring day. If you're interested in attending, sign up here: http://bit.ly/hn_dbc
Retargeting adverts might not be bad -- most ad networks can serve ads to those who have already been to your site, which can draw them back
I don't get it - is it somehow different from someone that shoots heroin or something?
Radio station running on Raspberry Pi experiment
5 minutes, go!
Okay, I bit. I forked the Redis repository and fixed a small warning when linking with clang to resolve issue #374 (nine months old but still open.) I just created the pull request. How long has it taken others for 24pullrequests to recognize my request?

Edit: It took only a few minutes.
How is this any different than "epiphanies as a hacker at a multi-person startup"? The post was well worded and concise, but didn't contain any insights that aren't standard HN rhetoric.
I just saw some Conan O'Brien clips and now they think I'm american.
My PC booted to DOS. Basic was an installed program.

My apple booted to the program on the disk you inserted.
If his ideas offend you, you should rebut them, rather than making such an uncouth, sweeping value judgement.
That's the part that ruined the entire article for me. To quote these games as hallmarks of emotional or intrinsic value in games is to me as clueless as to talk about paintings as 'things that you just look at', renders the person in the article clueless about both art and games, and destroys the sarcasm imho.
Prototypes aren't classes and they aren't always what you want, and conventions can't always be optimized by the compiler as well as structured language elements.
avg U.S. college semester is ~ 14-16 weeks, including testing. We'll call it 16 for some easy math.

16/4 = 4 months * 2 semesters/yr = 8 months.

We are naively assuming that semesters don't include test-weeks or other vacations and that all 16 weeks are education-filled.

Pricing for a college education [1]
in-state public college avg ~22k
private college avg ~44k

44k/8 months = $5500/mo

22k/8 months = ~$2750/mo

20k/6 months = ~$3333/mo

Pricing seems about right for a low end year of college.

[1] http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmp...

[edit: formatting]
I wonder if everyone is missing a piece of the Cloudflare pricing puzzle.

What if they have negotiated contracts with wholesale data providers where they get a revenue share for any traffic they bring into the network? This would mean that the more sites they have hosted, the more money they bring in for their carrier (which they bill the downstream for) and in turn, the more they make.

I dont not work for Cloudflare and have never worked in the carrier/hosting biz, so this is just a theory. I am however, a very happy enterprise customer.
And what they mean by "60 hours a week".
It was the same 10 years ago. Presumably it will be as low as it was when programmable computers were first deployed to homes with kids. It might get older if kids get too much video games that don't inspire them to program the machine.
I agree, though my first thought is many things work better if you add a little randomness to the equation. Something like abort X% of the time where X is based on latency over an acceptable threshold which should find a happy medium where a resource is at max capacity, but not overloaded.

Of course this is all assuming you have some sort of useful redundancy.
Relax. The analogy is more to storybook combat (Game of Thrones is the model) rather than real war. I found the extended analogy to be clever and fun.
Disclaimer: I work for Google on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These views are my own and don't express those of my employer.

From where I'm sitting real-time bidding ("RTB") does indeed seem to be the future of display advertising. Personally I don't see this as a bad thing as the more relevant you can make ads, the more useful they are to the user, the more advertisers will bid and the more publishers (websites) will earn.

As much as on sites like this there are those who speak of the evils of advertising, the fact is that advertising is the only way the vast majority of the Internet can exist.

The article notes:

> In June, Facebook announced that it would introduce a new service called Facebook Exchange, which will enable advertisers to send promotions for Spanish hotels, say, to Facebook users who have searched for trips to Spain.

For the record, Google still maintains a strict separation between search and display.

This quote is bizarre:

> Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field,

The New York Times is suddenly concerned with being egalitarian? Really? Also:

> ... based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control.

www.google.com/ads/preferences/

Click "Opt out".

(Side note: where is the Facebook equivalent?)

Another point:

> This is bad news for magazines and newspapers: once advertisers were able to track and reach specific consumers, they became less interested in where their ads appeared and more interested in who, specifically, was seeing them.

Online advertising has the merit of being completely measurable in that you can determine to a fraction of a cent how much you spent on impressions, how many of those impressions resulted in a click (resulting in an effective CPC) and how many of those became customers (effective CPA).

Traditional media is suffering because probably since it's existed--and anyone who has bought radio, TV or print advertising should be aware of this--is that the audience numbers are basically a lie. So yes, it's bad news for that lie to be exposed for those perpetuating the lie I guess.

> For example, by knowing discrete and apparently unconnected facts about you — your shirt color, gait, driving habits and the e-mail font you use — companies could, using algorithms that sort the profiles of hundreds of thousands of people like you, accurately predict what kind of porn you surf.

Say what now? An important point:

> ... none of these classifications was accurate, although Tawakol noted that they would become more precise the more I browsed the Web while allowing BlueKai cookies on my computer.

The underlying point here is that advertisers aren't interested in you, the individual, they're interested in you as part of an audience. Note:

> And BlueKai says that its advertising partners can’t identify by name the consumers they’re tracking, and they generally don’t want to.

> But it was a place where people could define themselves and be surprised by experiences in the future that didn’t reflect preferences they expressed in the past.

Really? We're going to wax lyrical about TV advertising in the 1960s now?
Hi Barry!

I help run App Academy (appacademy.io), a hacker academy based in SF.

Feel free to reach out to us (contact@appacademy.io) if you have any questions about our program!

Here's a list of hacker academies to get you started: http://qr.ae/1pZOh
Unrelated to the blog article, I hadn't heard of Pixlee until now. The company appears to scrape Instagram and try to measure brand awareness/usage/trends/______ by analyzing the pictures. Probably advertised as "Twitter-like sentiment analysis for Instagram." Image recognition is a hard problem. Good luck to them.

Scraping Instagram? Wow, that just gives me more pause about putting too much personal info on social networks. Will people create a startup that measures risk profiles for insurance companies based on how many beers or cigarettes appear in pictures? Or pictures that include known felons or people with police mug shots? It will be interesting to watch this space.
Not all wars are fought with guns and muscles, and very few are won that way. At the top levels, companies fighting each other looks almost identical to warfare.
Are you using black and white to mean a clear distinction, or to mean moral good and bad? It's not black and white to me.

It's obvious that copyright violation is not directly equivalent to theft on a black and white basis; there are clear differences, such as theft depriving someone else of a physical good, so under the "clear distinction" interpretation of your statement, it is plainly wrong.

And as to moral interpretation, it's not obvious that theft is always wrong either.
I've avoided CloudFlare since it seems to good too be true, which means it probably isn't. I've been burnt in the past with overselling - if I'm not paying for the bandwidth, I'm also probably not getting it. In addition, I've seen those CloudFlare captcha pages a few times, and they look really scummy, like domain parking pages, full of ads.
Properly Installing Cheap SSL Certificates
The other thing this article really fails to highlight is the DDOS mitigation service Cloudflare provides.

Cloudflare are disrupting a very established and lucrative industry. Companies like Prolexic charge a lot more for a lot less. Not to mention the whole "Are you currently under attack?" bullshit they pull where they charge you significantly more if you are currently a DDOS victim.
Sick Of All The Hyped Up Sites On The Internet
If Your Sick As I Am Of All The Hyped Up Sites On The Internet Your Going To Love This!
WriteMania Blog
All About Free Wtiting
I think part of the drawbacks of multi-tasking is attitude. The multi-taskers I've known have taken their approach as a sign of their intelligence, as if doing just one thing at a time is below their capabilities. They act as if they've tapped some special, hidden potential of the human brain that common people don't understand. Yet despite their super-human powers, they're often one or two tasks away from completing everything they're supposed to finish.

Their work is best described as achieving "limit as work approaches done." They continue to work on something, they get closer to completing it, but you could give them an infinite amount of time and they'd never finish.

I'll take devs who can focus on one task and complete it.
To make a fair comparison, you have to factor in your video game and TV performance and productivity, which is obviously suffering now.
Writing a Quickbooks REST API
I am an introvert and I manage a group of 22 employees in my now 8 year company. I have learned that the best way to connect with people is not to take myself too seriously. Also, make their time worthwhile when talking to them, don't ever over-promise and really, genuinely care about what they say to you.
"Should we worry about ads aimed specifically at us everywhere we go on the Web and, increasingly, on our mobile devices too? Yes, and not just because the ads can be invasive and annoying. Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, allowing companies to send loyalty points or discounts — or price increases — to individuals based on their perceived spending power. The travel site Orbitz, after learning that Mac users spend 30 percent more on hotel rooms than P.C. users, has started to send Mac users ads for hotels that are 11 percent more expensive than the ones that P.C. users are seeing, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article."

Isn't that complaining about ads being intrusive, then complaining about not getting ads because of targeting?

It's not like Orbitz charge mac users more money by upping the prices only for them.

It's funny because I did a ton of consumer search at Nokia and spend hours and hours listening to people talk about advertising on mobile and irrelevancy was one of the biggest problems. Better targeting saves advertisers money and should piss users off less.