skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible to compare writing software to writing literature. In the end, it doesn't matter how huge the demand for good literature is; the number of people capable of writing a good novel will remain roughly the same.

If anything, smart software will put mediocre programmers (and novelists) out of work. It seems unlikely, however, that we'll ever see a significant number of unskilled workers in the tech sector.
sounds like a plan.
True, but there are also things that don't get cheaper.

One good example is hosting. Linode/Rackspace monthly charges can eat your lunch.

Another is electronic equipment. Computers, smartphones and all other gadgets are not a tad bit cheaper -- they cost the same, and sometimes even more than they do in other countries.

Same applies to cars. A Camry will cost you nearly double its sticker price due to 104% tax on foreign-made cars. Indian-made cars cost $10'000 and up -- for nothing that even comes close to comfort and cruising of a Toyota/Nissan engine.

I know, I know; these are not big points -- what really upsets me though is -- being paid peanuts when people doing the exact same thing as you are making 10 or even 15 times more in other countries. I know people in Google, Zynga and other places all making $140k or more (in the U.S.)
Thoughts on this start-up idea?
This is an interesting example of why randomization in experiments is important. If you allow users to self select into the experiment and control group, and then naively look at the results, the results might come up opposite from what is expected. This is known as Simpson's Paradox. In this case, it was only the users for whom page load was already the slowest that picked the faster version of the page. So naively looking at page load times made the pages look like they loaded slower.

However once Chris controlled for geography, he was able to find that there was a significant improvement.

Moral of the story: run randomized A/B tests, or be very careful when you are analyzing the results.
To save everyone a click:

You can take a screenshot, but it notifies the sender.

Quote:

Can I take a screenshot of pokes I receive?

Yes. When you take a screenshot, your friend will see
[an icon] next to your name letting them know. While
pokes will disappear on the app, screenshots and photos
from other devices can capture your poke, so share
responsibly.

Edit: Fixed formatting.
Exactly, I'm leaning more towards Eric S. Raymond's developer-centric views, which may not be canonically Open Source but do speak a lot more to me and my personal history pre-1998. But this hopefully answers the question by the gp about why there is room for more than two (and three) 'movements': to promote different aspects of software availability.
I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the number of stars, but rather to what the reviewers say.

Yes, it takes longer to decide which product is best, but I get more reliable results that way.
But that's looking at the big picture... something that clearly, the powers that be at big companies no longer do.
why the hell would i want to talk to my facebook friends
> They'll even give free public Git hosting to products that directly compete with their core business at a lower price point (free)!

unless you are providing paid accounts and expensive enterprise solutions with support, you are not competing with them in any way.
Or just tunnel/run a proxy (preferably outside of the UK).
It doesn't do two-way sync. Nothing syncs as well as Dropbox does, right now. Maybe AeroFS is close to it, though.
If I buy logs and built rafts with them, which I then sell to people trying to cross a river, I'm creating wealth. If I own a strip of land up and down the river and charge people who want to cross it in their rafts, I'm extracting rents. If I patent the concept of raft building and require anyone building their own rafts to pay me, I'm extracting rents.

What that quotation means is that all the finance MBAs and Wall Street quants of the last decade aren't making the economic pie bigger, they're just ensuring that they get a bigger slice of it.
>> Instead of being the teacher, point your friends to people that are trained to educate. If the person is serious about changing their life, school is the first place they should go.

I'm a terrible teacher for others but I teach myself amazingly well. Reasoning that if you're not a good teacher then the only alternative is a formal school; I'd say there are more options such as self-teaching. It doesn't work for as many people but does work very well for some.
Uh, I know everyone going to yell at me, but...

I think it would have been much much better, had Adobe open-sourced Flash and turned into a standard (like ECMA or something).

This could saved everyone in the industry a huge amount of effort porting, rewriting, etc. stuff to work on a platform where every browser does things in its own (horribly) inconsistent way.
It should be pretty far down their list of priorities at this point, but I just noticed the "Exception Percentage" value at https://status.github.com/graphs/past_day is saying 483.704%. The fact that they're measuring this in percentages implies the maximum is 100%, but this isn't so.
Nowhere did he hint at anything about being socially clueless.

He came off as curious about how developers think and operate and very open-minded about learning from it.

Unlike your comment here.
Facebook deletes poke data. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/22/your-facebook-pokes-are-sto...
Of relatively mainstream languages, probably Haskell or ATS. Ada is rather far, but its type system appears to be nowhere near as useless as C's or even Java's.
This research invalidated the only reason I had for not minding homeopathy. It was at least healing people by the placebo effect.

Now it doesn't even do that. Good riddance.
My point of view is very simple: I believe in freedom of speech. If I feel like someone is watching and trying to understand every word I write, I cannot write freely for fear of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Hyperbole like "I feel like killing my boss" is the first to go. The person I am speaking to knows what I mean by my statements and I feel confident that he does. Having someone listen in on my conversations would take away that feeling of freedom. The law even has similar provisions: attorney-client privilege is only applicable if the two people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Oh, I totally know it does because I've been stuck on and off on slow connections recently -- and a lot of pages (HN is big and awesome exception), load quite slowly. I even ended up using gmail's HTML interface for a while.
Mind telling us what Nuuton is?
I think 'rarely' is too strong a characterization. My experience is that in the absence of malfeasance BigCorp is locally rational. They have convinced themselves, either for or against, about how they should proceed. We rarely get to see their reasoning though so its hard to evaluate. I've worked with M&A teams at a couple of places and have seen deals that looked irrational until the reasoning was uncovered but I certainly accept the claim that not all of them would past muster, even when all the information was known.
Phabricator and GitLab seem to have a lot of overlapping functionality (repo browsing, code review, wiki, issue tracking). What does GitLab add that Phabricator doesn't have?
Don't take any metaphor too far. If you like, a better metaphor: A model-T and a Ford Taurus are equally unable to read. That's not important. What's important is that one is forever, irrevocably obsolete.
> unless you are providing paid accounts and expensive enterprise solutions with support, you are not competing with them in any way.

Yes, you are. If you would have bought their product (paid Git hosting), but you used somebody else's product instead (Gitolite), then that other product (Gitolite) is competing with Github for your business.

I agree that there is a subset of the market that (a) won't or can't figure out Git hosting on their own, or (b) decides that paying for a Github account will actually be less expensive. But I never said that Gitolite will ever replace Github.
Alert: Newbie to economics here sharing some thoughts for feedback.

At time t -> infinity, the ideal state would not be humans not having jobs (machines taking over), but humans not "needing" jobs (machines doing everything we need to do today). This may however never be since natural resources are limited, and so the cost of goods (while reducing due to economically cheaper machines taking over) would never come to zero.

So then, as time progresses, the jobs for humans would end up being at the end of the production-possibility frontier [1] where their sole motive is to figure new things (entrepreneurship), while the machines take care of existing methods of producing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production-possibility_frontier
Food, housing, transportation, and medical care may not get any cheaper. Food is already highly mechanized. Housing is saturated in the places where people want to live. In the US at least we lack the political will to make transformative investments in transportation, and gas production is already as mechanized as it is going to get. Medical care is likely to remain labor intensive using very expensive labor.

Sure, the average worker may be able to buy more things at Walmart than they can today, but that has less of an effect on quality of life.
The #1 problem I have with most to-do list applications is that they don't support (or have bad support for) subtasks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like this is a main feature of todo.txt either....
Until it doesn't - how many draft horses do you see working now? Besides which, we've got over fifty years of history telling us that wealth concentration is happening faster and faster. If just that trend alone continues then within our lifetime most people would not be earning enough to sustain themselves.
I've been using git-annex[1] to handle this problem. It doesn't handle the synchronization instantaneously via a daemon, but that's trivial to add. Plus, it requires neither a centralized canonical repository nor complete synchronization of every file (only fetch the ones you need).

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/
pg is a pretty small part of the economy. Still, there is truth in what you are saying but when it comes to developing software there are barriers to entry much more substantial than capital.
I work on Platform at Dropbox and I agree :) We want great developers to build all of these things and I want to help them. Anyone out there please reach out!
I imagine it was a percent measured against successful responses. The exceptions now far exceed those successful responses. You are correct in saying it should be 100% but people have a habit of scaling beyond it.
Right after writing this post I see OSFlash (Open Source Flash) on Canasse's profile. (Got there via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956809)
Just listing a few that I thought of relatively immediately:

Free resources:

1. Wikipedia

2. http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

3. http://blog.notdot.net/tag/damn-cool-algorithms

Textbooks (they cost money, sometimes quite a lot):

1. Knuth

2. http://www.hackersdelight.org/

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

4. http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

EDIT: Got the link to Dev Bootcamps on your profile, saw that they are done in Ruby. I don't know offhand of any algorithms resources that use the language.

I'm definitely NOT a Ruby expert; I looked at Ruby once and its shell-derived syntax and tons of obscure operators made me want to gouge my eyes out (much like Perl). Python occupies a similar niche and it's about one hundred times less painful.
Before you become a professional data jerk (like myself) people tell you 80% of the job is data scraping, cleaning, organizing, piping etc. And the last 20% is the analysis and stats (or predictive whosiwhatsits). They're lying. Its 85% cleaning, organizing etc, 5% doing "real" stats and 10% convincing people you're not lying. This site seems to nicely outline many of the tasks that fall outside of the "fun" 5%.
You hit the nail on the head: it is all about VAS and getting squeezed on price, especially in the supplier-distributor model. The end-user will price-shop, but unbeknownst the end-users, all the distributors get their stuff from the same few suppliers. The end-users squeeze the distributors, and the distributors squeeze the suppliers, and it ends up no one makes any money. This then gets compounded because China is raising their prices, and at times, choking off the supply chain completely. After the end-users can't find what they want, they just look online and order direct from China.

I've been convinced for quite a while that price-slashing is the ultimate killer. The only advantage US suppliers have at this point is keeping foreign-bought stock locally so that they can deliver in less than a week. End-users are learning very quick, especially with the price of software decreasing, that keeping things in-house is not only more convenient, but cost less too.
I've been using Todo.txt for about 8 months now.

I don't think it's a question of what makes it better that another product but what makes it right for you.

I like the CLI properties of it and the ability to extend it with new features in any language you want.

Entry of new tasks and completion of done ones is really fast. The Android app isn't as beautiful as it could be but it does the job. My hard requirement was that my tool be available on Mac/Linux/Android. Having a Dropbox backed service made that a bit easier.
Exact same thing happened to me. I wanted to pay for it, couldn't... So the only solution available to me is to download it from tpb.

Silly.

I'll pay for it tomorrow, but I wanted to pay for it now. This strategy doesn't make sense.
Ask HN: classic literature recommendations?
Any suggestions on "classic" literature? I'm not too strict on the definition; I'm reading Kafka now and would probably consider it classic.
I've started to feel that todo apps have one major problem: they don't do the work for you. And this is why we're so obsessed with todo apps - we don't really want to do the work, we just want to play around with how we prioritize and organize the work.

In most cases, if we just got a lot of stuff done, we'd have no need for an app, because the list of stuff to do would be rather short.
> Yes, there is still a developer shortage, at least for certain technologies. (...) its near impossible still to find a local Rails & Backbone developer

I don't understand this. Why not hire a good programmer and give them few weeks to learn those technologies? Has anyone here hired a programmer who was good but failed at his job because they couldn't learn whatever language fast enough?

I mean, I can understand certain companies want people with very specific skills -- say, embedded programming -- that can hit the ground running. And some companies have enough candidates that they can afford to exclude the ones who don't have those skills. But if you talk about shortage then it seems you're not one of those companies.
What are "cheap schools" today are outrageously expensive by the standards when I was young.

The issue here is not whether a second or third tier school can give a decent education, it is whether poor families see school as an option at all. When you combine skyrocketing costs with growing numbers of horror stories of people who are financially destroyed, and cannot even (as when I was young) declare bankruptcy, more and more are going to make the economic decision that they cannot afford higher education.

I am not sure that they are wrong.
One of the primary reasons not to work there! But then you do have to realize that the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in US. I think 30-50K is pretty much on the low-average end even for a new grad.
When I graduated from college in bangalore (2004) I was offered a salary that would translate to about 21K USD (but in INR of course).
So, you should probably look into it. Colleges such as RVCE (my alma mater) do publish median salaries and std. deviation every year on their website.
Github is Down and I can't deploy my app
Don't have to be an extreme user to take advantage of the features above, they benefit everyone. Nor would it require years, it already works fine (has for years and on every other OS) ... just could use a little optimization.
Thanks for the replies. I kept searching around, and I think my mistake was focusing too much on the word 'rent'. Focusing instead on 'redistribution', what helped clarify my understanding the most is the criticism that modern finance is becoming more of a zero-sum game; and 'rent' is mainly being used as the economic dirty word for this behavior.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1069231-from-positive-to-zer...
Resocious – All new social network to redefine your interests
Buzzoole – Get rewarded for being an influencer
Pages was out briefly a couple of hours ago (certainly some repos, anyway)

Seems to be fine now though.
GNU might get you something roughly comparable to BSD/Solaris/etc, but without the Linux kernel there is really no technical reason to prefer GNU to BSD/Solaris/etc.

Sure you could use Hurd instead of Linux, or Mach, or any other number of alternative kernels, but who actually does that? Mach is very popular, but only in all of the places that GNU definitely is not.

(Clarification: I was explaining how Gnome may be filling the same, er, cultural role that GNU filled in years past. They're both software projects that try to give us the Unix experience we want. Part of what has changed is which part of the OS we pay attention to -- GNU is not as relevant because it achieved so many of its goals, not like Gnome.)
Some related studies:

'Partial antagonism of placebo analgesia by naloxone' (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6308540) -- no actual morphine was ever adminstered, only a regimen of saline injections, whose placebo effect is apparently achieved by the release of endogenous opioids.

'A comprehensive review of the placebo effect'(http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebartic...): "placebos have
actual biological effects on the brain and
body and are more than response biases."
It's interesting how this compares to projects posted without an explicit license where many will refuse to consider using the project until a license is specified:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22no+licen...

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22what+is+...
Simple way to push to multiple git repos
Laughed when I saw this post. Since I had just been looking at my TODO file for next steps on a project.

I like being able to include a TODO file in a project, commit it to git and then sync across platforms/machines etc. Low tech, free task management.
The root problem is that instead of being able to appropriate resources from nature and produce what we need as individuals directly, we've been corralled into a setup where we have to get permission from government to appropriate and transform raw materials. This is a completely artificial man-made problem, due to various forms of fiat property, one important class being patents, another being government-granted permission for resource extraction (but this is not exhaustive).

It wasn't always so. Early man could claim and transform resources as he needed. Now we are required, on pain of death really (if we try to disobey we will be arrested, if we don't comply with the arrest we will be shot), to either plug into the existing economic structures -- or to starve to death.
It helps a lot, assuming the user can use most of the page while you ajax-load the less important stuff.

Perceived speed is extremely important.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-u...
Github is back
Huh, your extensive research doesn't square with much of what I learned as a neuroscience undergrad. We read a few papers that demonstrated non-trivial physiological responses due to 'sham' treatments.

In particular, placebo treatments have a well established impact on pain by causing release of endogenous opioids (see http://webusers.astro.umn.edu/~larry/CLASS/NOTHING/READINGS/... and http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebartic...).

More generally, it would be shocking if beliefs and perceptions didn't have (both beneficial and harmful) medical effects. Mental states have physical consequences. For example, stressful thoughts cause measurable differences in levels of various hormones and neurotransmitters. Over time, particular patterns of thinking can even cause changes in the morphology of the brain. The strong assertion of a mind/body split seems simplistic and outdated, there's simply too much evidence of a complex entangled relationship between the two.
Maybe some anecodtes? Alternatives (for Python)? Would like to generate D3 style charts, without leaving Python for JS.
Congratulations. You highlighted a misuse of the word license, and ignored the underlying idea that still is not answered.

"Where does the copyright exist at? Is it in the medium, the UPC, the box, or perhaps more intangible than that?"

Thought I was pretty clear I was not talking about a EULA or similar.
Not worried about a down vote here?

I wrote out a big old reply to this article, and canned it. I was worried about a load of down votes. I didn't want to be judged badly by a decent community. I was worried my opinion would be a downer or some how anti-American / Capitalist / Western. So I self censored. And that's just a hacker's news aggregation site.

Dunno what point Im trying to make, but were we ever really free to make out true opinion's public? Who do we fear more; government or our peers?
Natural resources are virtually unlimited, at least for the current size of the human race. We're only just scratching the surface of the resources available on Earth, and there's a whole solar system we have access to. The only issue is the technology required to transform these resources into something useful, and the "permission" to create and deploy such technology.
Where do mobile payment services (paypal) store money
Thinking of creating a mobile payment service for my country but I'm not entirely sure how the backend financial stuff wo rks for services like paypal (I am a developer) Can someone explain this
Here's a refutation of the parent's position.

Let's take the following premise as given: Most Americans will say "I support our troops, because they're willing to lay their life on the line -- and sometimes lay it down -- to protect our freedoms."

Or, as Patrick Henry put it when this country was fighting for independence from Great Britain: "Give me liberty or give me death!" [1]

These examples imply that most of us think of our freedoms as something that we won't automatically give up when the alternative is putting our lives on the line.

NB, I'm not saying we won't give up our freedoms when faced with an alternative of certain death. I'm saying most of us are willing to fight for our freedoms even if it means accepting a significant risk of death.

I speak only for the USA; the viewpoints of other countries and cultures may be quite different.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_Liberty,_or_give_me_Dea...!