skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"Before most computer science graduates ever walk across a stage to get their diplomas, they’re set for life."

Be careful, the market can and will sort this out. Blacksmiths used to be set for life; so did lawyers more recently, now they struggle to find jobs. Smart people are what will always be in demand, not a specific skill.

Good article. My expectations are low with TechCrunch nowadays.
So you want to write an interpreter?
It's true, I did.
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” - Nikolai Tesla.
More handwaving about "innovation" but no counter to the truth that other services simply cannot offer and maintain a product on the level and stature that the hardcore Google Reader users are accustomed to.

I hope I am wrong about this, but every article like this simply shouts this out like it's unadulterated gospel truth, bereft of the multitudes of empirical evidence that it is simply not a given.
Valid points mate, agreed!
I find you completely unhelpful and unconstructive. I've criticized Apple and its acolytes before, but I've never accused one of being a plant. Consider the possibility that people are talking about Microsoft because the company is doing interesting things again.

And I hope I never grow out of Internet snark.
Former Sociology Ph.D. candidate here.

Yes, a lot of b-school research crosses fields. I've worked with b-school profs doing work across sociology, economics, law (to a lesser degree), computer science, and mathematics. The difference between research in those fields and b-school research seems to be that the b-school profs had more of an applied bent. The b-school research was more motivated by practical business problems.

Of course, much like programs within a discipline can be radically different from university to university, I imagine there's also a range of research styles across b-schools.
Microsoft's vulnerable among college students in computer/IT fields, because they have technical knowledge, lots of time on their hands and little money -- a perfect audience for FOSS.

So they offer big academic discounts to try to keep them in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Show HN: ICEcoder v2.0 – online and offline browser code editor
Have been building a web IDE & browser based code editor and v2.0 has now launched. Contains a whole load of features beyond just code highlighting such as online & offline use, code completion, type boosting, Emmet, database management, find & replace builder, auto backups, Github syncing and a whole lot more. Oh, and it's free & open source. Any and all feedback welcomed.
I can't wait to find out what Nathan has in store. I'm not a fan of Twitter's mission, I hope he continues building useful infrastructure that's not directly influenced by the need to show more ads to more people.
You're right, that's not the way a business' objectives are usually understood in the US, and it's a thought-provoking discussion. I think we could certainly go back to employers having a bit more responsibility towards their employees.

That being said, we need to distinguish business from charity. While a business may have certain obligations to the productive members of its work-force, I don't see any obligations towards the unproductive ones, and that is where the argument crosses the line into charity.

As an employer, I don't give you a paycheck because you're my family member and I want to support you. I do it because we are in a mutually-beneficial relationship. And it couldn't work any other way -- if you stopped firing the bad apples, your business would literally crumble.
They could just leave the servers running and let people continue to use with almost zero upkeep.
Have you ever tried to apply that in a big enterprise?
They didn't say destroy, they said "undermine", which means "To weaken or work against", which this action certainly does.
I peeked at the code behind s2png, and this doesn't do what you might think from the title. It just copies the data byte-for-byte into the pixels of a PNG image, and when you want the original file back, you need to use the same utility to decode the image.

Still a fun little project though.
>"Surely you don't really believe that is how companies are valued"

Could you explain how some of these companies are, in fact, valued then? There are a ton with seemingly random valuations.
Actually, I'd say it's the audience that learns a tough lesson: If you use an application that requires a server operated by somebody else, there's never a guarantee that the service will operate forever.

This is a compelling argument in favor of DRM-free desktop applications.
Since when do they do that?? It must be new, since as far as I know Microsoft gets payment for their software. If a manufacturer decides to install Windows on their laptops, then Microsoft gets paid per licence. If they don't decide to install Windows,then MS doesn't get a single penny. Unless there is some new law that I missed that says that all new PCs HAVE to come with Windows, I think your question is moot.
another one https://images.turbotax.intuit.com/tto/flash/state_import_an...
Hi,

Files: I Agree, storing entire files in databases (or at least the same databases as common field data is a horrible concept, but paths to files can and should be stored to files to prevent "searching" to locate files, check modification dates, sort by alternative, compute once(or as few times as possible), store forever data, so that files can be easily located and just a check to see if they exist.

DB Procedures being a poor design practice: I disagree completely, it is merely a separation of logic. Triggers, can be a bit much, but procedures can help, especially when used correctly for the right use-cases. Just as True that a good programmer / engineer should never aim to go for one method or another, but get the right tool for the Job.

DB Hammer, Programming Hammer, Buzz-word Hammer, all pet hates of mine, I have spent the last decade learning what I do know exceptionally well, I dislike hammer lovers on most levels and often find that the structures they build show their level of workmanship.

Provocative article, Nice work!
In terms of readability the angular brackets arguably don't nest well: <<<0, 1>, 2>, 3>.

Also, having braces for sets happens to coincide with mathematical notation. Angular brackets would be more appropriate for tuples, in this regard--although the brackets used for tuples in mathematical notation are less acute: \langle and \rangle in LaTeX.

I think it's pretty unfortunate that for practical purposes we're forced to make do with what's available in the ASCII character set, which is pretty much an accident of history. My favorite solution to the OP's problem would be to use the Unicode empty set symbol. People who for some reason aren't able to type it could fall back to set(), and in terms of reading it will be immediately obvious to everyone that the empty set is intended, which doesn't hold for all the ad-hoc solutions suggested until now.
Okay, thanks for the info. I thought as much actually, that there was a way for other OSs but that it's not really refined or practical. There should be a company that writes software so that Linux can do the same... hmm, or doesn't Red Hat? They're a paid distribution aren't they?
I don't think they do.

http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/

http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/xps-13-linux/pd

https://www.system76.com/laptops/

http://www.emperorlinux.com/

And a bunch more.
I think it depends. I've been building GUI builders and there is a ton of tree manipulation and traversal. Beyond that though most operations are already available in the standard libs.
I was thinking almost none of them.
Depends how you define the portable handheld market. If you mean to say that they are beating Sony, then yes, if you add tablets and phones to the mix, then no, not at all. There is reason for them to worry, even if 3DS will have games that mobile devices won't. Here at the office, most of coworkers' kids are perfectly fine with playing on the iPad, while the DS sits in the corner, that's not good. And tablets don't need to take the entire portable gaming market, they just need to take a chunk to really hurt Nintendo.
Well, my cat gets scared to death by a vacuum cleaner. She darts out of the room as soon as it's turned on.
> The book sold plus or minus 4,000 copies.

So... 0 to 8,000?
I like how Tumblr does it. Tumblr defaults to a WYSIWYG editor, but you can switch it to accept Markdown if you prefer. (The API also accepts Markdown or sanitized HTML)
I know a lot of guys who started Math Phds...I know no one who actually finished one.
Those authors make money from doing speaking or consulting gigs where they can then call themselves a "best selling" author.
Good point! In that case, I wouldn't mind double submissions as well.
Ask HN: Looking for feedback HireHub
I am working on this site on side. Let me know your feedback. You don't need to login or provide email to use the site. You can directly use the demo account. Would appreciate honest feedback to improve the site.

http://www.hirehub.me/
Algorithmic trading for dummies
For those interested, lthread now supports AIO.

It's still in dev branch, but I'll be merging it soon:

http://webmon.com/blog/2013/02/19/lthread-now-supports-userl...

https://github.com/halayli/lthread/blob/dev/src/lthread_io.c
I guess this comes up kind of in response to the google thing. Honestly I don't know why people keep using anything from google. About two years ago I decided I would never use a google product again, and I never looked back.

For RSS, I have been using Liferea since then, and I totally recommend it.
Clickable http://www.hirehub.me/
The New Yorker: Phones Are Boring
How would you do a foldable book style screen though? Even if you can make a screen that folds and bends how does the phone know how much you've tucked behind the phone. It's going to be awfully floppy unless you use some material that can stiffen on command. Another problem would be the thickness of the screen. If it is uniformly thick then the phone will half in thickness going from phone to tablet and if the guts of the phone are hidden underneath one half of the screen then when you lay it flat the gubbins of the phone will stop the phone/tablet from sitting flush with whatever you put it on. And the weight won't be balanced. Seems like a ton of problems just to stop one from carrying a 300gram tablet.
Having played Mario Kart on both Wii (with the steering wheel attachment on the controller) and GameCube, I have to agree about the driving games.
A simple and smart (or stupid) feed reader.
I wouldn't mind so much if it were accountable. There's no mechanism to challenge a title change. Between that and the arbitrary banning of sites, I usually think twice about submitting good things.
Funny, I see "Leaving Twitter (nathanmarz.com)". That's pretty descriptive.
Why Firefox OS matters to me
Update: I've received word from the author that the text can be purchased via Byliner, so have included that information as well. Waiting to see whether or not he'd rather the text be removed as well. Thought it important to update here to ensure folks knew that.
"decidable questions" sounds awkward, do you mean actionable? or better yet reword the whole thing
He doesn't do a very good job arguing his point which is basically "Google moves forward rather than maintaining the status quo, so they can't afford to turn into a big bureaucracy with aging products."

Google has lots of products that no one's using, why take one away that many people depend on every day? The reason Google's getting rid of Reader is pretty simple, they don't want their own products for consuming and sharing information competing against each other, namely Google+.
But if I can help them with marketing, UI/UX or wireframing or anything, that'll not be a waste of time for both the companies and me
>>But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.

>Amazing what you can do when you have to.

It's not any different this time around. We just haven't reached the starvation period.

But it's very, very close.
It was an unfair request and one I made off the cuff.

With more time I would have either rephrased
or not asked. I withdraw the request and apologise to both the above posters.

I don't particularly care about the sensitive portions of the poor 5000LOC but I am interested in how these things get so out of control.

I was some time ago trying to start a MSc in software engineering - focused on just these differences in productivity - and the biggest stumbling block is finding examples of bad code and coders to study. People who want to be part of a study tend to be in the upper quadrant and from my point of view boring.

Anyway, long story short, I posted before thinking

Take care
Perhaps the words "steals" and "heist" are not the best choice given the man won the money playing cards and the claims that he must therefore have been using a second person to feed him information taken from video feeds is presented without any evidence.
The point is not to only work on the technical aspect of the business - there's way more than just code to a startup/business.
Haha, not any cat either: that looks like a fairly decent logo rendition of Grumpy Cat. But yeah, it kind of works nicely with the name.
Of course they should only have the FQDN, but in practise they need to have the normal one too for compatibility :/
Merchant account recommendations?
Hi all, I am currently involved in a start up that wants to sell tickets, and I am looking around for an optimal merchant account. I am trying to stay away from pay-pal. Initially, I was attracted to stripe because it seems easy to implement, but their rates are a bit too high for my liking. I have heard that authorize.net and opencart both have a pretty good API, so if anyone can attest to that it would help greatly. Regardless, any opinions (good or bad) about sites anyone has used in the past would be beneficial. Thanks!
>> A bolder move than the Wii U would have been to completely flip the tables and infiltrate the cellphone gaming market.

It would have been a bold move, but it may have been disastrous. Right now, the mobile market is owned by Apple, Samsung and Google. They may partner with Nintendo, but on their terms, and always in control of their respective platforms. Furthermore, they don't actually need Nintendo, which means there is only so much concessions Nintendo could gain. So no, there is no guarantee that this strategy will do anything for Nintendo.

I do think however that Nintendo should have some sort of an app presence on mobile devices. Not necessarily putting marquee titles on the respective app stores (although, why not get some exposure and test the waters), but maybe experimenting with second-screen options for the 3DS or Wii U. For example, there is no reason why an iPad or an iPhone cannot play the role of the Wii U GamePad, or why you couldn't play (stream) your NES/SNES games from the Wii store to your android device. There's potential there, but I think Nintendo is too stupid, short-sighted and stubborn to see it.
Watch out you don't form bad habits that hurt you later. I truly believe that honesty makes people happier.

I'd say if you have extra time, use it productively for some of those related-but-inessential tasks that rarely get budgeted for, like refactoring, optimizing, writing tests, experimenting with new tools, etc. Spend the time on things that benefit your employer/customer but will also improve your skills or make life easier for you.

I've done this a few times in my career when I inherited a big poorly-written codebase. Whenever I finished a task early, I'd spend some of that extra time making improvements. Over a few years you can really make a difference. And those improvements are the kind that will let you continue to exceed expectations in the future.
As someone outside the valley (but a fellow traveler on HN), this attitude of "personal brand" has always confused me. Are the problems being worked on so hard that genius defeats competition? In essence, are the incentives for people in Silicon Valley so misaligned that a person can open numerous unsuccessful companies and still have a positive brand?

When you say for builders to shut up, find a customer, and build--isn't that what was being done before? If so, how could this incentive setup of serial failure being rewarded be avoided?
Starting today, the US has a ‘first to file’ patent system
This is precisely the motivation behind the renaissance of the "simple / command-line-driven software movement" that you see sprouting up from the corners of the Arch Linux users, Slackware, and elsewhere.

I used to carry around a laptop with 128MB RAM. In 2010-2012, I had 1GB and was happy with it, but I had to adapt:

- Try a tiling window manager. You'd be surprised how many resources it takes to draw those window decorations, which not only saves RAM but also helps you focus better.

- Try a lightweight browser like LuaKit, dwm, surf, etc. Most of them are Webkit-based anyway, so there's not many problems. Plus, a keyboard-driven web browser is a hoot

- Try using emacs/vim instead of Word or OpenOffice. Thanks to LaTeX, I haven't touched a huge office suite in ages.

- Instead of having lots of programs open in the background, why not try some command-line equivalents? If you're not on windows, you have access to a world of utilities: music players, todo lists, file managers, etc.

Now I'm on an 8GB machine, and even under heavy load, I don't think I've ever come close to reaching that limit in the six months I've owned this box. (I don't have any swap space either)
> very, very close

Why do you think this? What are the signals you're seeing?
Is this anything other than LeChat's advertisement for angel investors?

I'm with the folks in avree's linked discussion. IRC already does this for a dollar less per month.
There's always upkeep. Very few things at scale require zero or even near zero upkeep - these aren't toy apps that get no traffic. Google has stated that Reader was an app with a very heavy amount of use from a small number of users.

The sense I get from reader being discontinued is that it was being kept alive as a best effort, and the effort was becoming too complex, too difficult to take on without real staffing. I suspect "leaving the servers running" was what they were doing for the last few years, and it wasn't working anymore.
yes, Liferea is awesome. is it possible to port it to a web platform? meaning to make it online?
that would be more of randomly pulling cables from their PC/Laptop
I like self-centered. I don't want to read what everyone is reading, I want to read what interests me. If I'd want to know what everyone is reading, I can subscribe to one feed of "what everyone is reading". Why would I rely on "people like me" to be a filter if I have the best option - me - and I already have these filters set up in a way that suits me?
I of course do not refuse input of others - I read dozens of blogs. But I want to do it my way, not as a dump which mixes discussion on a national budget with pictures of somebody's half-eaten breakfast.
No, I felt that they path of America in _Sheep_ is what they folks protesting for #occupy see, and I see breakdowns of basic services like water Sanitation in California cities where a combination of budget cuts and corrupt operators combine to put the public in danger.

But I totally concede the point that looking at past predictions is at least as interpretive as the predictions looking forward are. I saw some things in Brunner that really resonated with the future, I saw few things in the LA Times piece, but those were my interpretations of them.

It makes me think about the "thing" that will be obvious in 25 years that isn't even on our radar now. Candidates might be unlimited fusion power, or space travel, or infinite bandwidth, or global transportation, or a completely different climate or lunar colonies. Clearly you can't know what you can't know.
Annotated explanation of "We'll be Circling Back" email
you're amusingly vitriolic about this
My experience in third world countries are that blacksmiths and, more commonly, ferriers are set for life (though not set greatly); this is because of the ability to customize things to specific needs. I guess in the US this would be the equivalent of a machining shop?
I'm not sure there's a good reason to go with an Indy publisher these days. Self publishing is stupidly easy and a heck of a lot more profitable. My Amazon #50,000 seller[1] has earned me over $2,000 so far and of course nobody ever wrote an article about my little book. If I'd had his publishing deal I expect I'd have exactly the same amount of publicity but have earned maybe $600 or so. And I wouldn't have been getting monthly checks within three months of sale as I do by directly publishing.

[1] This fluctuates wildly, of course. Right now I'm around #18,000 thanks to giving away 3,000 free copies of the book over two days, but just before the promo I was at #400,000. Point is I've never been anywhere visible on any lists.

(His point stands that simply being a best seller isn't automatically quit-the-day-job money, but at least if you self publish you control your costs and most of what money you do earn.)
hi, i wrote the post. As many engineers try to decide what's a "side project" vs startup, i thought it would be interesting to share one team that just made the decision.
Critics seem to say every console launch is a failure. I'm actually continually amazed to constantly read the same stories again and again and again. You'd think eventually people would wise up a bit. :(
Finishing a book every two months would be insane for a fiction writer.
lthread is very interesting. Thanks for the links!
what about the opposite? co-workers who are so keen on writing unit tests, even for the most basic shit. IMHO, thats even mor e annoying
Programming languages that alter your mind
I wish browsers would ditch tabs and switch to buffers. Emacs users know just how darn useful it is to keep 500 buffers open, each with fuzzy completion so you can switch to exactly what you want.
Thanks! Good to know there are kind people out there
Is it possible to expand human knowledge without a phd? Does anyone know?
"So Google has an opportunity to win over media brands right now,"

I would be amazed if Google became a "media" company and Marissa turned Yahoo back into a "search" company. That would be some weird stuff right there.
I agree. I am the original poster and I expanded the title to make it more clear. But looks like the mods don't see it that way.
Xamarin accepts Bitcoin for payment
> The most profitable games on mobile stores are free to play titles

Any evidence to support this? Generally curious.
When I said 3 days, I meant 3 days only. I think it'll make the founders think about the most important things they need to improve on, which can also be handed to someone with little credibility, kind of similar to the idea of contributing to open source projects.
I guess similar argument can go for GitHub/BitBucket versus internal Git server, yet GitHub and BitBucket are very popular for private repositories.
No, what you get in the end is valid PNG files. Here's one you can examine for yourself: http://pathg.com/i/1wI2a8kMG6.png. (Within it is an ISO of the QNX network demo disk from http://qnx.puslapiai.lt/qnxdemo/qnx_demo_405_network.iso)