skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all just incentives.

The downsizing and outsourcing is driven by incentives to remove cost from the balance sheet. If there's no incentive to do so wisely, if there's no disincentive against doing so poorly, people will inevitably make bad 'outsourcing' deals, just to have made them. Quality might take a hit, direct billings might skyrocket, products might have to be scrapped, etc. But if you don't fix the incentives, it will happen over and over.

Similarly, if you incentivize a person to make deals, if they have a stronger incentive to make deals than to make good deals (e.g. if they have no effective disincentive against making bad deals) bad deals will get made.
Actually, using patents in that way seems to have a long history - Feynman mentions something about having his name on a patent for nuclear powered aircraft in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman".
A "large minority" would have to be several hundred thousand people, perhaps a few million.

You'll get no dispute from me on that point. I don't even think that it matters much whether a group of the appropriate size starts out armed; the benefit to such a group from having an armed population has more to do with knowing how to use weapons that having stockpiles of them.
Replying to myself as I see the title has changed. That makes more sense. Now my comment seems out of context. I had no idea you could change the title of a submission, especially after people commented on it. That's actually scary.
I think man's innovation has been to pour ever larger inputs into a fairness function best adapted for a troop of monkeys.
This seems like a repetition of the many terminals to one mainframe pattern.
That said, companies like eink and pervasivedisplays already have 'epaper kiosks' that mimic this pattern with a transmitter acting as a middle man between your computer (or whatever generates the image) and the screen.

[edited for clarity]
At the very least, it's perfectly reasonable to expect schematics for how a prototype could be built.
8 reasons you're still getting push-back on cloud tech at your company
"My boss is asking" is not a component of immaturity the way I think you're using the word.
The argument seems very thin here. How is the mathematical equivalent of "blinding me with science" any proof that mathematics is not a language? I'm not arguing one way or another, but this does not demonstrate the proposition made in TFA.
Turing's Universal Machine voted most important past British innovation
Yeah, I do it online when I can, but I had to go in in person in 2011, and it wasn't particularly pleasant. I didn't know you could make an appointment; when I asked at the time you couldn't. Seems like there is now some kind of "get in line online" feature, though it's not available at all locations: http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/administration/driver_licensing...
... and the funds collected are distributed in the form of bonuses to programmers who are perceived to have worked harder?
>Fairness is a fictional manmade concept. //

I don't see this.

Fairness is about mathematical expectation. Fairness means people have equal opportunity (often within a restricted domain, or ignoring certain starting conditions). There is [nearly?] always going to be a locus in which fairness is asserted outside which it is no longer the case.

* The race is fair because both runners run the same distance. Ah but the ground is uneven.

* The race is fair because the ground and distance is even. Ah but one runner is poor and hasn't eaten for days and so is weak.

* The race is fair as the runners have been nourished equally, the distance and going are controlled. Ah, but this runner's family have a genetic disposition that enables them to run faster without tiring ... et cetera.

If mankind didn't exist a situation could still be fair or unfair for a creature - a combat test for leadership is unfair because this creature had a greater opportunity for nourishment and so grew stronger than the others. That of course doesn't mean it's the wrong test, just that each creature able to take the test doesn't have equal opportunity to achieve through their own efforts.

>It's not fair to me that someone steals my car //

Everyone had opportunity to steal a car, including you, that's fair!

I don't equate fairness and just deserts [ie justice]. For example two people can compete in a fair competition but the least deserving - the one who made the least effort or the one whose lifestyle is least noble - can win; the competition was still fair though.
There are a few source files in one of our applications[1] that have last modified dates back in 1994.

1. Mostly C application that's had >$1bn in sales over the years, but it's been in active development/enhancement since 1992. My oldest contribution to it is probably 1997.
Facebook will go the way of every other "big" social network. It overcomplicates its old vision and looses its fresh feel. Every new feature is less effective than the last, getting lost in the sea of older functionality. Facebook needs to pivot.
I can see where you're coming from but given some of the content of the original story it's not entirely irrelevant.

I actually do wonder a little what Grover Norquist's deal is here. I understand his politics (sort of) but I assume receiving a statement laying out the calculations the government is going to use against you could only be an advantage when strategizing how to reduce one's tax bill. That he'd be against it is odd.

Maybe he really wants the whole process to be as inconvenient as possible so people will sign on to some of his other ideas.
I use Vim for most work and have used Sublime a fare bit as well. The 75% sale that Jetbrains had lured me into picking up a PyCharm license, but only reluctantly. I was immediately put off by the perceived heaviness and general ugliness of the whole thing compared to what I was used to.

But... after getting over that and putting some time into learning the program, I can highly recommend it for Django development. It is incredibly feature rich with a lot of Django-smart tools. Though I still love and use Vim, one instance of runtime debugging inside a problematic template using PyCharm made it a permanent tool for when I'm doing Django (and other Python) work.
"I would expect the numbers should be better than Scala, for example"

Maybe once 1.1 is out and the language game switches to it, that will be the case (the benchmark is using the current stable release of Go 1.0.3).

Also, I assume you are talking about execution time, Go destroys Scala in your linked comparison in terms of memory usage.
I think you're looking for something more complex than that post brings to the table. As a community, we're trying to circle our wagons around a simple piece of advice about code that stores passwords: do not write code that stores passwords. Even if your algorithm is secure, your code is likely not. Include your language's best-supported secure password library (meaning one of bcrypt, scrypt and PBKDF2) and ship it.

So that post may be incomplete regarding the technical details, but the critical information is there: Just use bcrypt. (...and use the recommended work factor.) I know hackers hate that sort of thing, but this is really one of those things we just have to drill.
Businesses are more like software than furniture are. The Japanese hotel, Hoshi Ryokan, that is still run by the same family over 1300 years must have some really good "software".
Well said. And I agree, sometimes when people don't realize it they are jealous and hurt. A guy I knew who was, in my experience working with him, a complete loser [1] was fired and got a job at another company and that company went public during the dot com boom and made him several million dollars. Meanwhile my company, and I personally, made no such million dollar moves. And it made me jealous and angry and I could have easily written this exact same article about how clueless that company was for hiring the loser, but the emotion was from my hurt. It took a while to get over that [2].

Yahoo may be clueless here, but we really can't say that until we see if they get $30M in value out of the deal or not. So really all we can say is that we cannot see how they came up with that valuation. Then watch what they do to see where it goes looking for insights into their thinking.

[1] I recognize that "loser" is relative to the job they were asked to do, as opposed to the individual. At the time I was much less forgiving of people who weren't in jobs they fit (or didn't fit) with.

[2] I am still incredulous but I don't get angry and jealous over it any more.
Only 45 minutes? They've improved that since I had to use it (~6 years ago). I think it took me the best part of a week to get my account reset :\
Oracle installers aren't meant to be pretty, but rather practical, they are run mostly by IT professions who know what they are doing. Remember an Enterprise solution has to conform to ADA in 57 different countries and be fully translated, must work on version current-15, must work on lynx, IE5, csh, bash, ksh, windows 31, osx and vms :)

your convenience is pretty low on their priority list...
That's definitely not in javascript the good parts. It's a new thing and its spreading like some sort of horrible virus. It has quite the opposite effect that you're prescribing to it.

Your second link describes both variable hoisting, a real problem which causes serious problems, and function hoisting that has never been a problem as almost every other modern language behaves that way.

You don't seem to be a polyglot or you'd understand the problem immediately. Variable hoisting is just downright bizarre if you've worked in almost any other language, whereas function declarations can be anywhere in most languages and so when they are declared is almost completely irrelevant to a programmer.

Artificially assigning them to a variable so that suddenly function declaration order does matter is just downright weird. The 'normal' function declaration is better and clearer.
Plastiq allows Canadians to pay income tax with a credit card
Are you really saying that there's no place for generics? You can't think outside your own anecdotal experience and see that there's a reason generics exist and are used and considered important by many serious engineers?

Are you saying that every one of the many serious engineers who miss generics when writing Go are just not thinking outside the generics box? Or are you willing to admit that, while Go without generics may be a great language for many applications, there clearly are applications where generics are the right language construct for the job?
He didn't try what I always do. Mix salt with spices that I think I'll like, and dry-brine with that.

The bird tastes like a bird, retains moisture, and the spices get in. Personally I have a large enough fridge that I can afford to put a bird in a garbage bag in it, so that isn't a problem.
Here's the list of oldest companies to get inspiration from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
Haha - maybe we'll do something like that for the next batch, we'll see!

We do have a few batchmates on our platform, you can always create your own index and invest in all of them. :) (Unfortunately due to regulations we can't publicly say who they are, and viewing/investing is limited to accredited investors only... for now!)
"iPod ... No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Specs are rarely the most important part of the equation.
Not sure that's a smart move, if you care about your data. Do you think you can achieve better uptime and reliability than Google does with their engineers and servers and distributed data centres? I mean, it sounds cool and everything to do it yourself, but if you just dump all your data onto your local server (or EC2 instance), it's just a centralised storage that can fail any time, not a "cloud" any more.
> The point was that people need to take individual responsibility for their tax liability.

There are people in the military who get married just to claim a higher housing allowance (this despite it being against the UCMJ). Yes, we should be individually responsible but it's not practical to actually expect that from people.
I think it's probably a bit more abstract. The perception of a rising tide can lift a few boats.
For what it's worth, I picked up PyCharm on a whim during JetBrains' doomsday sale in December. I haven't done any serious Django development yet (still learning), but as an IDE I thoroughly enjoy it. As a daytime Java developer I'm seriously considering picking up their Java IDE because of the quality.

Just to reiterate, this is coming from someone new to Django, not a power user.
Typical corporate rank cultures are short-sighted because they've lost vision and short-term P&L is the only thing that matters. Risk-reductive management means that no one gets to do anything long-term because no one is trusted to bet that much time on anything.

VC-istan is based on a get-big-or-die mentality. These companies end up with tight deadlines because they're forced to hire so fast. That makes them panicky and stupid when it comes to operational concerns... and it's bad for culture, but no one cares about "culture" in something that exists to be bought by Yahoo in 3 years.

The future isn't going to be built by VC-istan, but by a fleet of ~50,000 small-to-medium businesses formerly called "lifestyle" companies, and the whole ecosystem that grows up to support these "yeoman capitalists". It's going to be built by people that, right now, no one will fund.

The problem is that no one will fund these companies now. Bank loans are good for dry cleaners and restaurants that are unlikely to go to total failure. (Half will be closed in 5 years, but most because their owner-managers could do better elsewhere-- opportunity cost.) VC works for a 5% shot at being a billion-dollar concern. Who funds the 30% chance at becoming a 20-person lifestyle company that, while it never makes a billion, pushes technology forward in a major way? No one, yet. There are "moral hazard"/principal-agent problems to be solved, but they aren't that hard.

I'm actually addressing that in my 17th part of the Gervais / MacLeod series. I'm between jobs (I have offers, but I'm not working right now) and I've had time to really attack this problem. It'll probably be out around 3:00 today.
I ran such a fund for the S08 batch. It did quite well (>60% annual IRR, which was very good for an '08 fund). I wanted to make it a regular revolving fund (i.e. a new fund for every YC class), but there wasn't enough interest. Most people who angel invest want to be in control of the investment decisions, so a fund is a hard sell. Administering such a fund is non-trivial, but I would happily do it again if I could find enough interested investors. It's a great way to get started and/or diversify a relatively small investment.
Hollywood 'craves digital versions of actors' [video]
> Unfortunately, the question can catch people off guard at times.

That's interesting. I'm curious why that would be or how it's manifested. Is it possible that some people don't have much fun?
I'm surprised by how good the copy is.

>Viaweb Store is the fastest, easiest way to open an online store.
You create your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to read this page. So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes.

"Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on shopify.com if you ask me.
It is supposed to be good enough that someone "skilled in the art" could build it after reading the patent.
> Americans aren't Norwegians or Germans, and simply aren't good at large bureaucracy. Unless America starts subcontracting out its administration to the Swedes, better government is going to take either a change in American character or something smaller and less-centralized.

This is a strange assertion, as if Swedes had an innate gene that allowed them to be more adept when they joined public service. Let's assume that that's not true and it's an ability learned through environment and civic education...I'm arguing that that reaching this ideal situation of "good character" will require -- when it is possible -- to make interaction with the government more efficient. Else, you may end up in a situation in which citizens are so distrustful of the government that they never see the point of achieving good civic character. And then we never end up being as good as the Germans and the Swedes.
> (n.b. I did more than just playing around with Go a bit, I wrote serious applications in Go some of which are in production use)

When you are writing an application, you can know all the types you are going to need, so that you can work around the limitations of Go's typing system. When writing a library, you definitely don't have all the information.

I found that in some languages (Haskell, OCaml, Scala), a common way to write applications is to write the different parts you are going to need as generic libraries and then combine them together. I don't think this is the common way Go programmers do thing.
Yeah, for some reason I seem to stumble over switch/case statements no matter which language I'm in. What_about / perhaps actually makes more sense to me.

I think what the world really needs right now is a dapper programming language.
Announcing Forecast
I have a friend who failed an interview (there was only one puzzle question and he couldn't answer it). He got the job because he asked lots of questions at the end that really showed he was interested in the position and that he was in fact smart. In the end he turned their opinions around and got a job offer.
You run `virtualenv .` in your project folder and it will
setup a virtual environment. To enter the virtual
environment run `source bin/activate`. I don’t know about
you, but I hate to see bin/ lib/ and other folders in my
project directory, so I made a wrapper around virtualenv
in my ZSH scripts.

Why not just make the virtualenv elsewhere (I use ~/virtualenvs/)?

Also, how about django-extensions? I don't know what I'd do without runserver_plus and shell_plus.
Pay-per-send iOS push notifications
Just had to upgrade my bandwidth for the views your bringing. Some interesting comments here guys.
I might do the same, having just filed last years' Canadian taxes with TurboTax. I didn't have a problem with TT but I do have a problem with Intuit's actions here.

Coming from the UK where it has been automated all my working life, I resent having to file my taxes each year. As others have said, the government has nearly all the information anyway.For anything else, then only short declaration forms should be necessary and not a full return.

I also don't like the lump sum return or payment if there's any discrepancy. In the UK the most common option is to have an adjustment to your tax code, which simply deducts more or less tax at source over the following tax year. You don't even need to give them your bank info.
I have a Pandaboard, its great. From a UX/Support point of view Android on it certainly looks nicer than Unity does, and in spite of the great work that the folks at TI have been doing the 3D accelerator support still seems to be better on Android.

That said, I don't doubt for a minute we're in a "new" place with respect to our home computing infrastructure. I am pretty close to building a 'browsing only' solution separate from the virtual machine I currently use.
What a lot of people don't realize is how easy state income tax is, and how a lot of states have gone to fully online forms. I think people assume it is as complicated as federal taxes, but our state, it's essentially just "take your federal gross income from the 1040, add a few things to it, then subtract a few deductions." The form and the worksheets is two pages.

So what I do is prepare the return in Turbotax, then print it, then file it electronically on the web for free. Fun thing is that Turbotax calculates the tax a dollar different than the state's web site.
I'm curious to know what you would expect from that guy if that module broke at 4:00AM?
Waypoints is more mature and can do much more complex stuff, but as with my earlier response about affix, for our use-case of pinning an unpinning the descriptions of the screenshots in our gallery, Waypoints didn't really come with anything out of the box.
I'm guessing that's not going to do much in the Anki iOS app though.

On the plus side, checking the app to see if such an option exists found a bunch of options I didn't know about that will make my experience more pleasant. Ta.
They'd be better off just starting again with a new minimal stack and API, with the lessons learned from their first iteration of the API (and I'm sure there were lots of things they'd do differently if they had the chance), run it in parallel, and gradually deprecate the old API as the new one gets up to speed, just as Apple has done several times over the past couple of decades (AppKit, UIKit etc). Moving a big group of developers from one API to another can be done, it just takes time, and a little judicious use of pressure...

Android now has the installed base for developers to be forced to go along with whatever changes Google requires, and Dalvik could be kept around for quite a while as a backstop. I don't think the problems with Oracle are going away, so this might come to pass eventually, but I doubt it is on the roadmap right now.
rn@42.fr ? That's sound good!
APL: A glimpse of heaven
Fantasy VC Picks
AtlasCT to Release Date Voice-Guided Navigation for Firefox OS
Day-one Incredipede Steam sales eclipse previous four months
Do You Have Customers, or Clients? Are You a Vendor, or a Consultant?
Er... just quote a teensy bit more of that sentence, and this will make more sense...

> who collected unemployment for a year and a half five years ago

She's a stand-up comic now, five years later, and was unemployed from whatever she was doing back then.

Edit: ...though it does strike me as very weird that out of the few people interviewed for this article, two of them are comedians. "Hi, I'm writing a fluff piece about talking to unemployed people -- know anyone willing to say something clever or interesting on the subject?"
Oh so you don't have to patch it manually anymore?

Patch was very stable, no problems and spdy just works.

Apparently work on the patch/module was sponsored by Automattic (WordPress, Matt Mullenweg) so thanks to them and whomever worked on it! Some background here https://barry.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/nginx-spdy-and-automa...

ps. REMEMBER you need openssl 1.0.1 - previous versions will not work with spdy and distributions like CentOS do not come with the newer version. You can switch to the IUS repo in that case http://iuscommunity.org/pages/Repos.html

rpm -Uvh http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/6/x86_64/ius-release-1.0-10.ius.el6.noarch.rpm
yum install yum-plugin-replace
yum replace openssl --replace-with openssl10
Sure, teachers could reset the password. My point is that there is no reason to. It is one extra step for teachers and gets rid of the benefit of having a consistent password for the student.
It really is that good - as a Swede, you get your prepared statement (and unless you've done a major or irregular thing in the past year, like buying a house, or trading stock on an exchange outside the European Union) that prepared statement is correct.
Part of the statement says "If you agree without modifications, just text 1234234 to the number 1234454".

And a few seconds later you get a reply SMS that confirms that your taxes are indeed filed for this year.

Done. Simple. And awesome :)
even if I google 'language shootout' the top link is the (now) correct 'Computer Language Benchmarks Game' and what is shown there is not 6 years old.

Is there a point to you continuing to spin on this???
>> It's simply not that important.<<

It's important as an indicator of how much or how little you noticed when you looked at those web pages.
Apple iPhone Landing on T-Mobile April 12 for $99
Congratulations to Amazon for inventing the dumb terminal. Clearly this is an original idea. /sarcasm