skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a good job here; I probably couldn't get anything else like a research position for a software company (Microsoft Research Asia) anywhere else in Asia.

Ya, last year was when they really started to crack down on VPNs. Life is quite harder, however, failure to adhere to IP rights makes local video streaming sites very useful compared to YouTube, so its not all bad (well, its not fair to the IP-right holders either).

Beijing is going through some tough times right now; the pollution is driving people out and preventing people from coming. This is probably a bigger problem than internet censorship.
And then they had to write their own interface to OpenSSL, their own logging framework, their own ORM, their own HTTP server, and their own implementation of map. That seems like a lot of "non-value-added" stuff to have to reinvent.
Entitlement is a problem amongst many people who experience success, regardless of class or nationality.

Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky have shown this in numerous studies, but here's an easily relatable example of theirs: Financial advisors.[1]

Predicting markets is an inherently random game. We often point to those who have been successful for a long period of time as an example that it is possible to beat the system, but that analysis fails to account for the other end of the probability distribution: those who have failed for a long period of time (or failed so hard early that they had to get out of the game).

In other words, for every big winner, there is a big loser. The fact that some people win or lose can (mostly) be explained by randomness (or cheating).

But Kahneman & Tversky's stunning finding with Financial Advisors, and humans in general, is that those who are successful attribute their success mostly to skill, hard work, etc, while failing to adequately acknowledge how large a role chance played. For the humble, this is not a problem, but for the arrogant or uninformed, this can easily turn into entitlement.

(BTW I definitely believe that, in most fields, a person needs to meet certain thresholds of hard work, energy, intelligence, etc. to be successful, but the level of success after reaching those thresholds is largely a function of chance.)

We humans are very good at drawing false conclusions from random data. Have you watched a basketball game recently? If a good shooter misses a couple free throws, commentators seem obligated to explain that the reason for this is fatigue, or poor form, or this, or that. How about the fact that it just randomly happens sometimes?

Applying this thinking to Indian elites: they have a lot of money, probably through their families or their own success. They believe their status is well deserved and earned, either because of superior genetics or superior skills (or any other number of reasons), and as a result, the uninformed feel entitled (and act accordingly). The author's anecdotal examples aside, this is no different than how many (but not all!) people behave on Wall Street, in athletics, at the high levels of corporations, etc. This is not an Indian problem, or an elite problem; it's a human problem.

Fooled by Randomness[2]. Again.

[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-kahneman-on-wealth-man...
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Market...
Probably just to hilight it's an easy decision, or one that is unanimously agreed by the team members.
That is a really cool idea. Is there anything similar for submitting solutions to more general programming problems, like the kinds of things they ask you to in interviews with hashing/sorting/etc? I can't figure out how the assignments are "graded" as such without logging in, it's just looking for a correct output regardless of sloppy code, or what?
Greatest pyramid scheme ever.
The "passwd" program on page 282 of the first edition of Wall & Schwartz "Programming Perl", copyright 1990, would appear to constitute prior art to most of these claims.
This was made by Amazon.
Thx, I thought my mobile browser was getting a special treatment.
No, just campaign dollars.
The prediction that go will become the predominant language in IaaS and PaaS seems to be a stretch... python has a HUGE lead and is well entrenched.
Thanks for the advice, and getting the mentor thing! I went to a Ruby meetup a few months ago, but I didn't have my laptop so I just ended up standing around awkwardly. I've been meaning to look for other groups though, and things that could be a bit more friendly and less opened ended such as talks, workshops, and so forth.
Umm, because your ANSI Standard sales dweeb is a Machiavellian shithead who, when given the opportunity, can't resist the temptation to chase away the golden egg laying geese.
The number one thing I noticed right away when I used Home for the first time is that it does not allow for direct swiping to camera.

This is the NUMBER ONE thing I use on my iPhone - as I need to get to camera ASAP in instances.

With the fact that FB owns instagram and the experience that home provides is a rich visual one - I hope this is one of the first updates you make.

(I know that the canned response may be: "well its easy to get to the camera by..." -- Sure, it may be easy - but its WAY TOO SLOW - get out of the way of the camera.)
What's Going On (on "Why Python, Ruby, and Javascript are Slow")
First, if you haven't read it, how do you know what it's about??

Second, did you skim over anything about the build-measure-learn loop? If so, let's say that you have an idea, build a first (completely fake) version, and get it in front of people. The next step would be to build something that works, right? If you're completely non-technical, how do you find people to take you to that step (and to do it elegantly enough that you can not only learn, but build on top of what you have learned)?
If someone wants to go dumpster diving in Cleveland, there is a Samsung 80 gig hard drive with about 120 Bitcoins on it. I won them from a tor gambling site after betting a single bitcoin that was given to me. They were selling for less than $.20 at the time so I didn't care enough to do anything with them when I scrapped my hard drive.

I obviously didn't foresee Cypress.
So, there's 100 coins that represent an abstract value X.

Now there are only 50 coins because 50 were lost. Do they still count as that same value X? What if you can't know how many coins were lost?
> Not even 0.005% of the Indian populace can afford the things I mentioned as examples.

Any references for that? The one I found, partly disagrees with your claims [1]. [1] also suggests that wealth disparity in India is better when compared to world. I am not saying the situation is good, but it is not as bloddy and fearing as you suggest it is. And there isn't something very particular about India in this case, I think the problem is a more widespread. And yes, the rich in India compare themselves to global standards when they determine if they are wealthy - because the world is more global now than we would like to believe. You suggest elsewhere that these people are upper class because it takes so little to help the lower classes. If that is any metric, most of the western hemisphere should be categorized as upper class because it helping a significant majority of eastern hemisphere will not have significant negative impact on lifestyle or wealth of the west.

[1] http://www.wealthbull.com/stock-market-today/878-wealth-dist...
>If you break things up into too many small things, it's confusing.

Not if you're disciplined about it.

>What's the "right level of decomposition?"

The key is not to decompose your whole problem into a network of tightly coupled parts. It's far better to build up your language with layers of abstraction until you have a new language which makes your problem trivial to express.
How do you know if the wallet is lost? I'm guessing most people who lost their wallets, probably lost their public address too. (Unless they were using it as a donation sink or something). Plus, if you can crack the keys, you would just target the biggest wallet and be done with it.
According to the Ovation report, the Borealis is well north of the US / Canada border: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html and https://twitter.com/GarySzatkowski/status/323252624713469952...
If this is true and any individual holds 1M BTC, it must take an incredible amount of self restraint not to dump those coins. That means the book value of his coins would have fluctuated between approximately $250M and $100M this week.

You'd also have to keep in mind that he would have been through the previous crash in which his coins varied in worth between $29 M before falling back down to $2M.

It would take a special someone not to sell those coins before they hit the prices we've seen these past few weeks.
"Bills to pay" or whatever your motivation is, does not mean that's the best way to drive business in a software company. Sales is a required part of business and one driver of how products are developed, but if sales were the only driver of how products are developed, products would be one dimensional pretty quickly with tactical "if you do this, I can make this one sale" types of development features. You still need a robust product management team that is (hopefully) looking beyond current sales needs.

Note, that's not always engineering, but sometimes it's hard to get product management looking beyond current sales needs, and therefore it does fall on engineering to do the strategic work.

IMO, it doesn't matter who does the strategic work, sales, product management, or engineering, as long as someone is doing it.
Yeah, that tree was pretty unpredictable.
Network rack, South Korea - http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=3070

Chickens, South Korea - http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=33410

It's kinda weird, I'm just pressing "random" and seeing what comes up.

There seems to be more than a few that are "street" views, which gives you view of certain cities. So that's kinda interesting.
Exactly. Even though we have a many more means of storage today than we did in antiquity, they're brittle in innumerable ways. The only sort of "permanent" storage would be in the form of a hologram (if the media is durable), however without technology to read it, that's still a gamble.

This is why messages for nuclear waste disposal sites are meant to transcend not only modern media, but also modern language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#Mes...
Why don't you have pricing, dev docs... or... anything other than marketing speak on your website? I see zero actionable/useful information there.

Edit: And I looked around for like five minutes. I assumed you would have some easy-to-start sort of thing there since you're telling small Github projects to use you.
I'll eat my own dog food and toot my own horn and say the saas version of mysimpleads we're working on, of course. Looking to release beta invites in June with it being like openx/buysellads together only simpler.
Not at the moment, no, but I appreciate the validation!
I think is a great article because it provides the perspective of an "outsider". It was pretty refreshing to read the ideas of somebody trying to get into the software business. What makes it more interesting is that it is a sales person, the type of people that many coders dislike because they kick our butt in, well, selling ourselves.

Many times sales people do better then engineers in a big company because they are better able to impress people and forge political alliances. Note that I also think that a sales person is closely related to a business person. If you've ever been to a large corporation, many times the engineering offices are some of the crappiest while the business offices are some of the nicest.
my sarcasm detector is clicking.

I think the only architecture that can be copied is the replication in staging and test.
I read the title in the same sense as you did and feel kind of the same way-- I like the advice and as my kids are older it's the same advice that I would give them...

but as a freelance PHP guy 90m outside of Austin looking for a stable remote gig without moving, I was hoping for something more along the lines of our first reading of the title.
Please read the whole thread; the first million BTC are definitely not held by one person.

(Also, I think you'd get no more than $50M for 1M BTC but that's a minor detail.)
Amazon hosted all these servers for free?
You haven't read "Lean Startup" yet you're leaning on it as a source of authority?

And you sign your comments as if we can't see your bloody username?

I have read Lean Startup and guided the development of products based on it so let me tell what (some of) Lean Startup says:

1. Make the simplest possible thing that could validate your hypothesis (a well formed one) against the market.

2. Use real data and principled hypotheses backed by data to guide product iteration once you've established a market response to one of your MVPs.

The key part being here - MAKING the thing.

What the book doesn't say is, "sell ice to eskimos, hire outsourced coders, hope for the best".

I've worked at startups dictated by salespeople or their sales process, it was a goddamn mess.
No no, it's a fair question. I'm generally quite open to discussing what it's been like for me since I got amnesia. I do have quite a few anecdotes. I know it's not quite the same for everyone but I do have some classic symptoms that people screw up when they get "Hollywood Amnesia" - my older memories are more intact, presumably due to neuroplasticity, but without giving it much thought one may assume that the newer memories, being fresher, are the ones that are more intact.

A lot of things ended up going into more procedural memory than I was expecting. I can't actually tell you how I was able to still log into my online accounts with my password - I suspect muscle memory has a lot to do with it. I often will have a sense if I knew a person if I see a picture of them or I read their name, but sometimes linking it further than that goes nowhere. Music/language is interesting, yet mostly expected. You're probably familiar with the case of Scott Adams, who worked on overcoming Spasmodic dysphonia using a nursery rhyme. So certainly different pathways there - I will remember tunes, lyrics (even in languages that I can barely use anymore), but not the context, artist, etc. I can read all the non-latin scripts that I used to be able to read.
I feel like a lot of these requests, especially in the "For a PR" section are things that only more seasoned developers have an appreciation for. Since OSS runs the gamut from bad-ass-mofos to beginners, I feel like you're going to get under a 50th percentile in most of these areas.

I agree that things need work, but sometimes it's hard to get to everything, especially if you're doing it for free in spare time.
The point is that unless someone is paying your bills, you need to charge from the very beginning. It's supply/demand equation - your goal from the beginning should be to determine the demand, make sales, and fill the need with your offering.
Maybe the whole "write a log post a day" thing is not the right way to go. You can reflect without broadcasting to the world and committing to something like that. Just relax for 30 days and don't do anything of importance, just be.
Misaligned incentives | the problem with risk management
This is really a minor point, but lots of people seem to hate function level scoping, including these guys. Having started out in languages with function level scoping, and only later used block level scoping, the former strikes me as the most ordinary thing in the world.

Am I missing some compelling advantage of block level scopes, or is it just a matter of taste/familiarity?
Mtgox is the biggest hurdle to bitcoin legitamacy
What is Cypress?
I imagine that cracking wallets that have been dormant for a long time carries less risk of being noticed and/or caught.
In theory this is priced in already. Lost BTC is treated no differently than "hoarded" BTC; in either case it doesn't contribute to market liquidity.
I am not excusing the appalling behavior of some of the rich in India. All I am saying is that this article is highly sensational and is merely backed by anecdotal evidence.

>>no one attributes this kind of stuff to northern Europe and there's a reason for that.
Could the reason be a willingness of the those societies to overlook this kind of behavior towards people with ..umm higher melatonin levels ? Slavery / colonialism / apartheid ring a bell ?
Right, because all of them were innocent to begin with.
I have to remind myself occasionally that perfect literacy isn't always a good benchmark for intelligence.
I didn't realize how old that thread was until I encountered this comment:

"Your 1st suggestion is pretty much what Altavista uses for basic search engine submissions."
Aside from Airbnb's Rendr (and I've heard DirbyJS does something similar), you could also build your SPA on top of your server-rendered pages. After pageload, hijack the click events from your navigation controls and have it fetch and render content via ajax. It's certainly not "DRY", but it's easier to implement for existing content-focused sites.
Settling Multiple Debts Efﬁciently
One example: the inferiority complex.
Cracking a wallet can be done completely offline. I guess if you mean extracting the coins, yeah. I suppose that's what you'd use a bitcoin laundry service for. (a "mixer" I believe)
>> We've seen this work when people take on CraigsList and Ebay and other "unstoppable" tech companies. Don't attack head on.

This is good. I used to work with an industry-specific portal that was perfected to work with said industry. Google would never be able to touch this space.

Despite being a smallish industry, there was two large players and few smaller players. The innovation even in such a small space was quite astounding.

There are definitely some areas that are too specific for Google to really work with. It is very good as a general search engine, but if your time is dependent on getting information fast in a specific industry, Google falls flat.

The main issue with this strategy is that you only have a small subset of the population and you have to an expert in many domains to get it right. thus, you'll never be as large or profitable as Google. Of course, you better have people to talk to on the phone. That'll kill this engine before it gets off the ground.

The only way I can think of toppling Google is if you created an engine that really focuses on productivity and gaining market share from the people who really need information and who are willing to pay for said information and offer them a free version that is better than their industry-specific tools, then after gaining penetration and toppling some of their industry players, branch into focusing on finding cute cat pictures and the like. There is more than one way to gain mind-share. Finding a better way to find links to movie reviews is definitely not it.
EPI has a study - includes discussion of salary, among other things:

http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-b...

But in all of these cases, studies are of interest only to determine the magnitude of the effect. We have observed thousands if not millions of times throughout history that in a wide variety of occupations, a labor shortage drives up wages and conversely, a labor oversupply eliminates wage increases (though it tends not to actively decrease wages by much, since wages are sticky upward). Increasing labor supply to minimize wage growth is an extraordinarily uncontroversial thing, and only nincompoop contrarian columnists or paid shills would argue differently.
I think there's a pretty simple reason that a software person is more likely to be successful than a sales person. The software person can find sales people - the opposite is not generally true.

If you need to hire a sales person, and the candidate sells himself, you're in pretty good shape. He's obviously got some of the skills - he may not be the best, but he'll be worth hiring.

If you're a non-technical person looking to hire technical people, you're fighting an uphill battle. First, technical people are currently in higher demand. Its hard to find them in the first place. Next, you have very little ability to evaluate their skills. Finally, the range of abilities in technical people is larger than in most other fields, which amplifies the problem of not being able to evaluate candidates' skills.
I think he means Cyprus?
It is quite possible for the middle class to move into the upper class. It is just ironic that the desire to entire the upper class is often part of neuroses that make it impossible to enter.
Don't get complacent though, Chris :). Technology is leverage and those who wield it (i.e. those closer to where the rubber meets the road) will have the potential to stay ahead of the game on average... though most will choose not to employ it.

Engineers can typically simply stay on-par with changing technology and in-effect be moving up market. What is changing fortunes right now is that innovation has stalled in software, and everyone is simultaneously catching up to the early innovators.

Once the market shifts to another platform/technology/methodology, we'll be kicking your ass again... by default. :).

That said, I'd love to have a gutsy sales guy in my corner as a mentor. Drop me a PM.
>Cypress is the name applied to many plants in the cypress family Cupressaceae, which is a conifer of northern temperate regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress
Some people are different. For example - I work a $10/hr part-time job for bills.

I could get a programming job since I have a CS degree and a few years development experience... but instead I choose to work a non-programming part-time job while coding my startup. I've been coding it for 6 months without showing anyone my demo. (it's a big project)

If I get investors this summer or not... I'm committed to "my vision" for the next 3 years. Bills aren't too hard to pay if you live minimally. (e.g. I don't own a cellphone)

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Albert Einstein
does anybody know that this is the reason that Skype doesnt have a dial tone when calling certain lines?
This is a very neat demo. I'd love to see what Paul Graham's newspaper looks like!
One of the best tales regarding an entrenched utility, costs, and an individual wanting to hook into the grid. Ken Adelman has made his name known for a number of things, but his fight w/ PG&E was one of the more memorable ones --

http://www.solarwarrior.com/pgebattle.html
>> Agreed, all software companies are different.

To a certain extent, there is a lot in common in the software industry whether you're selling to the consumer market, the enterprise market or the smb market.

>> There is also a huge distinction between software-to-software sales (where the product design is more important) and software-to-outside-world sales.

I'm not 100% sure I understand, are you talking about consumer software (software-to-outside-world) and enterprise software (software-to-software sales)?

Because marketing can be different, agreed, but development of the product is not that different. Unless you're trying to talk about internal apps vs. products ?

>> Most of our customers pay with CHECKS, yes, checks. They aren't software people so the design doesn't need to as good in the beginning.

Not sure how someone pays for software matters, care to explain?

Sorry, but you don't seem to really understand software product development, neither from the sales side, the marketing side, nor the engineering side. Not from the post itself nor from your comments. But I guess you say that up front so "it's ok" ... ? ... I guess?
The secret world of algorithms
Who would have thought the infrastructure behind Obama's site and whatever else they're running was so big. I always assumed it would be running maybe one or two instances, not require a whole freakin' diagram to explain.