skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty far outside of silicon valley, and that hasn't been true here at all. IT has always meant help desk, sysadmins, network admins, etc. Developers could be in IT if they were developing internal tools for IT. But software development in the "make software to sell" was always separate. It has only been recently that people have started to call everything relating to computers IT.
How can we say definitively (or with any certainty) that there are relatively advanced life forms everywhere, such that they are a dime a dozen? How do we know that interstellar travelers wouldn't find us rare and interesting?

Curiosity more than anything is what drives our need to know. I think that's what would drive such visitors. In fact, because they would be more technologically advanced and would likely have solved resource problems, etc., they would naturally have time to spend exploring and answering questions.

Finally, we can assume such explorers are more advanced than we, but not necessarily by orders of magnitude. I think people have a tendancy to attribute god-like qualities to them because they have solved some problems that we have not.

But, the idea of splitting an atom was outlandish until a handful of dudes, inspired by another dude's theory did it in a relatively short span. Similar with other breakthroughs. At any given time, a single discovery can advance our knowledge far beyond what we thought possible, and even moreso with the accelerating pace of technology.

And, BTW, many of our own "resource problems" are completely solvable and should not exist. For instance, we have an obesity problem in the U.S. while millions starve elsewhere (and in the U.S.). It seems that our biggest obstacles are a product of human nature. If anything, an alien species' appearance might be indicative of an advancement in philosophy or organizational behavior (ex. hive mentality vs. individual) moreso than a far superior intelligence.
Well, in practice (at least some time ago) the vast majority of programmers/software engineers/whatever work on code that "keeps the corporate computers working" instead of "shipped products".

The ratio used to be that in the industry only 10-20% of code was written in organizations that ship software as the product or inside of a product; maybe now it's a bit different - but it can't be estimated by intuition, simply because in everyday life we see only the external part of the iceberg.
Sounds a lot like the way growing up as a software engineer in Utah felt... :D
Your 8$/month plan brings a tear to my eye. My ONLY gripe against Heroku is the lack of a hard drive to save things in, for example user uploads, etc.

Does Stackful offer the hard drive to use as we please? If so, you just got yourself a customer. (As soon as you support Rails)
"Engineer" is definitely not a "bureaucratic term". It's an honorable title. The only reason I'm mildly uncomfortable with it is because I don't think I really deserve it, as programming, at least of the sort I do, doesn't match the level of rigor I associate with "engineering".
I'm a male software engineer and I had the same experiences going through school, too. Nobody else seemed to care about programming outside of school-related assignments. Very boring few years in school, those were.
Why did the music industry allow iTunes to sell singles instead of entire albums? If illegal torrents forced them to do it, wouldn't a better title be, "How Illegal Downloads Crushed Music Sales"?
Had a tough time getting passed the first lesson. It's not clear that you want me to duplicate the buttons in the lesson exactly.
Hey, Heroku engineer here. Can you shoot me an email at jonathan [at] heroku [dot] com and I can take a look?
I look around at a "human" species on this planet I don't understand and don't feel part of. Either I'm looking at a successful alien invasion, or I'm it.
Oh, he didn't mention half the stuff I thought he would. He's right about a lot of things though.

Take this for example:

Hello world, there isn't
1. There are 4.

The original markdown treats the second line as a continuation of a line in a single paragraph. Github treats the second line as the start of an ordered list. Why? Because then you can do things like this:

# My list
1. foo
...

I've been so torn about how to implement so many of these things. I've had a lot of people ask me about that particular issue, and when I tell them the original markdown behavior requires 2 newlines after a line before starting a list, it was the last thing they expected.

The main problem with markdown is not the fact that these counterintuitive things exist, but the fact that they're not consistently implemented. I've spent nearly 2 years trying to reconcile all these differences. See https://github.com/chjj/marked for more crazy markdown nonsense in the test suite.
Linode Fremont Experiencing Network Outage
Challenge Yourself
Speaking as a technical lead with a decade and a half of experience shipping web products solo and with small teams never exceeding 10 people, I can assure you that there very much is a place for a product manager in a great many products. In fact we just hired a product manager and it's a huge weight off my shoulders. Requiring all developers to be responsible for strategic thinking at all times is at odds with low-level focus needed to ship great software. A good PM is someone developers can trust to have the high level picture in mind at all times so the devs can focus on the necessary details.
raganwald put together annotated source for his coffeescript implementation of hashlife, also using Docco:
http://recursiveuniver.se/docs/cafeaulife.html
Markdown's embedded html is a strength, especially for something long-form and structured like a wiki. Of course it requires whitelisting, but that's not terribly hard to do (with the understanding that a markdown parser can be much more anal about bad syntax than a browser). The other wiki syntaxes either allow an html subset (MediaWiki[1]) or aren't used as is (plain creole is about as expressive as markdown-without-html). ReST on the other hand is extensible from the start, but the extensions are specific to the build context and the rendering target (mostly html, epub and latex).

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:HTML_in_wikitext
I think the requirement of account creation is a hinderance to helping spread the word of the site...I don't really have any intention of following these lessons (because I've used Foundation before and know CSS pretty well) but I would recommend them if, after skimming them, the site's implementation is well done.

I understand the desire to gauge user interest and get their contact info, but why not let the signup process be more organic (i.e. you sign up after the first few lessons because you recognize the value of the service), as it is for Codecademy?

(there is a "view lessons" in the top right, but it's not intuitive, given the signup modal)
Dear person:

> Machine learning requires alot of experimentation and C++ is a terrible medium for that.

Is it really? I suspect you do not know how to use C++ effectively. Why not try parameterizing your machine learning algorithms with templates? That way, you can plug in different loss functions, different regularizers, different metrics, or different initialization routines without having to modify your internal algorithm code. In addition, because you are using templates, it is bound at compile time, so you don't pay the vtable lookup penalty that you do with inheritance.

Python might be better for your uses, and I can respect that, but don't tell people that C++ is a terrible way to implement machine learning algorithms when you actually are just ignorant of how to do it well.
This. Locks keep honest thieves out. I don't know of any house that I couldn't gain entry into in a few minutes, without damaging anything, including my own.
We don't need FTL. Our current age limit is becoming more obviously arbitrary every year. Sooner rather than later we'll be able to extend our age limit to several centuries. We could spread out to all the nearby stars in less than one lifetime at even .1c. We could with generation ships anyway, but that's far less desirable. We could populate most of the Galaxy in a million years with no FTL whatsoever, and if FTL never plays out, we probably will. If we meet aliens along the way, then we do.
Why was reST not supported and contributed to by the community, BTW?

I saw a comparison here[1] and good that GitHub supports[2] other markups too. I don't think there's much of a need to move to Markdown other than just for the sake of using something else.

I remember reading Jeef's post The Future of Markdown[3] few months ago and then what ensued was really frustrating [4].

[1]http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/doc-notes/markdown-and-re...

[2]https://github.com/github/markup

[3]http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markd...

[4]https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800
There's some other choices which are interesting to me:

luaproc as described in http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/ry08-05.pdf is nice and simple. I'm also interested in lua-zmq.threads for LuaJIT which uses zeromq for message passing between threads. http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-04/msg00364.html and https://github.com/Neopallium/lua-zmq
I really doubt OS X or Windows are going anywhere anytime soon
The Brain As An Analogy Machine
Given that this is revenue, and given that Amazon has a "market-share-or-death" pricing model for margins, this really tells you nothing about AWS's profitability. It could be running at a loss (it wouldn't surprise me.)

I'd be much more bullish on Amazon as an investor if they gave any guidance as to when they will actually start taking profits. There's just something that feels wrong investing in a company that very well may never become profitable in my lifetime and whose share price will just float on hope for a day that will never come.

I still think Amazon is an amazing company, but their approach to providing shareholder value (the role of a public corporation) is definitely a little unorthodox.
Hahaha, I am the lead engineer at a Brooklyn startup called Classic Specs. We do vintage-inspired eyewear, but our real business is that we work with other fashion brands who want to get into eyewear and design the frames, build their website, etc. We just launched eyewear for our first brand a few weeks ago, and we have several more in the pipeline for the rest of this year!

Send me a note if you are interesting in writing Python!
He means in every spec other than sleekness and screen.
Markdown doesn't convert it backwards for you, but a big feature is that it passes html through.

The linked article is a little wrong though, the "Stack Overflow" alternative link syntax is a mainline feature.
ReachFeast: Contacts Search, Free for a Limited Time
A tenfold revenue increase in just three months - nanapi.jp's success story
Also, most consumer locks are trivial to quickly pick (after a few days of practice), so the "picture of your key" vulnerability is the least of your concern if you have reason to suspect someone actively desires to circumvent your locks.
Can you bring that PC into an ad-hoc meeting with a few of your co-workers? I'm not talking a Meeting(TM), just sitting together to figure some stuff out, maybe put some things up on the beamer, present your work, share your knowledge?

This is why I don't want people building their own PC, even though generally they can pick any tool they like: it shows they have the wrong priorities (at least for our team). Unless your job involves something really resource intensive, a high-end laptop (combined with external screens, keyboard and such) is more than good enough and much more practical.

Don't get me wrong, I love building my own machine, I build my own home server from scratch just for the hell of it every few years.

But simply the fact that you call it "half as expensive" suggests you have no realistic idea of actual costs. The time you spend searching the parts together is already more expensive than a MacBook.
Interestingly, he mentions the line break problem, and later recommends Creole, which also has the line break problem.
I have to say I've been using foundation 4 for some side projects since it was released, and really love it.

It's well documented, gets out of the way, and is just much more intuitive/less crufty to me than bootstrap or skeleton.
Rewriting history with ‘DuckTales Remastered’
i don't think that's really comparable, and especially so given the unique structure (some may say fuckedupedness) of the music industry..

you may be right in that growth in other revenue streams (touring, merch, royalties, ...) potentially offset, or maybe even exceed, the decline in media sales when looking at the space in aggregate. however, that shift has major implications for different players in the space, and that shouldn't be ignored.

things may be working out better for superstars like madonna (and that’s not necessarily true; i really don’t know) given their ability to draw massive crowds willing to pay-up for the experience; smaller artists however lose out, as do the record companies..

historically, record companies took the lion share of media sales and artists (frankly speaking) got fucked. while the model has evolved, slowly, that’s still largely the same today, though things have now flipped - where the media sales, that the record companies depend on, have collapsed, and the other streams artists mainly depend on have taken-off.. love em or hate em (likely the latter), record companies do provide real value and remain an essential player in the space, helping discover and get good music out and supporting pre-madonna-level artists early-on, and their losses shouldn't be viewed as a win for the little guy, as it most certainty not.

i'd say this long-standing disconnect in the industry is why it’s taken nearly two decades to adjust to a disruption (digital formats, internet, file sharing) in the market; a ridiculously long amount of time if you think about it..
If that were sales for your own company's product would you really come to the conclusion that iTunes caused CD sales to drop? Seriously, imagine for a moment it's your business on the line so you'd damn well better get the analysis right: it looks like "my product's" sales dropped off at close to the same rate before and after iTunes even existed.

How did iTunes kill music sales if the downward trend started before iTunes was even available (which is plainly on that chart)? What would an honest trendline from the CD sales peak to the trough say about iTunes' impact?

iTunes charges a dollar per song, about the same cost/song as Walmart used to charge for a CD in Nebraska back when everyone got in trouble for price gouging, and iTunes takes less of a % than Walmart ever did. If that chart is even close to accurate, Steve Jobs is about 90% of the reason the music industry still exists.

Every time I follow a link to CNN I get more convinced that they've given up, and I'm starting to wonder why people bother linking back to these news organizations at all.
C++ isn't a terrible medium for experimentation. Games and every "creative coding" interactive projector art type project are done in C++.
PAIP, Clean Code.
YHBT HAND

See you at Grey Bar.
odesk.com , elance.com and freelancer.com are the big 3 real international marketplaces. Matchist mentioned above is US only, and from the way you formulate it your question i assume you are not US based, so it's useless for you. The best freelance work comes from referrals though, good luck.
I wish zurb would invest the time to improve the documentation instead, or upgrading the javascript modules to work with v4.
Totally agree. Even though I'm a mac user, PC-hostile attitude is a total red flag for me. My experience has been that more Mac-heavy shops tend to be somewhat weaker on the *nix side, primarily because they overlook people with strong Linux chops. If they genuinely know their stuff, PC/Linux people can help you get more mileage out of your infrastructure... which sounds like something 42floors needs at the moment.

There was a story of a failed startup on HN a month or so ago that had a co-founder who stated (jokingly) that they'd no-hire engineers who used Linux as their primary OS. They ultimately folded in part because of technical issues with their infrastructure.

In that respect, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a real correlation between crummy sysops and PC-hostileness in startups.
> I feel like there is a bigger lesson in this story: I've got to stop making people feel silly for not getting my Star Wars references, and they've got to understand that there's no logical reason I'd know anything about the big names in fashion. I occasionally meet people who get this - you know your domain and I know mine, and we can still talk to each other without othering.

> And that skill - of being able to get along with your PM even though they "clearly don't know anything about code" - is one worth developing.

For anyone reading this looking into a career in software development, this is incredibly important. You might speak in code, but the people who you write code for will speak in their business. Odds are they're not going to look at your functioning code, but you're always going to need to understand their business if you want to both help it now and prepare for the future.
Lots of great discussion here! If anyone is interested, I added a blog post about the paper (http://synesthesiam.com/posts/what-makes-code-hard-to-unders...) and put the data up on github (https://github.com/synesthesiam/eyecode-tools).
Kids like this are usually doomed unless they can get proper mentorship. In an academic environment where the outliers are picked on relentlessly, they'll develop a talent for appearing "adequate" and nothing more. Being unusually smart is just as big as social liability as being unusually stupid.

"Gifted" programs are a start, but these often include children with wildly varying skills, from extreme right-brain thinkers (highly artistic, under-developed math and language skills) and left-brain thinkers (highly analytical, poor artistic skills) means it's very hard to keep all members of that group sufficiently challenged. What is effortless for some students, is nearly impossible for others, and vice-versa.

I went through a program like this. The learning experience was terrible, but at least as a collective group you didn't have to be too concerned about being an outlier. You were in a whole group of them, safety in numbers and all that.

Unfortunately, the best plan for the parents is to move to a better school district.
It's negging, before the first date has even happened.
Aliens would indeed not travel to us for earth's ressources. But our earth is special by the existence of life. If life emergence is a random process, the forms it can take may be as well. There would be alot to learn and gain from a direct access to it. Science and knowlege is the ultimate ressource any ciilization will run after, after energy and other limiting facors have been mastered.

Another frequent mistake is that ET would travel direct from home to earth. As far as we know FTL is impossible. So it makes better sense to travel by small hops from one solar system to the next one. It could be more a ant like colonization process. This would imply that ET visiting earth would irst build one or more bases in our solar system and visit earth from there.
> outspec'd the MBP in every way ... for less money

You're falling into the consumer trap of thinking of the value of an item as its initial, un-depreciated cost. Apple products are almost liquid assets--you can sell them for large fractions of their original purchase price for years after you buy them. Whereas most PCs, like cars, plummet in value the moment you take them off the "lot." Which do you think a startup would rather put on its balance sheet?

Also, because Apple products don't tend to depreciate very quickly in the market, Apple is willing to re-attain their own products after lending them to you for a while: they maintain a very competitive leasing program for businesses (http://www.apple.com/financing/business.html), which you can get into as soon as you want to lease $5000 worth of hardware (i.e. as soon as you're at least a two-person shop.) This is basically the Heroku/AWS of computer hardware: you need fifty laptops for a year? Pay as you go. Want to upgrade? Return them and get new ones, no charge. Business fail? Send everything back, you're good. Business succeed? You can buy the stuff out.

I would bet [fairly large amounts of money] that the majority of startup in SV/SF who keep Apple hardware are on that leasing plan. As soon as you mention anything about "starting a business" around an Apple Store employee, they throw someone in a black shirt at you to explain it.
Mostly agree. There are engineers who like to build products and there are engineers who like to build infrastructure.

Unfortunately companies rarely make this distinction when perusing candidates. After all, software is software, right?
Life through Google's eyes [video]
jezebel.com
cant submit password.
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I think that's exactly the right attitude to take. You're really just doing an 'apprenticeship' at one of these early-stage startups, make connections, get some practical experience, then go do what you really want to do.
Who ignores the <link> syntax?

The html is generally handled like this:

parse the Markdown syntax and render as html, then parse, whitelist, and render the html.
We do a lot of crazy crap in the name of invisible gods. What's to say an alien race wouldn't get it in their heads that it's their sacred duty to their chosen deity to fill every planet in the universe with their greatness, exterminating all the impure in the process?

I have no problem believing the equivalent of the Daleks or the Ori might one day demonstrate a variant of the replicator hypothesis at our expense.

Why must they have a coherent logical basis for all their behavior? We certainly don't.
i have created a light-markup format called "z.m.l.",
which is short for "zen markup language".

i started a decade ago on project gutenberg e-texts,
so i've had a lot of time to evaluate my decisions,
and to tighten up both the format and my converter,
which i have ported to several different languages,
most recently javascript, where it runs quite crisply.

i've also coded a number of authoring-tools, including
online sites, and offline apps which are cross-platform.
some of these authoring-tools have a pedagogical bent,
making the z.m.l. format easy to learn, especially since
it was specially formulated to be simple to grok quickly.
(my converter has no complicated regex black-box magic.)
and all of my programs have an instant preview facility.

z.m.l. puts its focus on long-form documents, like books,
so output-formats include .epub and .mobi, not just .html.
in addition, viewer-apps with high-powered functionalities
have been created, again online and cross-platform offline.

for an advance preview, send a tweet to me, @bbirdiman...

-bowerbird
I'm not even sure why you need a computer for this - maybe to print out the picture. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the heights are discrete, and you could figure out how to reproduce the key with a ruler and a pencil.
but the music industry wised up in the '70s". And wise up they did. Slap a couple of singles on an album, populate the remainder with filler, charge more

No, that was the model they used in the 50s and early 60s--singles were much more expensive than today's 99 cents, and very profitable, and the albums were intentionally designed to get a few more bucks out of a few hits. By the 70s, the decent groups didn't really try to write singles--it was all album-oriented music.
See https://plus.google.com/u/0/111607634508834917317/posts/AM7s...