skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole point of the study was that the majority of folks coming in on visa programs like the H-1B aren't "going to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDP." We already have O visa programs for those kinds of individuals. Out of 65,000 H-1B applicant slots every year, I'd expect to see bigger economic waves if all of them were contributing hundreds of thousands or even millions to GDP.

Is there something wrong with the methodology of the study? I have a great deal of disdain for libertarian front groups like the Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute, but I don't immediately dismiss any study they come out with by virtue of their Boards. Mistaking the presence of an agenda for deliberate scientific dishonesty seems excessive; that the data may align with or contradict one's bias doesn't invalidate it either way.
A generalization is a generalization. OP didn't write this, merely reposted it for the benefit for the rest.
Not only is life short, it's shorter than you think.
I think this is a fair comment. SpeakerDeck focuses on preserving the presentation layout with absolute fidelity, and does that by using static images. It's a trade-off. It's certainly possible to implement some kind of link-detection, I hope they are working or plan to work on it.
Revolution in end-user documentation Say Hello to InlineManual
Windows 8: Beautiful and Fast
Well, to be fair, independent invention doesn't matter for patents ... you aren't exporting as much as claiming what they invented as your own and exporting a license to use it.
Understood, and this was more of an open-ended rebuttal not directed at OP.
It's possible he deleted his post because he realized that he included something in it that could identify him, which could be bad for his career.

It might have been better to rewrite his post into your own words, and take out some of the unnecessary detail, rather than literally repost.
While there are clearly some significant security considerations, the author writes Chartio off without considering applications where it could be a good fit.

Also, the oozing, patronizing tone of the author is really annoying. Just make your points and be nice about it.
One might argue that a self-updating prebuilt VM is functionally equivalent to a SaaS offering.
That's not all it's there for. Python programmers expect to be able to do things like print(obj.__class__.__name__). You're definitely free to write your own alternative Enum, however, since it's just a library function.
Except you can buy most, if not all, consumer devices on credit, and they may still be paying for them. They may never have had the money "at some point".
Failed App? This Is How To Reboot
Walks And Walking - The Isle of Wight Walking Festival 2013
A) Your argument against H-1B's is disingenuous at best. And I'm curious, are you against expanding H-1B's but in favor of increasing the amount of low-skill immigrants and/or granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? If so, how do you reconcile your seemingly-contradictory stances?

B) Heritage is staunchly conservative, NOT libertarian.
Oh, quit your hyperventilating. If you have a problem with this statistic, direct your concerns to Dr. Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. A PDF of the cited study is linked in the Huffington Post article I linked to, and his CV and contact info are on his faculty page at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/
Is VP9 the first and h.265 the one under it? Because to me the first one looks the most clear.
What's wrong with 9-5? Can't you be passionate about what you work on, excel in you career, yet stick to dedicating ~50% of your time awake to your job?
> Another reason for the quality gap is that that we've been having trouble keeping talented people. Google and other large Seattle-area companies keep poaching our best, most experienced developers, and we hire youths straight from college to replace them.

I will say all of the ex-Microsoft folks I've encountered at Google Seattle have been fantastic.

On a related note, it's stupidly easy to get code accepted by another team at Google.

Also we're hiring.
If your first priority is your kids, your first priority is not your work. That's fine, it's a choice, but there is a frequent claim that the massive incremental time demand of kids makes one so much more time efficient at work that it more-than-compensates. Insofar as one is the same human being, with the same energy reservoirs and time management skills as before your child was born, this is unlikely.

I understand the reason this fiction is maintained: people with kids need the job even more than people without, and have an interest in denouncing people who claim kids make you less productive. There's also the second order effect in which "with kids" is correlated with "older".

The net of it though is that devs with kids tend to assign work a lower priority, to take fewer risks, to need more money, and to be older and hence less familiar with new technologies (and too busy to learn in their free time).

Society doesn't have a good answer for this situation yet. In times past, technology didn't move so fast that experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time. A 40 year old farmer with kids in 1713 would probably have much to teach a young whippersnapper. The same isn't true for a 40 year old programmer with kids in 2013.
Same, I downvote short posts with no real substance. They may have gotten the pageview, but I'll do my best to prevent some other person from wasting their time like I did.
Another downside: if your tank is always half-full, you'll need to burn more fuel making more frequent stops at the gas station.
I think there are two complementary parts that Linux gets right here. One is as cited in the article, that you get personal glory for improvements you make to the kernel even if they are fairly small. The other part is that there is for Linux someone who will say "no" to a patch. Linus will certainly do it, and other trusted devs will do it too. Linus is perhaps even famous for telling people when they are wrong.

I've seen a number of open-source projects where you get all the personal glory for your additions but there is nobody who takes the responsibility to tell people "no". These projects, almost universally, turn into bloated messes over time. Open-sourced computer games seem to fall down this path more easily, since everyone and her little dog too has ideas about features to add to games.
Pinterest hacked?
>Also we're hiring.

Insult to injury? ;)
That's not the only problem. In many places the elephant population is overgrowing the reserve sonthey get out.

And few people would be verynpleased with an elephant going through their crops.
Possible candidates:

Math and science education

Public health campaign

Microfinance

Contribute to/volunteer with existing charity

Give it all to Watsi?

Invest it, then use the returns for good?
I actually enjoy working at Microsoft --- I'm in Phone, working on telemetry and various other things --- and I've met a ton of very smart people people. I've also made the cross-team (and cross-org) contributions that the OP says are nearly impossible (just today, even). While the OP makes a few good points (some teams are kinda reluctant to take patches), I think he's grossly exaggerating the problems, and the level of vitriol really isn't called for either.

He's also slightly off-base on some of the technical criticisms: there are often good reasons for doing things a certain way, and these reasons aren't always immediately apparent. Besides, change _does_ happen: Arun Kishan (who is smarter than I'll ever be) broke the dispatcher lock a while ago (see http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Arun-Kishan-Farewe...) when nobody thought it could be done.
From the article: "It’s quite possible that the risks I’ve highlighted above are ones that you feel it’s okay to take, and in that case, go for it – as long as you’re respecting your end users’ interests as well."
Incentives.

For many locals, just shooting the elephants would be the solution.
Outsiders care about the elephants and the humans (most of the times, in that order).
Boston drops Microsoft for Gmail
If your experience of programming becomes worthless after 10 years, then you probably did not focus on the good skills. I don't see how learning how low level hardware works, some time tried languages (C for example), data structures, networking details, debugging protocols of all kinds, structuring programs, working in teams and so on and so forth... could become worthless.

For the idea that parents and older programmers have different priorities, that may be true, but you downplay experience way too much. That said, trying to find 150% dedicated younglings, that don't spend a lot of time on side projects and just enjoying life is not that easy either
By the way: there's actually quite a lot of information available on Windows Internals. In fact, there's a whole book, Windows Internals (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963901.asp...) on exactly how the NT kernel and related system components work. The book is highly recommended reading and demystifies a lot of the odder parts of our API surface. We use it internally all the time, and reading it, you'll repeatedly say to yourself, "Ah, so that's why Foo does Bar and not Qux! Yeah, that's a good reason. I didn't think of it that way."
I'm glad words I never wrote caused you such a physical reaction! Hope your laptop survived.

I was referring to the new rich and the fact that a guy like Elon Musk isn't preoccupied with making a product like Snapchat or Pinterest. Instead him and Tesla have single-handedly realized the all-electric car as a consumer product with physical infrastructure, brand appeal, and impressive engineering. Oh and they're also solving a real global problem by doing this (carbon dioxide levels are currently at the highest levels in recorded human history).

And freakin space mining? Yes we will laugh at the idea today. It's a much loftier goal, it might not even take off, but approaches (somewhat) fixing the real problem of dwindling natural resources here on Earth.

Bill Gates? Ron Conway? PG? You certainly know these people, their accomplishments, and the lasting impacts they've made (among others on the list). I might not agree with their philanthropic desires for FWD.us, but I'm not going to dictate where others should spend their (well earned) fortunes.

Musk has just simply decided to move elsewhere.
Why makes you say that Ruby's type system is not expressive? I'm not exactly sure what that means. I've heard of a language being called expressive, but not a type system.

By the way, does Haskell's type system have the "value restriction" that you run into in ML?
> invent constructs that have no basis in reality

Regardless of how abstract you get, how far you go, math is always tied to our physical reality. The basic operations are reflections on properties of our universe. The "kind of stuff" mathematicians do" allows us to model and reason about our world in ways that wouldn't be possible any other way (that we know of).
Since you felt free to generalize us parents, I will feel free to tell you that people without kids are generally way behind us parents in terms of maturity. That might not matter in entry-level jobs, but is quite essential when you climb up a bit.
I'm a founder of Emergent One, a startup that uses similar agent-based technology to Chartio to access production databases and build out RESTful APIs. Some of our APIs are write-enabled, which makes the proposed risk even higher than that of Chartio's.

We've spent a lot of time thinking about security risks and writing code to reduce them. I thought I'd share a few things we do and that we've learned from our experience:

* The agent approach is the most popular because it allows for a system administrator to easily sever the connection from the database server without having to worry about writing queries to revoke user access.

* We never run unindexed queries without an explicit request from a customer and a manual entry from an Emergent One employee.

* We're currently looking into security consultants to continuously test our production environment.

* We're building an appliance version of our software much like Github Enterprise in order to accommodate the customers that aren't comfortable with their data hitting the cloud.

* We strive to have very quick and personal customer service directly from engineers. The vast majority of the responses are within the hour.

and last but certainly not least...

* The very best thing we can do is be honest and straightforward about the inherent risk behind our platform. Being able to build and maintain a pristine level of trust is the only thing that will keep us in business.

I'm sure Chartio does things very similarly. Direct-database access technology is not for everyone, but it's also proving to be extremely valuable for both Chartio's customers and ours. The cloud advantage that makes most SaaS software great is still there.
I've seen stuff like this pretty regularly, and I'm always dumbfounded by how people don't even think about how bad this is.

This is the exact definition of a "crunchy center", and I wouldn't be surprised if they do other horrible things. You know for certain there are no passphrases on those SSH keys either.
Can you give me an example other than say, post Apr 15th sales/promotions to get tax rebate money?
Hi, founder of Chartio here. Other than the title (which makes me a little sad) I liked your post. Its great to fully inform people of the security tradeoffs and you've done a nice job of laying out the levels and options of security that we've spent a lot of time developing.

In anything that is cloud based there is going to be some level where some hacker could get in and destroy everything. Most people on this site use cloud hosted servers, all of which would be at risk if Amazon or Rackspace got hacked. BI in the cloud is a new space and will be cautiously entered by some, but benefits will outweigh the potential risks and just as has happened in every other segment of cloud computing.

(will write more soon)
In our case we set up a dedicated cheap database server only for ChartIO. Then we have a script that copies to it analytics data from our production servers every few hours (while also anonymizing what needs to be just to be extra safe).
"there are often good reasons for doing things a certain way, and these reasons aren't always immediately apparent."

One of the issues the author seemed to be alluding to is that the loss of experienced developers makes it really hard to keep track of "line 123 of foo_dispatch.c does this because of vital business reason xyz or compatibility reason uvw" and "line 123 of foo_dispatch.c was written while I was hungover and trying to make a deadline--it looks clever, but feel free to junk it.".

This issue is compounded when you are hiring safe, and you have a culture where making gross fuckups while trying to make progress is discouraged. It is neither good nor bad--after all, I too enjoy using stable software--but there is a price to be paid if devs don't feel comfortable making breaking changes.
> Do not be depressed, at least because of this. Few people will ever write anything that is correct, can not be meaningfully simplified, yet incomprehensible and essentially unreviewable.

You don't have to write something that is essentially unreviewable to end up in the scenario described earlier. You just have to work with a team that isn't prepared to learn new things and rejects thing that they don't understand.

I've been studying functional programming lately and can easily imagine being told my code is "incomprehensible" because I wrote it in a functional style instead using loops and variables.
A few commenters on here mentioned in another thread that they would buy it for a month and see. Bear in mind that there's a years contract hidden away in the terms and conditions, otherwise it's $75 and not the advertised $50 per month.
And 8hrs is probably too much time to really productively be working on a job at that.
Having a product that also involves connecting to other people's databases we're pretty well versed in this problem. I will admit its a bold step to allow an external service access to your production databases but as a trade off of convenience vs security the former does win more often then people would think. This is especially true for people using PaaS/DBaaS providers which by default allow access from all inbound IPs (ie not white listed).

One thing we try to do is be open about all this and we explicitly mention it in our docs[1]. This includes instructing users to explicitly limit the permissions that they grant.

Another poster mentions loading a pre built VM. thats actually our goal for the enterprise as there will always be systems are not (and should not!) be accessible to the open Internet. In the meantime though there plenty of folks happy with the convenience of living in the cloud.

[1]: http://www.jackdb.com/docs/#security
I put something like this together a while ago. I think it still works. Just two scripts, ffmpeg, and a cronjob. https://github.com/msmith/caps.
> experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time

I'm 28, which means I'm young enough that even people like you believe I can learn new tricks. As far as I can tell, my brain is still fully functional. That said, most of what I use every day, I learned over ten years ago. Computer science never gets old. The notion of indirection is never obsolete. The mental machinery required to navigate up and down in an abstraction hierarchy is universal. Sure, I learn new APIs every day, read about new programming paradigms (hey, functional reactive programming is cool), and so on, but I learned all the basics way back when.

Would you say that all my older experience is worthless? If your hypothesis were correct, I should be able to say that what I'm learning now is more important than what I learned in 1998, and that's just not true.
So what does this mean for the "thousands" of patents Microsoft is "licensing" to Android manufacturers for using the open source Android OS, and what about Apple's lawsuits? I remember some of their patents were "stuff you can do on a computer", too.
Sadly the alternative is data warehousing (which all of our competitors do). Its the worst solution as it

1. gives a copy of your data to someone else
2. is legally questionably still your data
3. is stagnant (as you usually only backup once a week)
4. there is no way to track where that data goes
You don't treat major depression with "realness" because the brain has the ultimate control of sensation and perception. Physical sensation doesn't make a difference in those cases. Light therapy is used for seasonal depression (seasonal affective disorder), but it does not necessarily work for those with major depression.

Your suggestion about 'physical touch' is funny because I think it perfectly shows how people misinterpret what depression is. Imagine touching your spouse one day and realizing that the endorphin and oxytocin release is no longer there. All you feel is warm flesh. Suddenly, the natural moisture of the skin becomes apparent. Has skin always felt like this? It's kind of gross. My discomfort becomes apparent, and now suddenly I'm trying to make a face like I enjoyed that hug. THAT is what depression does. You have all of the sensation with none of the reward pathway. And, much like someone who has lost one of their basic senses, the brain tries to overcompensate through heightened sensations (like feeling the moisture of someone's skin), which causes discomfort and anxiety.

Imagine smelling a flower and not having that temporary, brain-clearing, 'ahhhhh....' moment. This is what depression does to you.
Dear the Oatmeal, I see your Mantis Shrimp and raise you my favorite animal
How I learned to stop being a perfectionist
Hi Kevin, thanks for the great response! We should continue to share notes on best practices in all of this.
I'm sure thankful all the Internet protocols weren't patented.
What are you basing all of these assumptions on? All you've contributed to the conversation is more stereotyping. If you have something to cite I'm happy to look at it.

Most of the assumptions you've made don't apply to me, a 40 year old father of two. It may very well apply to some people similar to me. This is the problem with stereotypes and the problem with people perpetuating them. Oversimplifications are a shoddy mental crutch to deal with the complexities of reality.
It's a vapid comment that lowers signal:noise, of course it should be downvoted.
Employees who are parents are less productive. Logically, it follows that there would be measurable degredation in society over time, as long as workers keep procreating. Society's decline is irrefutable.

I hope the explanation for your post is that you're 17. This blatant generalization is idiotic and useless. Reading that reply is a denial of service attack on productive thought.
Windows is dying just like DOS.

Azure is the new Windows.
Ask HN: are you stuck on your side project?
have a side project, but you are stuck on a problem? or have some spare time to help a fellow programmer?
give us the link to your Github repository and get help from HN
NAO Robot Has Learned To Write
"Don't feed the Bell Labs guys."
I'd focus on who would get value out of your features. Figure out what your top 1-2 features are, and think of who needs extra privacy. People in the government, in purchasing? Senators?

I think your pricing is way off unless you can find a super niche segment who are crying out for your product. People don't like to spend $50 per year on an email, much less per month.

Let me ask you this: what kind of person would need to securely share access to your email? Probably someone in charge. Work from there.

I hope you figure it out. It seems a little bit to me like you're trying to reinvent email and charge a premium for it, which is a tough product to sell.
oops. The elastic IP reuse problem is actually pretty interesting/funny because I've seen a few scenarios.

The easiest one is cross site scripting sourced from a recently de-comissioned elastic IP. Its easy, really easy in fact. So much so that its been done more than once (duh).

Its been used for phishing, except the IP wasn't hijacked or misused, it was just reused by someone who was attentive enough to wonder what all that HTTP traffic was about.

Its been used for "shocksiting", where all of a sudden, your favorite AWS hosted website redirects to one of the more famous shocksites, serves an ad and makes them money.
I won't share any of the links here, they're easy to find.

This current pinterest problem is pretty bad, I just checked the date on my machine and its 2013 so nobody with any sense should be storing unencrypted passwords. Even ROT13 would be better than nothing...
This is a good approach. I work with ERP systems for large companies, and it's typical to separate the transactional database (OLTP) from the analytics database (OLAP). There's usually a replication process to copy transactions into the reporting system.
That's not "considering applications where it could be a good fit".
And I'm sure thankful formats like HTML aren't patented.
A timeline of the distant, disturbing future
Great use case! We don't support an API that you can push data to, but that's because whatever API we build, it would never be easier to learn or have as much language support than just spinning up a PostgreSQL instance and writing the data to it. Quite a few of our customers use us this way.
Is this really type safe? Does anything prevent the address of a member being taken, followed by an assignment to a member of different type (destroying the validity of the pointer)?

You can make tagged unions type safe if you eliminate storage that is interpreted in more than one way. You can do it by requiring immutability, introducing indirection, or by copying the type-variant part. Unless I'm missing something (very possible), this technique doesn't seem to do any of those things, so I don't see how it can be sound.