skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's another recent Halloway talk: Concurrency in Clojure.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Concurrency-Clojure

Great high-level explanation of the spirit of Clojure and how/why it transcends place-oriented programming.
Maglocks do exactly zero to prevent this.
There are two things that prevent kids from shooting things/people they didn't intend to:
1. Parents
2. Training

Ignoring the issue is just bad, we figured that out a long time ago with sex education, not teaching your kids about the things you may or may not have in your house is dangerous.
It was posted elsewhere that the gun, while legal to manufacture and possess, is illegal to transfer to another person in any way. Given that, destroying it is perfectly reasonable if he didn't feel like owning a homemade AK-47 forever.
Java (which I liked) instead of the MS platform (which I didn't)

Could you mention a few things you prefer in Java to C#?
Yes. Standards should be designed by committee, ensuring as many cooks are helping the broth as possible. Much like UNIX and C came out of large standards consortia composed of many industry leaders, and like the HTML5 standards evolved incredibly quickly until those darn browser manufacturers slowed them down by going off and implementing things. A single engineer or group of engineers trying to solve a real world problem have never done anything good for the world.

(DISCLAIMER: I work for Google. All of my opinions are my own and not Google's.)
> A friend of mine was rejected for a sales engineering job...

Seems like he wouldn't have even made it to the interview phase if the BS was a hard requirement imposed from above. Are you sure your friend wasn't just rationalizing why he didn't get hired?

That said, I agree with your message -- get a degree folks...
They can use that account for receiving money for other jobs. I don't think they make money at all in Google Play.
jroseattle, great post, what firm did you take over as mgmt of VP/Engineering? just curious.
those are both big advantages, but neither of them make dealing with the errors easier or more predictable as far as I can tell. it would definitely constrain the locations in your code where there could be surprise though and maybe that's enough?
> It would be interesting to see airlines' market research around higher speed aircraft, and whether there was enough demand for super sonic flights. My intuition tells me they did perform this research, and the data told them that it wasn't economically feasible.

This is why Boeing's Sonic Cruiser (mentioned in the article) was canceled. The jump in drag approaching the sound speed cascades into more complex and costlier aircraft engineering, which ends up in the fare. Lockheed's Skunk Works also shopped around a quiet supersonic platform (not subject to the sonic boom flight restrictions in the US) biz jet to Wall Street banks in the early '00s, who were the most avid flyers of the Concorde, but there wasn't enough interest to fund it.

> there are some companies who are innovating on the fringes to make private jets more accessible

This would be air taxi companies like DayJet, which went bankrupt due to the late '00s recession. In an age when most people comparison shopped for airfares $20-50 cheaper, offering a seat costing $200+ more for slightly shorter flights wasn't a great value proposition, and still isn't. Better preboarding and seating on the planes is somewhat taken care of already by business+ class (you also get those airline clubs in the departure areas). This small chunk of benefits still costs too much for most consumers, with the vast majority of first/second class tickets acquired through flyer miles or corporate sponsorship. Air taxi seating would cost even more than first class due to reduced economy of scale. Would this be worth it to skip the TSA line? I'm not sure. Kavoo is a new air taxi operator that flies (slower) turboprops though.

> I for one would love to travel out of smaller airports if there were more options...

This was the original goal of Eclipse Aviation's Eclipse 500 (in fact the EA logo depicted travel between regional airports like Van Nuys, bypassing hubs such as LAX). I think the higher energy requirements and generally greater distances of air travel magnify cost differences in small transit vs mass transit (taxicab vs. bus), making jet air taxis cost prohibitive at this time.

Disclosure: Former Eclipse Aviation engineering intern
Depending on the airport, you need to re-check in & go through security when going from International to Domestic. This is true at LAX which is the main hub that I go through.
Dear dumb entrepreneurs who want to raise VC: bootstrap instead. VC forces you into a 'go big or go home' strategy. There's nothing wrong with going big, but just do it the patient, more sustainable way. And then you never need to worry about the points made in these articles. You just get to sit back and laugh at them while you're owning and running your own business.

P.s. there is a time and place where big time capital is necessary to start but most of those businesses aren't reading HN.
Presumably part of the low return of VC is due to declining marginal returns due to too much money.

If SF VC funding were somehow constrained to $1b/yr, you'd get crazy percentage returns, since either only the top deals would get funded, or they'd be funded at super-favorable valuations (allowing more deals on the same money).
I went back in my mid-30s, with one kid. I had flirted with a variety of work/school balances up until that point, but working full time and doing school part time was going to require about 8 more years of sustained effort to finish a B.S. With a kid, full time school pretty much precluded me working, as my spouse works full time, so I ended up taking on much more debt than most undergrads, which brings up the next fundamental problem of opportunity cost. I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s. I don't regret doing it at all, I'm very glad to have finally finished the degree, but there are lots of extra costs and obstacles that come up when you have other substantial responsibilities.

That being said, the actual schoolwork was way easier in many ways than during my first foray from my 20s. I had time management skills, a supportive wife and stable home situation, and years of experience in the software industry that gave me a reasonable baseline of knowledge.
Nicolas,

You should consider adding a little more leading to your website's copy to improve readability.
But computers don't take up nearly as much space. You would only need to shield that one specific spot where the computer was rather than the whole cockpit.
Did C# exist around 1994 - 1998? (I assume this is when geophile's story takes place)
What is the place of support vector machines once deep learning techniques are going mainsteeam?
Maybe not 98% of all VCs, but I do wonder about 98% of VCs who weren't successful entrepreneurs at some point.
My lawyer's standard rate is $950.
Norman? This is Mr. Eddie Vedder, from Accounting. I just had a power surge here at home that wiped out a file I was working on.
Yea, I was curious about this too. I tried and failed to find anything on it.
Irdogg
if you want you can paypal me 50 cents and I will check out literally any link for you. cut out the middle man, keep disrupting and stuff.
Did that really need a Wikipedia link? Haha.

Also humorous:

My Girlfriend: What are you reading?

Me: I'm reading an article about this guy that turned down $300,000 from Microsoft to build GitHub.

Her: What in the heck is a GitHub?

Me: A website that acts as a hub for coders to share their Git repositories.

Her: Git repositories? My god, that sounds disturbing!
I worked there a few years ago and everyone was wearing headphones.

I worked in Santa Clara.
url routing is one of those things about PHP frameworks I never really understood until I wrote my own. I think if you work with PHP, it's probably something you kind of should know how to do.
You shouldn't necessarily care about this at a personal level, but this has some deep implications, which might be a reason for concern for your parents and/or the society:

1. The company doesn't value education. It only cares if somebody can do the hard work and maybe pick up what he/she needs to perform at the same level of other people who have degrees.

2. The university program you attended did not give you any skills that can provide a differential in the market. It is clear that several degrees give that differential, such as psychology, electrical engineering, medicine, just to mention a few.

I think both issues are true for CS degrees. Companies are too interested in getting bodies to do their programming jobs, and don't care if the people have the right kind of education (especially at big companies like Google). Universities, on the other hand, are doing a lousy job of preparing people for the profession.
This reminds me of an exchange from a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5500592)

Somebody said:

As a former investor, an entrepreneur that thinks he/she understands my business better than I do is a big red flag.

and I replied:

As an entrepreneur, an investor that thinks he/she understands my business better than I do is a big red flag.

To me, this gets to (or near) the heart of the thing. If you're a VC / angel, you're probably fairly smart, probably well connected, and probably have a modest amount of interesting experience in many things. But if you're not one of the VC / angel types who came from a background as an entrepreneur, why should I believe that you have much knowledge that will be specifically relevant to my business. And why should I think you are particularly well suited to judge my business?

msuster, sgblank, pg, and a few others, I would put a lot of faith in, based on their backgrounds... but most other VCs, I really wouldn't be looking to them for much besides: A. money and B. introductions / referrals. I almost certainly wouldn't be looking for product advice or marketing strategy, etc. from them (unless they had some proven background in that area).
Raising minimum wage to $30/hr would soon be followed by the price of basic essentials quadrupling. Money is just a medium of exchange, a convenient way of saying 20 minutes of floor sweeping is about equal in value to one gallon of gasoline; raise the pay for the former and the cost of the latter will rise in kind.
Have you read the tutorial http://docs.python.org/tut ?
How To Find A Technical Co-Founder
The market for train travel from New York to Austin is pretty much non-existent because it just doesn't make any sense unless you can't fly for some reason. Even with high speed trains, it'd be a ridiculous choice. With demand so inelastic, you get exorbitant prices and no reason to invest in improvements. Neither are Amtrak's or Congress's fault.
Sorry but I just don't see how bandwidth and XML could ever be a problem for Google.

Youtube alone makes up a significant amount of the Internet's total traffic. Sending compressed XML isn't a problem for Google.
Am I crazy, or is the short-run benefit more for unsupervised feature learning more than classification accuracy? If I recall from my brief reading on the subject, kernel-aided SVMs and Random Forests are basically equivalent to a three-layer deep graphical net, but on painfully feature-engineered inputs. I'd wager learning features is more useful now than any benefit of a super-deep architecture.

(I would love for a practitioner to shoot this down or corroborate my hunch-- awfully new to neural nets, having basically read a monograph, played with Theano, and watched some Hinton lectures.)
How about working naked? Would that also be in line with the core value of "openness"?
There's nothing wrong with going big, but just do it the patient, more sustainable way. And then you never need to worry about the points made in these articles. You just get to sit back and laugh at them while you're owning and running your own business.

This is our mindset. We definitely plan to be big (real big) but we're patient and we don't have to paint ourselves into a corner or take any bad deals by trying to do it all at once.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be nice to have more capital to work with, and that's not even to say that we won't ever take VC money. But if we do take VC money, the goal is to do it when we are well positioned to get more favorable terms.
That just sounds like laziness as a coder to me. Would he also output to JSON from scratch?

I taught high school for a while, and I had kids that refused to stop using their fingers for addition, regardless of the fact that it was preventing them from learning how to do more abstract math. What you're describing is pretty much the same attitude.
Why doesn't Quora have advertising?
Well that's true in any sector. Returns go up when capital is scarce. But SF with $1b/year in VC funding would be economically insignificant, even if the returns were great.
In a perfect world, you're absolutely right. In practice, you couldn't be more wrong.

> You're wrong. If a JavaScript app is structured properly, especially one delivered as a signed browser plugin, it can run completely client-side with no capability to _execute_ remote JavaScript code from a server whatsoever.

It is absolutely possible to engineer an application in that way, but that is not how the vast, vast, vast majority of applications work. Most of them throw data straight into the DOM, they include scripts from the server, etc, etc. It's possible to do this right, but I rarely see it.

> You are correct that XSS is an issue, but as mentioned elsewhere, so are buffer overflow attacks in compiled code. Any crypto implementation will have "issues" that need to be engineered around. That's the purpose of independent review and open source code.

XSS is easy to find, easy to exploit, and exists everywhere in real-world web apps. This is comparing the danger of a car heading towards you at 200mph to a baby coming towards you in a stroller. They're just worlds apart.

At the end of the day, nearly every single web application I've tested (hundreds, if not thousands) has fallen to the same issues. This trend hasn't changed, and I don't expect it to do so any time soon.
I haven't come away with the same impression of the Python standard library. Besides urllib, what are the biggest offenders in your mind?
> Refcounting is an extremely poor choice for memory management on modern machines.

Tell that to Linus:

Data structures that have visibility outside the single-threaded
environment they are created and destroyed in should always have
reference counts. In the kernel, garbage collection doesn't exist (and
outside the kernel garbage collection is slow and inefficient), which
means that you absolutely _have_ to reference count all your uses."

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle

Just to balance your downsides of refcounting, some downsides of GC: requires halting the program periodically and trashing all the caches, which is inconvenient and sometimes impossible. And performance-wise it's unpredictable and can require lots of tuning, as Java programmers who work on allocation-heavy workloads can attest.
You can jerry rig your own using ddar (http://www.synctus.com/ddar/), it's basically the de-duplicating part of tarsnap by itself.
I went back to double-check the article to make sure I hadn't missed some important piece, because I didn't recall any such implication that any of this was related to gun violence. I still couldn't find anything that implied such. So no, I don't find it misleading.

I personally find the article to be very narrow and factual. It seems to go out of its way to refrain from implying much of anything, and just tells the story.

It's odd that gun advocates are coming out of the woodwork to criticize it despite that. One gets the impression that gun advocates find straight facts to be problematic.
when their self serve platform first came out, i did a few promoted tweets, but the fact you can't pick a specific tweet to promote left me promoting things that weren't time-relevant anymore. Also my CPC ended up being like $4, and the "followers" I gained were all bots on the experiment. Facebook definitely has their act together better on this front.
Agreed on the growth capital point completely. Was referring specifically to early stage capital in my comment - should have been clearer. Thanks.
Left-handed.
The irony of this blog post is that it's very existence proves that the 98% routinely behave (and believe) they are the 2%.

The other important point is that the 2/98 split is largely exaggerated but you could make it 10/90 and the point would remain valid.

It's sad that all VCs want to be "entrepreneur-friendly" publicly (largely to widen dealflow) but are largely the opposite behind closed doors.
> Its hard to build a case for differentiating the value of one JS/Ruby/Python programmers hours against another as the barrier to entry is low without a context.

I agree. One reason I want to move away from this area is this, since the people hiring generally look at technology (Python expertise), not experience as a whole (how many complete products you have under your name). In this regard I have to compete with fresh-from-college kids since anyone can claim doing what I do.
I don't agree that money == freedom. I think there is only a connection if you make it for yourself. There are many very rich people trapped in lives they don't want. There are many poor people who feel very free.
That's a post I've been meaning to write for a while.

Back before I had a reputation as a fairly decent (tech conference) speaker, I had a proposal which was accepted at the Business of Software, which was a bit of a reach for me honestly. I'll find the exact text if anyone is interested, but it hit three bullet points:

1) Social proof that I had something interesting to say (I run a blog, somebody you the conference organizer knows has cited me favorably before)

2) A one-sentence pitch for why my topic would be interesting and topical for the attendees

3) The (accurate) prediction that people would talk about my talk even after the conference was over, because (for a for-profit conference) this helps accomplish their #1 business goal, which is selling more tickets for next year (n.b. point #1 also speaks to selling tickets if you can claim an audience which will follow you to the conference)
Even the best functional programmers I've seen fall
back to some kind of exit-or-exception semantic in
the None case.

I offer two responses to this. I'm going to use Jane Street's alternative Core standard library for OCaml (http://janestreet.github.io/) in my examples, because that's what I'm most familiar with.

First, consciously raising an exception is far, far better than having an exception raised without you being aware of it. I can search OCaml code for all of the instances of raise, failwith, and _exn, and end up with a reasonable understanding of when my code might conceivably fail. I can't do the same thing in Java, because many of the functions I'm calling might return null.

And it's really not that hard to deal with optional values when you have them. Sure, it's slightly more verbose than not having to deal with null, but in practice you have to write a bunch of if statements checking if things are null everywhere anyway.

Also, most languages don't have good abstractions for dealing with nulls despite them being everywhere, so they're always painful. Languages like OCaml and Haskell do have good abstractions, so you can often avoid a lot of the verbosity: if you have an optional value and really do want to raise an exception (usually only in scripts/smaller programs), wrap your value in Option.value_exn. If you have a reasonable default value, call Option.value ~default:(...). If you have a bunch of optional values together, you can sequence them together with Option.(>>=), because Option is a monad.

Second, there are alternatives to raising exceptions in the middle of big programs. Consider the Or_error library (see https://github.com/janestreet/core/blob/master/lib/or_error....), which is a part of Core. Rather than having a type like Option everywhere:

type 'a option = Some 'a | None

It also has types like Or_error (defined approximately like this):

type 'a or_error = Ok 'a | Error Error.t

Error.t is a very useful type that lets you lazily construct error messages from values, so that you don't pay the (often high) cost of serializing things into a human-readable form until you actually decide you need the error message.

What this lets you do is write your code inside the Or_error monad. Because it's a monad, it's very easy to sequence error-generating operations together, and you don't have to check for errors unless you explicitly decide you want to.

Often, you can do something useful like log the error to a log file or display an alert, rather than killing off the entire program. Sometimes, of course, an error is bad enough that it should cause the program to die, and then you can make it terminate with Or_error.ok_exn. But that's relatively rare. If you're trying to write robust systems, many errors are things you can deal with intelligently, and having those errors encoded in the type system ensures you don't forget to do it.
At which point in their career would you consider a software engineer (with some sort of specialization) being worth paying > 100$/h?

What measurements or rough guesses can you use to say "this engineer is worth x $/h"?
Have you tried promoted posts on Facebook? I've been curious how well that works. I'm skeptical of it's effectiveness.
What does it mean for an individual to go bankrupt? [genuinely curious]
The thing is that I think healthy teams need to have those conversations as well. I.e. ones that not everyone is privy too. Team cohesion requires trust and I found the inability to have private conversations easily is a problem.
The reality is probably that no Linux (or FreeBSD) system in any configuration is secure from an attacker that can run native code in an unprivileged process.

There's a lot of web hosting companies which use Linux on their servers?. Are you saying they're all doing it wrong? Or by "an unprivileged process" do you mean "not specifically sandboxed process"?
Because everything is a list.
Nuclear ships are not a trivial matter. Here is an interesting part of the wikipedia page for the Russian nuclear icebreaker Lenin:

"The second accident was a cooling system leak which occurred in 1967, shortly after refueling. Finding the leak required breaking through the concrete and metal biological shield with sledgehammers. Once the leak was found, it became apparent that the sledgehammer damage could not be repaired; subsequently, all three reactors were removed, and replaced by two OK-900 reactors."

Poor bastards had to break into a nuclear reactor with sledgehammers.
Boy am I underpaid compared to these numbers as an experienced lead iOS programmer. Sadly I live in a dreadful place to do anything but be glad I have a job.