skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience the opposite is true.

Some people have an easy time programming, and the specifics - libraries, languages, etc - don't matter at all. They'll pick up that new stuff in their sleep.

I recently hired a Java guy after talking to him - he had all the right hallmarks so I was pretty sure he would be good. I gave him a task with a piece of software I am intimately familiar with. A good developer would have had to get up to gear for a week (40 hours), then code, test, work around the little kinks (there are many).

All in all an optimistic assumption of mine would be that this task would take a brand new guy a month. The dev I hired did it in less than a week!

These people are rare. They are the rockstar programmers. And if you find one, you want to hold on to them no matter what.

Team players? What if the guy can do twice as much in a week than a "team" of 5 mediocre guys?

To get back to your assertion, he then proceeded to learn Android and put a functioning app in the Google play store in less than a week.

Granted that's still Java, but the libraries are all different and developing for mobile is also different.

If I had an iOS job right now, this guy would get it, despite never having done iOS. He'd learn this in his spare time and then proceed to run circles around people who've been at it for years.

That's a rockstar programmer for you.
The damned Scandinavians get to be best at stuff that matters. :)
We do, because our comfort level is so high. Because one might ask, 'why do Danes have such low expectations?' following that conclusion.
Yesterday on HN there was a link to this story:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/swimming-in-a-sea...

Which had this quote:

"This isn't something that happens to some people online, it's something that happens to everyone who has ever put any of themselves out there for public consumption."

One thing that has confused me from the beginning, when Sierra first claimed that she had received death threats, was exactly why this story took on the scale that it took on. I recall at the time, of the 100 tech bloggers that I read on a regular basis, this story overshadowed everything else. I recall that previously I had been unsympathetic to Sierra because of the perception that she tended to rely on hyperbole and drama to sell her books. For that reason I was initially skeptical of her claims. Later it turned out that the 4 bloggers who harassed had clearly stepped over some line, and said some things that were at the least, very rude. As I recall, all of them later apologized (all of them were bloggers with some substantial reputations in the world of tech blogs). But given the amount of abuse that happens online on a regular basis, it seemed a little surreal to me that the story reached such a scale.
The fact that he arrived in France from Poland at the age of 15 may explain that. Plus that his whole family works with him. Does anyone know if he speaks polish with them at work?
The company is 100% family owned! Not bad.

His story in french:
http://www.capital.fr/enquetes/hommes-et-affaires/octave-kla...

The first interview I ever heared from him, on a french radio/Tv:
http://www.bfmtv.com/video/bfmbusiness/it-for-business-lhebd...

His views on the french state subsidized cloud attempts:
http://pro.01net.com/editorial/584765/octave-klaba-un-fourni...
"That is not enough to put on the table a big amount of money."

http://www.vaporcloud.info/
"Vous aussi vous en avez marre des annonces franco-françaises autour du Cloud financé par l'argent public ?
Adoptez le Cloud français d'OVH.com. "

His twitter with nice pictures of OVH infrastructures:
https://twitter.com/olesovhcom

Keep on Oles!
Terrible advice from a "web programmer".
This happens with any and everything remotely contentious on Amazon. It's a default soapbox/battleground [0] for the Internet. Though, this certainly appears more organized than the typical ranting.

It's an interesting problem.

I tend to think that Amazon is big enough now that they could require a purchase prior to review without facing a shortage of content. I'm guessing someone over there has calculated that the sale potential to creators and readers of unqualified reviews outweighs any negative impact they have.

Allowing angry reviews against one view is a great sales opportunity for material supporting the opposing view.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092631
There's a lot of this sort of discussion in the strong artifical intelligence/transhumanism crowd. The reasoning goes:

* The threat (and possible upside) of strong AI is too great to ignore.

* We should be spending as much effort on understanding and developing friendly strong AI as we can, to outcompete any efforts that will produce a malevolent strong AI (whether intentionally or not).

* Ergo, everyone should maximise their gross income by becoming a high-flying lawyer, derivatives trader, or similar, live off a minimal income and give the rest to a strong AI research group.

Which is fine, except that the economy is, by nature, a huge web of networked interactions. The ways in which those interactions are linked is probably very hard to discern.

Which is to say that I think the kind of redistribution of wealth to good causes that people are calling for is worthwhile, but only to an extent. It's the problem that utilitarianism has - it requires perfect knowledge of the outcomes of the various choices you could make.

As others have said, the thing you develop might prove useful in treating some disease. Or the skills you pick up while developing it might lead to down a more 'socially responsible' path. Or the thing you make might produce utility for someone else and lead them to contribute to an important cause (e.g. the entrepreneur who sets up a coffee shop in town isn't curing cancer, but the people who now have a place to gather and collaborate might).
Don't forget as well, the barrier to entry for solving cancer is non-trivial compared to the barrier to entry for creating Angry Birds. It's significantly easier to develop an app than solving cancer in terms of the equipment, research and background you need. I haven't seen many 'Learn cellular analysis in a week' books floating around.
(And used to be part of Denmark.)

/me rins.
Demystifying the mystifying GFCI « Home Improvement Stack Exchange Blog
Then don't use groupcache.
Cancer will be "cured" when mRNA sequencing gets below $100. At that price point it will be cheap to identify the exact mutations. Then comes the harder part of hacking the millions of mutations to create millions of cancer specific drugs.
Bootstrap 3 Illustrator Template
I'm not sure to understand the point about rebase destroying the history. Does he speak specifically about `git rebase -i` ?

I very often run `git rebase master` in my feature branches to avoid having many conflicts to resolve just before my pull request to master. Once merged in master, initial commits I rebased from master did not seem to have changed. Am I missing something, here ?
Living includes staying happy. If playing games makes you happy, the game developer is doing a useful job for you. If the developer is happy making games, he is doing a useful job for himself too.
It's worth pointing out that Scandinavian culture values achievements. There's just a general suspicion of those who openly seek recognition for it. We tend to expect people to be hard working, but self-deprecating about any achievements to the extent of almost appearing embarrassed about it. Someone who is sufficiently self-deprecating might even be celebrated for that, but someone who is perceived as boasting will very often be viciously cut down to size.

A good illustration of the extreme importance of being self deprecating is how a big part of Norwegian mythos around the Norwegian royal family is how the then king took a tram when wanting to go skiing in '73 during the fuel crisis, and "even" took out his wallet to pay (During a period, using private cars during the weekends was illegal, and while the royal family almost certainly would've gotten dispensation, they judged it to send a bad signal). Google even autocompletes "kong olav trikken" (king Olav tram) for me if I type in "kong olav", and you'll find pictures of it in most Norwegian history books...

(The hilarious part is that this was partially staged: the press heard he'd taken the tram, and nicely asked if they might be allowed to come along next time and were given the ok by the palace; had people in general been more media savvy at the time, it'd likely have had the opposite effect)
We can have both.

There is a dizzying array of diseases, cancers and traumas that were death sentences in 1960 that are completely curable today. If I were born in the late 40's instead of the late 70's, I would be an invalid living in a room somewhere due to a back injury. Instead, because of modern surgical techniques, I missed six weeks of work ten years ago and are 100% fine today.

So I'm not going to sneer at entrepreneurs who invent video games or make movies or start a laundromat or who sell t-shirts in a resort town. They find places where demands are unmet and fill them. If for you, the opportunity is curing cancer, good for you. If it's hocking t-shirts on a boardwalk, good for you.
First off, there isn't a zero-sum game between Angry Birds and curing cancer. It takes different resources and skills and there isn't an easy or immediate conversion between the two.

I don't like Zynga (not to lump Angry Birds in with Zyngarbage) and what they do, but it's not like one could, if given majority ownership of the company, walk into their office and say, "Okay, we're going to sequence oncogenes now". You can't really fault them for not curing cancer, because they aren't set up to do it.

All that said, I think there is truth in the argument that VC lends itself to frivolity. VCs are no longer investors, so much as detachable managers. The problem is that a non-expert can't evaluate cancer research. On the other hand, any moron can evaluate and run a "social" web app.

If you treat executive positions as political favors to be handed out to one's cronies, and you're running biotech companies, you'll destroy them, because one actually needs to know things to run biotech. On the other hand, with the hot "social" companies, no one will notice the change.

Just as reality TV survived the end of its hype cycle, because it was so much cheaper (no writers or professional actors) than scripted television, so it is with social media. Talent is the scarce resource, and the nice thing about the social world is that one doesn't need much of it. They're marketing experiments; they can back-fill with solid technology later on in the process.

The dark secret to this is that there are a lot of middle-aged MBA types who never learned to understand technology, and haven't actually worked in over a decade, but want something to manage. As investors in cancer research, they'd be passive philanthropists; as paratrooper managers they'd have no clue. On the other hand, social media they can take over and run because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what those companies are doing.
Nice linkbait headline
You don't believe art and sport improve the human condition? I would argue that what you dismiss as circuses are actually what make life living.

Being a scientist or engineer is fine, but is far from the only way to make the world better. Life would be very drab if all art and sport stopped tommorrow.
>(or was it considering a lot of poorer people and debtors do two jobs and proportionally there are more of these people?)

Being an American, the only people I've known who have had to work more than one job was because their first employer wouldn't give them enough hours because of the type of regulations and "work rules" you are championing.

>Yours is a pretty corporate-centric view of things and doesn't include mergers, manufacturing moving to the East, outsourcing and the rampant globalisation since the 1950's when communications and travel became considerably less tiresome...

I would view it as reality-centric. It's supply and demand. It turns out Western peoples aren't the only ones who can perform sophisticated labor in exchange for payment. People in the East have every right to participate in the global economy. Your original comment stated: "we're there to get paid for our time". You're wrong - it's not kindergarten. You're paid in exchange for the value you bring to your employer.

>Most businesses by employee volume are SME's. Large businesses don't just suddenly appear. They grow over time.

That's the point of the chart. They aren't suddenly appearing (successful startups) or growing over time. From what I've heard, many of the legacy Euro-corps (Airbus for example) have a pretty incestuous relationship with the government. All told, it doesn't sound like a very healthy business ecosystem.
I think it's likely that a particular community, language, tooling combination is likely to resonate with a particular person. Although reading a few well reasoned articles might give you a hunch of which one to choose, it's likely, barring external forces like occupation or marketplace requirements that you'll know until you plunge in and try it for yourself. I appreciate the article, seems well written and reasoned, but I wouldn't want to read too many more like it before I just dove in and found out for myself where I felt most happy, efficient and expressive.
The total cost of the 2012 election was $6.3 billion, about half of which was the Presidential election, so over a period of 4 years you're looking at roughly 2.4 billion per year. That would do jack shit for curing aging or even an important disease. The NIH spends $30 billion per year on those things.

We do the beer and circuses because they're cheaper than large-scale human advancements. The Manhattan project was $30 billion. Apollo was about $135 billion. The interstate highway system was $400-500 billion. (Inflation adjusted).
The company I work for does exactly this actually, and there are others like us. The problem is that due to heavy regulations/HIPAA, we have to sell our services to companies who can use it with their provided insurance.

You can't just set up a service with a Facebook log in and have people connecting medical information, so it's not something that's going to end up getting viral or posted on blogs or TechCrunch, and the only people that are going to see your service are the ones that work for our clients.

I can't even put 99% of what I do on a regular basis into a portfolio or anything because of these regulations.

I guess my point is there _are_ companies doing things like this, while being successful and social conscious, they just won't be publicized like Angry Birds or the Find-Vegan-Bacon-In-SF-Apps.
They're pushing the hell out of this on the /g/ technology board on 4chan. I wonder if large group chat rooms will be a new way of sharing files over secured/private connections.
I won't hit it with the Aztek stick (nobody deserves that), but I do see a resemblance to the Scion iQ. But .. what's up with that beltline? It's got curves like the Enron stock price.
The answer to both questions would be the same. Although the way the question is phrased may get one to the answer faster or slower.
> No market maker is needed

That doesn't mean that market makers don't provide value, just that they are not necessary.
I'm conflicted about that. He definitely deserves to be in jail, just not for what he is imprisoned for.
64GB for database systems is still fairly large amount of ram for Databases and still largely considered an enterprise class server.. I know lots of several multi billion dollar companies running their financials and oltp systems on servers with <64gb ram. Also, people don't generally by over the counter ram for their servers, they're spending extra on ECC memory correcting ram.
> Nearly 70 of the employees are being laid off immediately, while the remainder have been asked to stay on for a few months through a transition period. Another 36 employees are being asked to relocate to New York from Berlin.

Does anyone know what the visa situation looks like for them?

Relocating 36 employees to the US can't be easy. There aren't any more H1B's this year and L1A's (and the equivalent green cards) can only be given to executives and managers. EB-2 maybe? Or L1B?
Why not just use the XCode organiser (via AppleScript if you want automation) to delete applications or download/upload app sandboxes? There's no need to touch the phone or use "iFunBox" for this.
Just one word - nginx.
Yeah, wake me up when Tesla builds an EV that's within a affordable price range for someone like myself, making about twice the median income and still nowhere near being able to buy myself a $70K car (which would be over 70K Euro where I live).

As much as I like the Model S for its design and performance, I wouldn't bet on Tesla taking over any meaningful market share from the big manufacturers anytime soon. Tesla built something beautiful, but it's so far out of reach for such a large majority of people, I can't make more of it than a very nice curiosity.

I have a better comparison: suppose I had $70K to blow on a new car, the price of the base Tesla S, the least expensive version available, I could by myself a petrol-based car that would be miles ahead of the Tesla S in about every way imaginable except environmental impact.
No, it's actually super easy to block it if you're clever enough ;)
Fair enough... TANSTAAFL. You at least get to keep all the licenses you obtained while in the program, right?

Personally, it's the license compliance overhead more than the fees that drives me nuts about Microsoft. They make it hard to give them money.
The "reactions" table at the bottom made my morning.
So.. take VC money so that it doesn't go to potential weak competitors, who will just add noise and uncertainty to the market?
think of it as "peaks" of relevance
IOS Tutorial: Connect to Foursquare using OAuth
The big difference there isn't necessarily in the questions, but in the sets of things the questions are applied to.

It's still asking the same thing, so I'd say yes. But you might be asking it for different reasons ("am I interested in this historically or practically" vs. "is this innovative or canon?").
Wacko in the Morning 07/30 by The Wacko Network
I found no test case. Does it really work?
Was really hoping for an electric successor to the 3 series, so disappointed in the form factor.
Thankfully I have never heard someone call themselves a rockstar programmer.
Almost all my mobile development experience(of which there isnt much to start with) has been acquired via PhoneGap, meaning i only did native if absolutely necessary.

The biggest issue and something that has gotten me into a state of white-hot rage has been Apples certificate/provisioning profile nonsense. I don't think I've ever gotten a profile to work from the get go, even just for development(a requirement thats positively ludicrous). That's why I generally develop/test on Android first.

Seriously, I've managed to require a whole week just because of some certificate snafu.
It's a reality of doing tech support. You get a flood of garbage information ("Hi, I can't access your web page, I get a 404 error. My system has 8 GB of RAM and an Intel 4700K and blah blah blah..."), and have to do your best to sort through and solve the user's problem.

Your ticket had two problems described. The tech probably didn't understand the significance of the first problem, and so just discarded the information. Then she answered your second question. When you've got 100 tickets to sort through in your 8 hour day, you simply have to make some compromises on the thoroughness of your response.

To get her attention, it would have been better to explain a little about what the consequences are, and request that she have a developer follow up. Make it clear that it's a major security failure and could lead to compromised VMs.

Then open a second ticket for your other issue.
"Meanwhile, your doctor in the hospital is stuck using some 1980's software, which drains the very life-force out of him by the amount of pain it inflicts with every use..."

Most of the problems with medical software is the doctors and medical administrators themselves. They get so used to be worshiped as Gods That Save Lives, they assume that they Know Everything About Everything. I've seen more software and business talent quit the medical software field than any other....
Bullshit. You can still get a job writing COBOL. C, C++, and Java are also older than 5 years.
The last question and answer sum up SpaceX perfectly:

Q; So you're not breaking a mold here.

A: We're taking it to an extent previously not done, but we're operating in a well known set of techniques and capabilities.
How?

Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay, you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months and then we'll iterate."

Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the project and then we're going to want everything done in one pass."

The NHS tried to update their computer systems a while back, it cost them £12 billion and two contractors dropped out of the contract because they were being too difficult to work with. It's still not, I believe, fully deployed.

The BBC tried updating their media management system.... DMI, I believe it was called. And spent £98.5 million on it only to not get the product at the end of the day....

All for things that a reasonable software company could probably have done by iterating over features on a basic product fairly easily.

Then you have things like the Police computer system - which is laughable in its antiquity and difficulty to use. I think there was an article on here quite recently about the awful 911 system.

You know? Things need to change concerning regulation before I think we're going to be able to adequately address those sorts of problems. Otherwise you're going to get these monster projects that effectively have to be done all in one go, which seems like a recipe for disaster.
Nice. http://placeit.breezi.com/cade2ae
Your grocer is a market maker!

To the point that the word market is often used for small stores.

If you had to buy bananas off a truck when it happened to be in town, you'd get a lot less bananas and you'd pay more for them.
You're not missing anything. Rebasing off master is the same as a fastforward only merge. It is -i that can actually change the history.
That's funny, I see it differently. Windows 2012 is finally coming of age with R2, HyperV is starting to shine competitively, PowerShell is kicking ass and taking names - Desired State Config FTW, Visual Studio is finally getting better C++ support, Windows 8 has HyperV built in, much better performance overall. Exchange has improved leaps and bounds when deployed correctly (hardware load balancer instead of its crappy mac address cloning hack) so on and so forth. The fact you essentially got 1m of free software and support over the what, 3-4 years in the program should have allowed you to better leverage your known expenses and plan accordingly. Also, Microsoft isn't nearly this evil unless you're doing something wrong, just license datacenter copies or hell, move to Azure and save even more money.

Quite frankly, i'm calling BS.