skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of which article is correct (this one or the one it is referencing) in predicting the future of software employment, I think we'd all do well to keep an eye out for the future and be agile and ready enough if a Detroit-like situation does arrive. It should never be taken as a given that we'll always be highly sought after and well paid. With that in mind, I find Baugue's article much more useful considering I've never thought of an article that can be reduced to "Things are great, I don't think anything will change." to be of much help.
If you re-read his comment, its filled with as much vitriol and bitterness.
Interesting that one of his examples, Wordpress, has contributed to lots of software jobs as well. Writing themes, plugins, etc can be fairly lucrative and probably more interesting than making a blog from scratch over and over.

The whole point of writing software is to make it so you don't have to keep doing the same thing over and over. That doesn't mean there aren't new things to do. Software really is eating the world. If we run out of software jobs, it's probably because we've automated literally everything else already.
I don't think we are operating on a platform where a BI could be actually implemented. Too many intrenched interests (among which are pretty much every single megacorporation that uses wage slavery to keep employees poor) that have too much lobbing money in a political process that is so exceedingly corrupt. And beyond that, you have mainstream media hound dogs at the beck and call of politicians to spread lies and propaganda about any proposal to ruin its public opinion.

I'm just saying if we did it (we won't) it would have to be a hard slap in the face to wasteful spenders of it. The thing is, people can survive and rebound from 2 weeks homeless because they wasted their BI check. But when you don't have a check in 2 weeks to give it another go, you just end up down a spiral into destitution and the bottom dregs of society.
@nrivadeneira: Yes, the point Ford made works, but it works because of the _nature of the jobs_, not because of any inherent property of theirs that influences their compensation (implied by Ford to be the knowledge/labor distinction). Clearly you and I can think of high-income location-bound jobs (bodyguard) and of low-income information-processing jobs (library clerk).
First of all you still get html in the end.
So whether you get the slightly reduced json payload size and use the users cpu to generate html or just get cached html from the server you still end up with the same thing, and arguably, similar response times.

I find the answer is not one or the other it's both. If a certain page requires interactivity then embrace Javascript and do the interactivity with Angular or Ember. You end up writing less Javascript. If you do it as decorating html using jQuery then you will end up with more javascript. Most pages in web apps don't require this much interactivity on every page though. There may be a few pages here and there. Most of it is just document viewing. In that case just send down cached html. Sure Bustle.com is fast, but so is Basecamp, both take entirely different approaches to display pages.

When I first got into Knockout a few years ago, I was a kid in a candy store. I wanted to do everything with Javascript and Knockout. Soon I grew up and realized you just don't need all that crap to display an f'in table. It's just a table for God's sake. We have been displaying tables since the dawn of web browser. In fact you will pay client CPU cost trying to display a table in Angular when you could just send it over in HTML.

Now if that table requires heavy editing(not filtering, or sorting, that stuff is easy as decoration), then sure bring in Angular.

On the other hand if I need drag and drop, validation, on complex forms, I'll definitely bring in Angular.

Choose the right tool.
Indeed, a lot of verification logic techniques were developed for nuclear shutdown code. By David Parnas, no less.
Great point. The nature of the work changes as old complexity is automated away, and new growth possibilities arise as a result.
Also, Google do some kind of scanning of applications you want to install (optional), last time i checked, so that would probably limit the distribution potential even further. AFAIK, Google's services have root access to the system (they can freely download .apk, install them silently and more), but rogue apps would need a 0day on non-rooted phones,
...a private sector built on technological innovations whose initial development was funded by the government.

See what I did there?

It's not a question of "who's better, public or private industry?" We need to recognize that our system is built on a symbiosis of both.
That's a good point - there can be serious career opportunities in managing, supporting, and modifying ostensibly "automated" solutions. The core may be automated, but the ecosystem doesn't have to be.
> The counterpoint to it is that it requires fewer developers to automate a process than it requires to write it.

Not by definition. Rather, only once it becomes easier to automate than to do by hand, we automate.
To give my post some much-needed useful content, and not look as though I was simply sniping someone's spelling, I may as well share my mnemonic for spelling "onomatopoeia."

It's 12 letters, and there's a sort-of pattern in four groups of three with a rhythm. o-n-o, m-a-t, o-p-o, e-i-a. The first and third parts are like rhyming lines in a poem.

That's how I see it, anyway.
> Only those whose programs might “endanger the public health or safety, security, property, or the economy will need to be tested.”

I don't think the people pushing for licensing disagree with you that web developers don't need a license.
No hard bound, but the tape is only potential infinite. (Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actual_infinity)
I don't disagree, I'm not comparing the build I did with an actual Mac Pro. I just didn't have time to wait for it (I did this build months ago). As I mentioned at the end of the post if I had seen the tiny mac mini-esque build I linked to before I bought the case I did, I would have built something like that instead.
Beats being blown to pieces.

Also, please don't pretend erectile dysfunction is not a real problem to the people affected.
Scottish startup thinks whiskey can fuel more than an epic bender
Toyota's reputation here in China is much lower than I remember it being in the states, and the only difference are the Chinese JV factories, which I guess are just inferior in quality. The level of automation in Chinese factories is much lower than in Japan or North America given that (a) labor is cheap and (b) importing machinery is tariffed and very expensive.

But Toyota's reputation is nowhere near as bad as that of Chinese brands. No one wants to drive a Xiali even if it is essentially a Corolla in design.

Japanese electronics and cars were already considered to be very good by the mid 80s. Japan ALWAYS had a strong culture in design and quality, and it was only post war where they had to play catch up again; there is no mystery about Japanese success. The Chinese, on the other hand, have a much greater problem of converting from a primarily rural to an industrial economy, a problem Japan did not have post war (the Meiji restoration already happened while the Chinese were going through late Qing chaos). I'm not experienced with Thailand's auto industry (beyond that they dominate in pickup trucks).
Good point - what we do is not the visible coding; only a small 10-20% of our time is doing that. It's the 80-90% that is thinking, the considering and discarding of solutions that is valuable and not easily automated.
Driving the entire Bay Bridge (Both Directions) During Shutdown
While I enjoyed the Heechee stories, my favorite of his is an oldie he wrote with Kornbluth, "The Space Merchants".
They are not completely fixed.

They did fix some of the issues (and continue to), but I just don't think the hardware has the capacity to make it right. There are all kinds of graphical lagging, jerking, and stuttering in my completely-maxed-out-with-all-upgrades latest model Retina MacBook Pro, when using it with 30" external monitors.

Like using Exposé with a couple dozen apps open is like:

- Hit button
- Wait... thinking... thinking...
- Still thinking... wait for it...
- OK, here is the Exposé mini-window view, sans animation

EDIT: AND, I should add, my monitors are the old stone-age 2560x1600 type of 30-inch, not the awesome modern high-res type ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJ4BIKA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_... ). I don't believe the current MBP can even drive an external 4K display, which is what I think the OP was referring to.

EDIT2: woah, I realized at that price, I really should be using an affiliate link where I get a kickback if anybody buys it. ;-)
I can't tell if you're joking to make a point. Japan and Germany aren't "modern" societies?

And now you're just shifting the goalposts. You never mentioned anything about democracy in the grandparent post. I would also note that Germany is democratic.
Javascript is no cure-all. Just like flash and java, avoiding the subjugation of built-in browser features (back button, bookmarking, hyperlinks, context menus, copy and paste) requires explicit effort many developers simply don't give either out of laziness or ignorance.

Being able to CURL any page on your site and parse it using standardized, agreed upon tag names is a feature.
Hint: you should be constantly automating yourself out of your current job and into your new one.
Alan Kay, computing pioneer
I hope antirez never stops coding to move into management. I first came to know him during the Engine Yard Hamming Distance contest (2009). I've read and followed his work ever since.
How I lost myself and left Facebook.
I think only the highest of Mozilla and everything they stand for.

"You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome."

What I'm trying to convey is that I don't believe that anyone need make this compromise. Mozilla is awesome, other organizations are awesome, some freelance gigs are awesome. You can be a software developer without putting yourself through anguish, it's just a matter of priorities.
Spot on.

To add a point, licensing will shift the blame from corporations and their management to workers. This will mean that the blame won't be placed on management cheaping out on processes to ensure safety, but instead the 'bad apple' developer. This is bad for both consumers and workers.

Licensing in all industries, especially in medicine and law needs to be abolished ASAP. it has devastated many lives (it's too costly to get multiple opinions) and robbed the middle class in every town across America.
Software people are so arrogant. Auto workers arent and weren't unskilled manual labor.
Oh, of course.

I didn't understand that. Thanks.
Ronald Coase Passes away
There is something that can slaughter the job security of software engineers, but it's not technological advancement.

Before I get to that, my personal forecast is: income expectancy for intelligent and hardworking people will continue to increase but so will variance. Eventually, the variance will become intolerable enough (sans regularization) that basic income will appear to be the only solution; even the smartest people will see a personal need for something like it. There will be a lot of struggling and fighting over implementation (e.g. do college graduates get more? how about families? should society incentivize or penalize reproduction?) but everyone will agree that it's necessary. That's probably about 30-50 years from now.

Okay, so what's the #1 threat to software developers' job security? Not robots. We have robots that write code (compilers) and our jobs are still challenging. Instead, it's upper-level complacency in society. An elite that would rather hold position and keep relative rank than grow society and gain absolute prosperity (but at a lesser rate than others, losing rank). Historically, this is the norm for elites. Many people, especially in positions of power (because power selects such people) would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. If they can conspire toward self-protection and social mediocrity, they will. The good news is that, in a large and heterogeneous society, it's actually very hard to hold any conspiracy together for very long. This is why conspiracy theories overstate the power of such organizations; conspiracies (lower-case 'c') exist all over the place (e.g. Davos assholes) but none have the power to run the world unilaterally. It's too chaotic and large. Societies and nations have set themselves back centuries when their elites conspired toward mediocrity, but I don't think the world elite is capable of doing so-- especially not now.

If the global business elite figures out a way to conspire toward mediocrity, the people like us are fucked, because excellence will cease to matter and being good at what one does will just get one the reputation of a troublemaker. However, the likelihood that anyone could pull this together in a world with unprecedented distribution of technical literacy is incredibly low.

As long as there are people looking to do things in this world, and the world continues to advance technologically, there will be a high level of demand for people who are technically competent. We might be applying our skills differently and changing industries, but there will be work for us, and society would have to reach an advanced (that is, certainly plausible but unlikely) state of degradation for us not to do that work on at least half-decent (e.g. middle-class) terms.
I don't see that that actually has any bearing on what I said, though. Reality will always give some hard bound, on any practical problem.
Great link. I was surprised to find an entry for today... Makes me wonder if the death was sudden.
It's really dependent on what you're talking about. It takes massive amounts of money to do the really long-term research that lays the foundations for much of our private enterprise. We wouldn't have such a fruitful startup scene for private individuals to attempt to innovate with reasonable low upfront costs if not for decades of development in our computing and communications industries, much of which was financed with long-term state investment. How soon we forget.
That only really benefited the Nexus Devices. Far as I know no other popular device has had issues due to lack of fstrim. And all recent Nexus devices already got the 4.3 update.

But since Play Services has system level access I am wondering if they could've technically been able to stuff the fstrim daemon along with the app updates. All it does is wakes up on idle and issues trim ioctls - Linux kernel proper has had TRIM support for a while.
Yes, it's all very quaint, except that they're denying their children opportunities in the real world by not having computers around the house. Nobody can leave the community of farmers and woodworkers because they're so dependent on it and they've never known anything else. In particular, I can't imagine how horrible it would be to be an atheist in that community.
Pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg has had his Facebook profile fucked with more than anyone else, judging by all these disclosures I've been reading :)
No better news for the industry and users could have been know today.
>an incomplete language in which circumlocution is always (not just occasionally) required to convey complex ideas . . . crufted and overgrown . . .

Not disagreeing, but incompleteness comes from the overgrowth sometimes. Interestingly, we now have to use all sorts of circumlocutions every time we need the now-lost thou/ye distinction, and routinely miss its significance when reading Early Modern English texts like Shakespeare or the King James Bible. So even people who are aware of the old distinctions need to use the modern circumlocutions to communicate clearly. Similarly, native speakers will need to conform to World English norms.
Ask HN: What are some of your favorite Twitter parody accounts?
>A website is not a program, let's be fair. It's at most a minimum amount of logic wrapped around content. Automating it is easy, and it has long ago lost its prestige.

Previously, most people would say that it requires programmers to make a website. Now you're demoting producing a website to something that doesn't even require programmers, saying it's been automated for several years.

I think this proves exactly the point of the GP.

Re Re MBA guys - I don't know how many MBAs are working on something more complex than another social network, because many successful businesses recently have been quite easy to build a MVP for with not a lot of programming skills.

Examples of succesful companies with not difficult to program MVPs: AirBnB, Instagram, Twitter, Groupon.

I believe many MBAs could build something like these given some time. If we want to broaden the category from MBAs to just STEM students, I know very few STEM students at my college (which is ~97% STEM majors) who couldn't build more than a MVP for one of these sites given 2-3 months.
Go see these in person at the MIT museum if you ever get the chance. They also have a nice collection of holograms.
How I influenced a map design in Doom 3
isn't this from some book? could have sworn i had read this somewhere, but no credit is given here.

edit/update: ah, ok, so this is from kevin kelly's site, and he's the author of http://www.kk.org/books/what-technology-wants.php which contains either this text or something similar. not a bad book.
Javscript Is Eating the World
Silent and Efficient Supersonic Bi-Directional Flying Wing
I completely agree, but if a version test wins by more than a few percentage points, it usually makes sense to implement the feature even if it does make the page inaccessible to 1% of users.
RE point 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Yes for the domain knowledge, but what about the software? Do you expect an aerospace or biomedical engineer to understand also how to write safety-of-life system?
Everything in Play Services is application level. Just because Apple bundles a mail app and browser in with their OS doesn't mean that those kinds of things make up an operating system. Any tablet maker in China can still use Android to get a complete mobile operating system for free, without even telling Google they are going to do it. So can Amazon. Can I make a new phone with iOS for free, as long as I don't include Apple mail? Not even close. So let's not start pretending that Android is just like iOS now.
Oddly enough I've never personally known anyone who subscribes to the Everett Interpretation who uses it in such a silly way.

To be sure I've heard of some, even some prominent ones (eg Tipler), but on the whole it seems to be an insignificant minority.
if we did it (we won't) it would have to be a hard slap in the face to wasteful spenders of it

I would say that even if we did do it, it wouldn't have this feature.
Yeah, i like to split the world in 2: web pages and web apps. For web apps, i don't hesitate to assume javascript.
Exactly, why can't I open an appendectomy kiosk at the mall!?!
That's a gross oversimplification of what I wrote. If you take only Baugues's conclusion ("don't be reckless, save and network, things may not always be so great") and ignore his premises, you're reducing the article to a platitude. My intent was to show how fears of automation are nothing new and should not stop developers from pursuing their careers.
Please do elaborate on 1 :)
System Administrator
‘BlueLine’ Social Media Network For Cops To Launch
I'm not trying to be hostile. I switched the pronouns to the first-person plural.
Here's Bustle's: http://www.bustle.com/api/v1/sections/home.json

It needs run through a pretty-iffier, of course, but seems straightforward to me.
Do you own stock in a cryonics firm?
There was a chapter in "What Technology Wants" about the Amish and I believe was written similarly.
If the government has compromised trusted CAs to do man-in-the-middle attacks, my thought is that they are only for 'intelligence' levels of actions, at least at this point in time. The government isn't going to tip its hand to foreign adversaries even to jail a few pedophiles (or other breakers of Federal law).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes
Chanting "Bettridge's Law" simply because the headline is a question certainly isn't helpful but that's because it's inaccurate.

As Bettridge himself said:

> they know that story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it

Identifying a headline & story as an example of Bettridge's Law of Headlines should highlight that the headline is nasty link-bait phrased as a question purely to manipulate the reader and that the article provides no insight – in fact it merely serves to further highlight the insidious nature of the headline and the nasty journalistic choices of the author.
I agree with many of your counterpoints to large government, but at the same time, I could write much the same sort of thing about private industry. But the reality is that public and private enterprise both have their successes and excesses. Honest reflection on our economic history since WWII has to recognize that both have worked together to produce the advancement and prosperity seen in the Western world.

I hope we spend the 21st century refining governance in the public and private world, rather than fighting over which side of the economy to eviscerate in search of overly simplistic ideological purity.
I would have gone with a 15" rMBP; I assume he was only considering a 13" rMBP.

I bought a Mac Mini 2.6 GHz i7 a month or so ago, and added a 240GB M500 SSD, 16GB RAM, and 4 x 4TB external HDDs. Pretty happy with it performance-wise, even for Final Cut. I'd probably get an Areca ARC-8050 8-drive Thunderbolt RAID (http://www.areca.us/products/thunderbolt.htm) if I needed faster storage beyond 100GB, though. It's mostly a Plex server, VMware server (although I just use Fusion at home), and testing some proxy/etc. stuff, and is connected only to a 1080p projector and 5.1 HT system. I figure not much will get upgraded on the Mini in the next 6 months -- maybe no upgrade at all, or if it is upgraded, only some pretty irrelevant-to-me stuff.
Before I yell "Get off my lawn", I'd like to remind what seems to be the main demographic here on HN (you know, the 20 something "me me me" short pants crowd) that people, businesses, start-ups, families, friends, entrepreneurs, new ideas, etc - all got along (and flourished) just fine before all this social media crap.

So stop using the social media drivel, there's many better ways of staying in touch - none of which are facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.

Now get off my lawn.