skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it seems many don't agree with the article (as usual) I do. Developers are sitting pretty at the moment because the Internet in the greater scheme of things is brand new. It wasn't really until the early 2000's the Internet exploded in popularity and got a whole lot more complex. There is always some new hot language startups and companies are clamouring to use, every new language or framework seems to create a gold rush of sorts (Rails developers were once white hot property).

But the sad matter of the reality is, more and more people are learning how to create a website. And while little Timmy who knows HTML and a little CSS won't be taking your jobs any time soon, as the supply rises there will always be a plethora of small jobs that Timmy would be able to do leaving the few actual big and complex jobs for the many developers fighting for the job.

I personally think we are a very long way off oversupply in the development sector (especially web). My advice would be to continually learn as many new skills and techniques as possible so if the day ever comes you are at risk of being replaced by a WYSIWYG editor that generates the code for you, you might have a chance of keeping your job.

Software is a lot harder to automate for the moment, but with websites it's at the point where content management systems like Wordpress already make it easy for people from kids to senior adults to make a website without even having to touch a line of HTML, CSS or Javascript. Automated tools can only get you so far, we'll always need designers to design the look and feel of a website, developers with a grasp of modern web technologies and languages to program whatever it is that's creating the website to ensure its output is up-to-date.

I've been preparing myself now for the future. If automation does happen and it will, nothing can truly be 100% automated, but if it does happen, I'll be the guy running the automation stuff, not living out on the street because I was too naive too think it could never happen to a developer like me.

PS. Send some of those recruiters offering six figure salaries my way please...
The wallet is temporary and wasn't really created (if I understood it correctly).
pollute yo metadata with vendor crap. just like jpeg.
How Nintendo's negligence to other platforms will kill it
Twitter (San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle) is hiring.

While well beyond the scrappy startup phase, we are looking for a broad range of skills, from front end, mobile, operations, SRE, and backend positions.

See the job postings at https://twitter.com/jobs and feel free to e-mail me at yann@[company].com
>> Am I the only one who feels the same in technical forums

Sort of. I used to have a forums addiction and have probably 300,000 posts across about 5 forums that I regularly used.

In most cases forum threads are just re-hashing the same things over and over. The same arguments. The same recommendations. Jeff Atwood wanted to fix this real bad.

Especially when you're talking about something like a vintage Apple computer or 80's Ford Mustangs. Nothing has changed with these things in years so why do we need to make thousands of posts with people asking the same fucking questions as they were in 1995?

Tech news sites were another thing. Refreshing AnandTech, HotHardware, ArsTechnica, The Verge, (the list goes on) only to find out that yes, Virginia, the new widget is 20% faster than the old widget!

After a while I realized none of it matters. When I buy a new laptop, I'll spend an hour reading the reviews. If I need to recommend some hardware at work, I'll look at it (and not have to look over my shoulder to see if my boss is wondering why I'm reading SSD articles all morning).
I think microsoft lightswitch is the "visual foxpro" for the web of today.
Realistically most of your readers will come through links and the like, and thus not be willing to pay a subscription.

If it were a site I frequent, I'd probably be willing to pay $3-4/month for a simple, clean, static html version (no need to remove the pictures though -- I can choose whether to load those client-side). Something like this, say: [http://mnmlist.com/unknown/] I'd only pay 15-20/month if I could get the entire web like that :)

Most likely, at 15/month I'd just not visit your site.

EDIT: PLEASE don't use the navigation from that site though. It's ... way too vertical.
So, does this guy win the chunk of cash that Kim Dotcom promised, or what?
Linux: A Beautiful Mess.
I remember when Android was starting to gain popularity (around 1.6 I suppose), one of the key decisions that I really liked was that Google apps would have no more access to the OS than any other apps. There was no preference to Google. This has now all changed.

Further, what's to stop other vendors doing this, possibly without users knowledge? How many users will click "allow" on a permissions box that gives the vendor a huge amount of permissions like this just so that they can use the latest MyTwitFace?
The general problem with buying bitcoins with credit cards is the fungibility of the good you're buying. In other words, bitcoins are so fungible that buying them with credit cards becomes a problem.

When buying anything else with bitcoin, it's generally hard to resell the item, and make your money back. With the amount of credit card fraud, buying bitcoins with a stolen credit card would mean sites offering this service would have too many chargebacks, and they would have to charge a 5% fee on top of the 3% VISA already takes. Few people are going to want to pay an 8% markup on money. Money has a very definite price, they're not like other goods. You can see that you're paying a hefty markup, and people don't like that.

Bitstamp allows you to buy bitcoins by wiring money to them: https://www.bitstamp.net/help/how-to-buy/

It might be me, but I really don't see why wiring money is so hard. I just log into my online banking site and set it up, takes a couple of minutes.
How To Install Incompatible Apps For Unsupported Devices
I don't see the problem here. Play is part of Google's ecosystem, not the Android OS platform. I can download Android's source code, compile it and put it in any device I want (provided I have the technical capability to do so of course). In fact, this is what Android distributions like Cyanogenmod do, and they also provide a binary blob with Google's stuff as an option, if you want to install it. I don't see the reason to demand the Play store app to be open source nor what could be gained from it.
It is undeniable, but of real regret, that many major medical advances are made during wars. Even so, this is fantastic.
In that case, you'd likely prefer a JS based app that used its app manifest to cache the actual moving parts (JS/images) before you headed on vacation and landed on that slow connection. Now it only makes a bare minimum of compressed RPC's to provide the page with the content to render itself. Depending on the content being rendered, you could even get an RPC down to one or two packets, much better than sending you the entire site frame over and over for a minor change (I'm looking at you classic postback driven ASP app).
Thanks Steve, appreciate your feedback. You're right, data and system availability are primary concerns, and ldap.io is designed with those factors in mind.

In the event of networking or connectivity problems -- for example, if your Internet link goes down -- we're considering providing an on-premise virtual appliance configured to automatically replicate with the hosted servers. It would be very low maintenance and a good option for BCP.

For the authentication issue in general, consider the current trend of Identity as a Service and Single Sign-on as a Service -- Okta, OneLogin, and Ping, to name a few. If you use ldap.io for authentication, it would be in the same category of services, and you would also have more control of the data layer.

Along the same lines, Microsoft is now offering Active Directory for Windows Azure, to cater for similar use cases in the Windows world. See http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/active-directory/

In any case, totally understand your concerns, and it makes sense to use the service for non critical purposes, in the first instance.
Good old vocational education.
Google didn't choose the open-source route because it figured consumers would find that enticing. They did that to encourage development on a low marketshare platform. Android exploded in popularity in exchange for fragmentation.
Considering how much fighters cost we could renewably synthesize fuel for them just fine.
It costs nothing to write software with software, you don't need big hulking robots to do it. But it's also a job that has lots of variety; each day you have to solve unexpected, frustrating, novel problems. Not a task for the average robot (or even the average person IMHO).

We have software "robots" that write software and many of us use them frequently. They're called compilers. They do the repetitive and detailed stuff, often better than we can, due to pre-programmed knowledge. Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years.
140 comments in and no mention of TurboLinks? You hit a URL, you get the content. You click a link, it just gets the body and replaces that: no reloading the CSS, or JavaScript, so content gets rendered faster. Search engines get the actual content from the URLs, users get the speed. Issues having to do with making your scripts idempotent are problematic, but it certainly sounds like a good base.
Ford's point is a good one, but it's a bit dishonest. A radiologist's job is processing information - it's easy to move overseas or stick into an algorithm. A housekeeper's job is managing a house and the people living in it - a hotelier is similarly difficult to automate.

Regarding your PPS - it's not so much that demand for software is unlimited, it's that software can be used for far more purposes than food or natural resources. A single algorithm can be used in multiple industries, and given that the world doesn't develop evenly as a whole, there will be software opportunities in the real world (machinery), in processing the real world (commerce), in the virtual world (media), and in processing the virtual world (analytics), and these opportunities will increasingly require more and more knowledge and creativity.
Great solution! One of the reason I love seeing things like this on HN :)

[I realize this could be read sarcastically, but I mean it sincerely.]
I experienced this recently. I had to look through the source of a site because their image gallery javascript was broken.

I was already looking at a gallery of thumbnails... how hard can it be to make each thumbnail a link to the image in question, and at runtime attach a javascript handler to open the image in a pop-up or whatever?
If they can send money to Red Cross from your address they have the private key anyway, so nothing is lost.
Great work iterating! Keep it up.

You might consider changing your banner's background color to something more "minty" like #45E488. It seems more you.

As someone who has never met you, I feel 100% qualified to say this.
I don't understand your point.

I am not a linguist, but in my humble opinion, pidgin doesn't measure how far two languages are; it rather is the semplification of a language (e.g. Latin, or Italian) in order to make it easier to understand and speak by non natives.

Please tell me what your point was, as I don't know what to answer :)
I hope they submitted this to the MEGA Vulnerability Rewards Program https://mega.co.nz/#blog_6

My guess is that it already has, and has been ruled a side-channel/social-engineering attack (requiring either a compromised browser or to run arbitrary javascript on the site).
On the other hand, Google Play Services largely encompasses those features that were /always/ closed source in Android: maps, google+ and GCM. The Google applications that are core to the "standard" Android experience for most users have also always been closed source: Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar.

There are still a lot of new features being introduced to the core Android APIs, with fragmentation issues being mitigated by a provided support library [0] which essentially backports the newer APIs to older versions of Android (some new features are only in the support library).

Android as it's sold in most consumer devices obviously isn't entirely open, but Google still seem to be attempting to strike a balance between supporting the open-source platform on the other, and building up a suite of closed userland features on the other. You might disagree with their judgement on where the balance is, but I think it's unfair to say it's being developed as a completely closed product.

[0] http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/index.htm...
To add to this, generally most user data collected is through javascript.

If you don't have javascript enabled...
Where has this changed? Google's apps are still built on top of the SDK. The only real change was the centralization of Google Play Services, but that doesn't change the level of OS access at all and 3rd-party developers can still tap in to these services.
lazyjones,

you are right. It's not a statement of fact. Let me rephrase by saying that "if you have a strong accent, you are more likely to perform poorly as the CEO of a startup that does business in the US".
Online attack leads to peek into spam den
Not as ridiculous as you think - a large amount of content is locked into PDFs which present effectively as images, and HTML wasn't always as dominant as it is today.

The idea that it is actively shameful to use Lynx is strange and antithetical to the way the web was originally designed - the user agent is SUPPOSED to be in control of presentation, the markup is SUPPOSED to be semantic.
What bugs me about web apps is that I need to download a new copy of it every time I go back to it (or at least send all the AJAX requests again). Load times suck.
A big topic of discussion in music tech right now is active vs passive usage. Active usage is when someone uses a music service or station with the intent of discovering new songs and artists. This mode of consumption values a diverse playlist.

On the other hand, passive consumption is when the user just wants background music and doesn't care what's playing as long as it sounds good and matches the mood. This mode tends to favor a more limited playlist, as the overall quality of the music will be higher.
I agree, it's a bit confusing.
ChargeCard: the USB cable that fits in your wallet
or...... you could check out one of these projects (sideprojectors.com) (disclaimer - I maintain the site btw)
I took a nontechnical friend of mine to Maker Faire in NYC a couple years ago and for the first 20 minutes or so all she could ask was "why?" As in, I know it's possible to make a robot that paints weird pictures or a flowerpot that sings or a giant, iron propane-flame-breathing dinosaur, but why would you? What purpose does it serve? Who's paying for this stuff anyway?

The answer, I think, lies at the center of the hacker mindset: there is inherent value in the experience of making things, and inextricably, the experience of learning how to make them, regardless of the value of the end product. Surely if we believe it's valuable in and of itself to eg. write a Brainfuck compiler or scrape HN for sentiment analysis or build and launch a satellite with the sole purpose of detecting gravitational waves, we must believe it's also valuable for someone to learn to program and build a project, even badly.

So with that in mind, I absolutely think accessibility is important, resume bullet points and job prospects aside; for the same reason I think art, music and woodshop should be taught in schools even though most kids won't grow up to be painters, singers or woodworkers.
Inventing Favicon.ico
>Health care is certainly the major cost, but it isn't the only cost. If I hire one guy to do sixty hours of work instead of two who each do thirty there are all sorts of savings - one workspace vs two, management overhead, training, and most importantly communication.

I think that a boss has to be a first-class idiot to think that one person working 60 hours a week is going accomplish anything near 2x what that person can accomplish working 30 hours a week.
Is this really a thing? More often than not less "popular" people on Facebook are the ones actually posting interesting content.
The top reason to require Javascript is to enable user tracking (e.g. Google Analytics, but not just that at all).
Another hopefully interesting discussion on another HN thread here (Accents, English, Arrogance, Success): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316826

(disclaimer: I am the author of the original article)
So, the ultimate nail in the coffin for open, fragmented services. If you want to build a good OS, you ultimately have to take almost complete control. (Google is basically following Apple's route.)

The reason I think the Google system is worse is that theoretically any application can achieve this level of control. So while I might trust Google, it seems all too easy to trick users into installing a different process which can take complete control of their phone. With iOS, only Apple is capable of this level of control, thus decreasing the attack vectors.

EDIT: Admittedly it's highly unlikely that Google would ever let such an application into the Play Store, thus limiting its distribution potential.
Sorry for not being more clear.

> it rather is the semplification of a language (e.g. Latin, or Italian) in order to make it easier to understand and speak by non natives.

This is exactly what happened to English; English used to have a great deal more complexity, until the French conquered England. That started a great simplification, so that the court (which was French) and the people (which spoke a very Germanic English) could communicate.

Even things like whether a table is male or female (exists in Italian, no?) were removed from English.
The video game community might misinterpret it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frag_%28video_gaming%29
Nice! It'd be good to pair this with some instructions on how to do safe key management by yourself, because you'll only ever be as safe as you keep your keys.

I would link to some here, but I don't even know of any best practices for keeping personal keys safe. (Use smartcard/physical-backed keys?)
This JS code needs to be run on the MEGA domain, right? That's why it's a bookmarklet. Other sites don't have access to the local storage required to extract the key. It does mean that MEGA can get the key and send it back to the site if MEGA was compromised but ultimately the client code needs to get the key to decrypt the MEGA content.

Some way of pinning or signing JavaScript verified by a third party or browser would be useful here. If it could also note what percentage of users was using a particular JS version you'd be more likely to notice if a targeted malicious JS was being sent.
Hm. Interesting. I have not seen this 'lightswitch' before.
It's a pretty complacent article. How long until software development has good quality automation - of a kind that drastically reduces the number of jobs? I suggest it's not as far away as the author thinks.
I'm new to the concept of Bitcoin and the part I have the hardest time with is how do I get out? If I have Bitcoins and want to turn it back into Canadian money, how does that work? Or does it work at all? Am I locked in? Can I only buy tech items on a couple websites that support it?
Its not getting worse, its just more pervasive. Quality tends to be lower than hardwired implementations ("because we can fix it at manufacture time!"), primarily due to the rush to first to market.
...because if it's say 98%, you have just thrown away 2% revenue.
Yeah, in the old days this was all done in hardware and you got hardware bugs like the infamous ones in the CMD640 IDE controller. (I think Apple had their fair share of data corruption bugs in that era too, actually.)
Yea, he did. I think the point is more that MEGA can read the key, and your files without permission. This contradicts their claim "Your data is encrypted by you before upload to our system and therefore we do not and cannot access that content"
We're definitely considering that, but we don't want to be just another enterprise LDAP vendor. What would be the unique selling point, in that case? Elasticity?

The Platform as a Service angle is very interesting, and we're planning to release an addon for the major platforms such as Heroku, GAE, OpenShift, and CloudStack. CloudStack is already setting a precedent with their new LDAP authentication functionality. We'll see if it catches on.
Hate to be the pessimist but surely this is easily abusable? From the way you described the process of sending money from a wallet to another, there is likely some way of using a botnet or something of the sort to run through your site, create a wallet, send to a central wallet, repeat thousands of times?
The Japanese car makers are even more into automation than we North Americans and Europeans are. And the results are actually better: people make mistakes, they are not precise; machines on the other hand are very precise.

Automation most definitely was killing the American auto worker...then China comes along and starts killing automation with very cheap labor. But we don't buy cars from China, the same Japanese cars that we laud in the states are derided in China for being unreliable (given that they are made in Chinese factories without automation). There is a lesson somewhere in that.
There are a couple exchanges that will cash out your Bitcoins to another currency-- CoinBase being one of them.

Sometimes you'll need to go through some hoops to verify your identity, and you'll likely end up getting a bank transfer (as opposed to PayPal, etc).
A lot of the simplicity also came from contact with the Danes during the Danelaw period, effecting a sort of pidgin understandable by both Danish and English speakers in the area. We shaved off a lot of the inflections there as well.

Over the last 1000 years or so, few can argue that English has more or less normalized these earlier influences into a "full-blown language" as the author states. It's extremely rich and has ways to express whatever was formally contained in its Germanic grammatical roots.

What's GREAT about English from a learning perspective is that we DID hang on to a few pidgin aspects. Loss of tense and case inflections make English easier. Mastering its nuanced use is difficult, sure... but outside the US and the UK, you people don't really hold you to knowing which words collocate perfectly with others.

In the next few decades, billions more functional English users will be minted on this planet. Native speakers can look forward to either cringing or embracing innovations that arise from that. It's an interesting time.
Every time Facebook is brought up, some of us attempt to enumerate the reasons why we ostensibly hate Facebook.

But frequently our list just looks like an inventory of our own self-limiting beliefs, bitterness, and narcissism. Perhaps we really hate Facebook so much because it so effortlessly unmasks us and our conflicts with the world.

In an impressive dance of culpability evasion, we come here to re-convince ourselves that the deactivation button is a secret transcendental portal into social nirvana instead of acknowledging the possibility that the deactivation button is our only chance to turn the tides of a personal battle we are merely losing against ourselves.
Looks like a cool project, will check it out.

At the moment, ldap.io is intended as more of a general purpose infrastructure service, rather than strictly identity or authentication.
unfortunately not.

the detect box for the leap is a ~400mm (16") cube centered over the device. unless you're only knee height it won't pick up your hands from standing. (Although it does raise the possibility of amusing apps for 10yr olds :)
GlassWiki: A freely licensed wiki on Google Glass development