skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try viewing meta.discourse.org without Javascript on then look under the hood - it's a pretty easy problem to solve with some <noscript> tags. Other approaches use PhantomJS to create a "rendered" copy that is accessible to primitive clients/scrapers.
This, this is a really lame.

You're a software developer which means you have the opportunity to work virtually wherever and whenever you want. You can write software on a sunny day in the local park, inside a tent in the midst of an Arctic storm, or aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.

A laptop can be purchased for $200 and internet can usually be found free. There is no reason to compromise on a less than exceptional job unless you want to live in the idealized city apartment and collect a sizable salary.
Hey everyone, we're currently experiencing a security breach which has resulted in us temporarily freezing Bitcoin transactions. Because of this, claiming your wallet at the end will not work. We hope to have this fixed in the next hour. Thank you all for your patience.
How would this work with "software engineers" who are educated as Computer Scientists? Not everyone who writes important software was necessarily trained as an engineer, nor do they really need to be.
We could take a 9/11 in the shorts every year, for what we spend on the tiger-proof rocks sold by the Intelligence Community.

That sounds like a fair trade considering the cost in human lives... except that there's no evidence we're "trading" anything but our own treasure and freedom.
The solution for this is to solve it in the domains where it is necessary. If you want to write or adopt software for use in a critical system in aerospace then you need to be a licensed aerospace engineer, etc.

There is absolutely no need to license web developers or those who write the usual line of business software etc.
I think what you're trying to say is that there's a huge disparity in individual agency that needs to be recognized when invoking the "voluntary" ideal.
“Quantum Jumping,” or how to co-opt advanced science for personal gain
Review of the new ARM9 powered Lego Robotics set
You're technically correct, which is obviously the best kind. However, on lesser kinds of correctness, I would argue that the Google Services type model at least violates the spirit of that decision. IMHO, the ability to silently add permissions is either a violation of the agreement or a vulnerability in the OS. I doubt any app would last long on the Play store if it did that.
Well, there's some of that, but also I think the whole package of firmware and hardware just does more these days.
How to stay productive when you work in an open office
I think it would have been better to compare this build to the iMac or the Mini. While I definitely applaud osx86 builds, I don't really find this build comparable to a Mac Pro of any recent generation. I think a much better comparison build would have been to upgrade an older Mac Pro 3.1 or 4.1 (EFI64 being the key) to 12 core with maximum ram and video card upgrades. I think right now the 4.1 is the sweet spot (considering memory prices). But even if someone maxed out the build, I don't think it would come close to the new 2013 Mac Pro. Another thing to think about here, especially for developers, is the software aspect of hacked/upgraded osx builds. When Apple releases a new OS version, or a new Xcode version, it might not work or it might be buggy / unstable. This is what happened with my old Mac Pro 1.1 and OSX 10.8 (flashed to 2.1 and upgraded 8 core 3.0ghz w/ 32gb). I was able to get up to 10.7 but 10.8 is messed up and the new 10.9 look like a no go. Which is why my old Mac Pro is now an ESXi Server (working on getting v5u1 working so I can run osx 10.8 virtualized)
not an expert in this area, so I won't comment on the accuracy of your claims, but your comment is full of ad hominem vitriol. please keep it civil, whether you agree or not. HN is better than this.
How is that different from "don't trust, verify"?
There might not be ways to automate everything, but there will certainly be changes to how we do things that facilitate the replacement and downsizing of some otherwise 'creative' jobs. A housekeeper can be replaced by modifying the nature of the house - a fridge that keeps itself stocked and roombas that actually do a proper job, for example.

My point is that the qualitative difference between a creative and non-creative job is mitigated to some extent by all the 'non-creative' stuff we have to do every day. So even knowledge workers are not immune to 'dumb' automation. An example of this would be remote work and off-shoring, which has opened up software development projects to global competition.

However, the argument still stands - knowledge workers aren't unionized manual labour and if robots are going to replace everything, someone has to program the robots. And, there's easily going to be more 'robots' tomorrow than today for some time to come. So what could end the 'world automation' gravy train we are on right now?

IMHO, the average knowledge worker has a much clearer and more present danger that the chance they might be making themselves redundant - and one that would affect pretty much everyone, not just knowledge workers. They should more concerned about that other thing that destroys demand: financial destruction. The redundancy threat that knowledge workers should be concerned about are the sins of our owners coming home to roost; another depression.
Never mind all this nonsense about blogs and voting and such.

Rewrite the docs. From scratch. They are dreadful.

I would like to help but every time I think I have understood angular, it turns out that no, I didn't. There was an undocumented feature that's well documented ... if you read the source code and have been subscribed to the mailing list for a year.

It would also be nice to have a consistent naming standard. For example, why do these two functions have inconsistent parameter names:

$watch( watchExpression, listener, objectEquality )

$watchCollection( obj, listener )

The purpose of `watchExpression` and `obj` is the same: they are an expression that evaluates to the thing that is watched for changes. It just seems unnecessarily messy. PHP-standard-libs messy.

And then there's the confusing use of names. `objectEquality`? No: it's not a function that you pass in. It's a flag to watch-by-value instead of watch-by-reference. Why not call it `watchByValue` instead?
Here is mine: http://www.zmjones.com/mac-setup.html
the simplest is statistical aggregate interpretation.

An interpretation of QM experiments depends on your interpretation of QM :) When one sees the world through Copenhagen interpretation (i.e. superposition of states, simultaneously dead/alive cat) one sees miracles like entanglement, and starts wondering about many worlds, etc... On the other side one can look at Hitachi's electron double-slit experiment :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ-0PBRuthc

It doesn't refute superposition, it just allows to interpret/explain things without it. Of course with superposition gone, quantum computers are gone, and no miracles like entanglement, and many worlds while still may exist lose a potent argument in their favor :)

(note: the experiment clearly shows 2 separate things:

1. the main point of QM that, for example, position of a particle is described by wave-function/quantized

2. superposition of many positions is visible as a characteristic of the whole set of particles

Bringing in additional superposition at the level of one particle doesn't add anything for explanation, it only brings "miracles" that Copenhagen interpretation is filled with )
Computational Journalism on a Stick v1.3.0
The point was made just fine. He said that there is not one definitive compensation class that will be primarily affected. It doesn't seem like you've refuted that.
The issue here is that MEGA presents itself as "the privacy company" and makes some very careful claims about encryption:

All files stored on MEGA are encrypted. All data transfers from and
to MEGA are encrypted. And while most cloud storage providers can
and do claim the same, MEGA is different – unlike the industry norm
where the cloud storage provider holds the decryption key, with
MEGA, you control the encryption, you hold the keys, and you decide
who you grant or deny access to your files, without requiring any
risky software installs. It’s all happening in your web browser!

It's true that everything is encrypted. And it's true that many cloud storage providers hold the decryption keys. It's also true that with MEGA, you hold the keys. What they carefully avoid claiming is that MEGA is unable to read the decryption keys.

All it takes is one court order in a country where MEGA operates ordering them to obtain the user-held decryption keys via the exact same method this bookmarklet demonstrates. MEGA doesn't even have to be involved. In the US, a National Security Letter to your ISP could lead to a man-in-the-middle attack with the help of an SSL certificate that the government orders a trusted CA to provide for MEGA's domain. At that point, all of MEGA's carefully-crafted claims about security are moot.
> Much as it pains me to do this, I cite Node.js as a counter example. People can and do write systems software using their understanding of Javascript as a basis. They may not do it well, but I know for a fact I could write certain types of servers acceptably well with it (I would prefer other tools, though).

Well, Javascript is a proper programming language. If you've got a web developer who knows Javascript, you've already got a web developer who knows programming. For the record I'm not making a distinction between systems software and higher-level programming here.

> You keep re-asserting this but haven't given any quantitive metrics for how it is different. You just keep saying it like I'm supposed to agree.

I think I've made my case pretty clearly (though this discussion is qualitative rather than quantitative). If you only know HTML and CSS, you aren't a "programmer" because you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to write programs that do any nontrivial computation. If you only know Python, you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to make an attractive static website. Of course, you can learn both, and having experience with computers makes learning one somewhat easier after you've learned the other.
Really cool reading this back story, in 2010 I launched a web search engine that displayed search results as favicons (no text, image only). The goal was to appeal to kids (using images and not text) and mobile devices (I generally find only 3 search results fit on a mobile screen using standard search engines, but the favicon engine allowed a user to see 30 search results on the screen at once)...the traction did not last and it was shut down. Nevertheless, great learning experience and my fondness of favicons and their importance only grew.

Edit: The part about Yahoo also made me recall a prior version on Yahoo's mobile search which displayed favicons prominently to the left of the search result text (first thing your eyes saw was the favicon), and at the time I felt Yahoo had the most aesthetically pleasing results page of all the search engines on mobile, all because the addition of the favicons.
Why Etsy's brave new economy is crumbling
They could AES your keys before storing it in local storage and prompt the user for this extra key whenever they need to access your keys. Otherwise your private keys are just stored in a sqlite file or some other implementation specific file that your browser created on your file system.
Sucker Zucker used again in Facebook bug demo
it doesn't have to be a gunshot wound. it could just as easily save lives of people in car accidents.
I don't know if this is up your alley, but have you looked into the aesthetic called 'wabi-sabi'?
I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analyze seemed frustrating then, yet, it is only after a couple of years in industry that I realize the true value of respecting those who trust their data with you and using it to do greater good.
>> You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused us all non m$ users.

Of all the pain and suffering that Microsoft programmers have caused the rest of the world, favicons have got to be near the bottom of the list.
> You can't be constantly calling your manager on his bullshit.

That's the secret - pick your battles. You only have so much political and social capital, but it is rarely zero. Definitely use it if it might save the company.
While pg's comment may have seemed insensitive to some, it has helped bring to light some of the anxieties that foreign-born founders may themselves have (for instance, about the way the local culture they're founding a company in will perceive them due to their accent, not forgetting their ability to communicate anyway).

Posts like this one are a sign that cultural phenomena such as this will be more visible, and won't just disappear into the detritus of forgotten blogs. Do some foreign-born founders struggle with their accents? Yes. Is a strong accent a barrier to communication? Quite likely, yes. Is it worth it for a founder to do what it takes to communicate her message exactly, and nothing else? Absolutely.

Shouldn't the goal be to either: 1) become excellent communicators, or to 2) find excellent communicators, and get them on "our" team?

Now we can focus on, with our characteristic laser-like ability, and talk about why accents may hold somebody back, as a community, and how we can help people succeed anyway.

Some ideas:
- Schools to help founders communicate better?
- An additional service within accelerator programs to help founders with strong accents become effective anyway? (Maybe YC could just take this and run with it)

Solve that problem and move on to the next one. Isn't that The Rule?

Let me take the opportunity to focus on what, imho, started this whole controversy. While I consider pg's position to be valid, he should probably have explained it better, through his usual channel of the essay form, before talking about it in the media, where his words were much more likely to be taken out of context. He didn't, they were, and we're left picking up the media-transformed pieces of what would have been an otherwise instructive take on what might hold some foreign-born startup founders back. pg seems to have forgotten why he writes essays (explore ideas as fully as possible, while leaving room for improvement), and now he has to pay for that mistake with a (possibly -- I have no way of knowing if he'd prepared an article about this) quickly written piece of damage control, published in the middle of a frenzy of accusations and hurt feelings. The "Founders' Accents" essay is weaker than it would have been if he'd written it before he did the inc.com interview, as the interviewer would have had a more self-contained source to reference, counter-arguments and all.[0]

I must conclude, therefore, that his comment may have done more harm, in the short-term, than good. It remains to be seen whether we can turn this around for the good of all.

We should remember, though, that we're in this together, and pg is not the only one who has a responsibility to make sure the people that matter don't miss out on opportunities because of something that can be fixed. Which is not to say that its trivial. Fifteen years is a long time.

[0] For one, I don't think the discussion surrounding it would have devolved into accusations of racism, though that probably says more about my view of people than about pg's detractors in this case.
A good point, but an obvious one to economically-literate readers. The counterpoint to it is that it requires fewer developers to automate a process than it requires to write it. In the short run, unemployment may increase, but in the long run, it'll stabilize.
It wasn't mentioned because that particular fallacy has already been beat to death.

Take a look at Discourse or Bustle. They're pure Javascript apps that are still SEO-friendly.
Fantastic. Date of the post might be nice.
I feel this would have been more comparable with a Xeon, otherwise it's effectively a decked out iMac.

Also: I toyed with the idea of building a Hackintosh to replace my 2011 iMac, instead of waiting for the 2013 model (Haswell, 780MX GPU). By the time I'd specced a comparable machine-i7, 16GB RAM, GTX 770, 3TB HDD, SSD, and a 27" Dell UltraSharp (to match the iMac panel), I really wasn't that far off the iMac's price with only a larger (256GB vs. 128GB) SSD to show for it. About < AUD$400 off, which if you consider the time to order, build, etc, isn't as significant as many make it out to be.

The actual Hackintosh process seems to be relatively "smooth" if you use compatible parts and set a day aside (and a couple to research similar builds), but I dread any warranty issues (and therefore dealing with > 6 manufacturers).

I'm still open to the idea, and maybe it makes more financial sense in US (there's about a 20% markup on parts here in Australia), but the price different wasn't substantial enough to offset the added effort/risk.
Heh, programming is very much about living in your imagination. I love reading, especially long series of novels. When the last book is finished, and that world vanishes before my eyes, it leaves an emptiness for days.

Like reading a book transports me away from my dull seat on a long plane journey, it doesn't matter that you are sat in the same place every day. The point is that there is always a fresh problem, or that you can see the new thing you want to build in your minds eye, if only you could just figure out how to do it.

So maybe teenage you wouldn't understand. Did he really understand why you might want to stay with the same woman for ever (or why you didn't)? Or that your dad is okay really, but he isn't there for ever? Teenagers don't get a lot of things.

Teenage me was dreadful. If I don't impress him, I'm probably doing okay.
The rich, the poor and Bulgaria
The design of this site is intolerable.
I am not sure where you are going off on the parent post. Also, I don't particularly know what you mean by "exceptional job".

However, let me describe a few thoughts I had whilst there (not the submitter).

1. Mozilla's mission is just as important as random company making the pipes more efficient for sending cat/twerking/whatever videos. They are a non-profit and are operated as such.

2. They have some incredibly interesting problems that they are working on. From the research team to the browser development itself. Read interesting = hard.

3. They do pay well. I know this as a former intern; also from word of mouth from people who worked there. :)
>What makes you think that you can give a probability that a program has an infinite loop in it?

I can't. That's why I basically rummage through the code base, using all kinds of heuristics, most of which I make up on the spot. Sometimes it takes me two minutes to find that off-by-one, and other times two days.

Interesting paper. I don't think it will help that much though:

>Ideally, we want to automatically generate patches for all bug reports. Realistically, it is impossible. [...] Even among bugs that can be fixed, some are too complex to be fixed automatically [...] Therefore, a realistic goal is to automatically generate patches for relatively simple bugs [where] the bug reports contain useful information, e.g., the buggy file and the symptom
Prep for Parallella's 64 Cores: Installing Go on Mac OS X
Luckily for me, I don't do anything particularly CPU-intensive.

I just bought the current Mac Pro. Sure, I'd like the shiny new one. But I also needed a faster Mac that could accept a bit of expansion that I could get before the end of last financial year.

The hardest part about being an Apple tragic is separating my need for the zomg new shiny from simple business decisions like "is it worth getting something better now or limping along until some indeterminate future time?"
I highly, highly recommend Doing Innovation in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway to anyone who wants to truly understand the nature of our economy. It's basically this piece elaborated in exhaustive detail by a Ph.D economist and 40+ year veteran of the finance world. To me, it's at once a thorough investigation of the history of markets and the boom/bust cycle, a defense of Keynesianism and the State as an economic player, and a memoir of a pioneer of the modern venture capital industry.

Even more importantly, I think it's an incredible analysis of the actual nature of our economy. We've never actually been any sort of ideologically pure system, and Janeway argues that there's actually something very important about how our system historically has been, as opposed to what purist capitalists and socialists might have it be.

The biggest flaw of the book is that it really needed a gifted editor. There's a lot to the book, and it could have benefited from much more careful organization. Janeway seems to presume a great deal of familiarity with economics and the financial industry, and it made the book challenging for me to fully comprehend without taking notes and looking up unknown terms myself. But it was well worth the effort.
Would Google object to having Play on devices made in and/or for North Korean officials, or Iranians etc? Would Google be forced to restrict access to them? Granted, the amount of people this realistically affects is very small.
Tips From Mentors & Graduates On Whether You Should Step On the Startup Gas
On the Retina MacBook Pro

"Scrolling and animation tasks are jerky or just plain slow. I can’t deal with that in a new machine. Maybe in a year or two when it can drive its screen and a large external retina smoothly."

What? Has the author used one recently? These problems were fixed within a month of original release. I've been using one for over a year and love it.
>The automation of tasks that formerly required writing software, are automated by someone writing new software.

This.

User timr writes:

"Then take a close look at AWS, Heroku, Rackspace...those were all systems engineering jobs. Startups don't have to hire people to do that now. What used to be thousands of jobs is now maybe a tenth of that."

Let's take this point and unravel it a bit. AWS is hugely disruptive. It takes work previously done by operations folks (like me) and puts useful tools directly in the hands of users (programmers).

This is a huge change that increases a programmer's efficiency. (I prefer the term developer, but I'll keep it to stay consistent). In effect, it has removed one of the major barriers to entry, that is, getting your code online and accessible from the internet.

So automation is the thrust of the argument; robots on the assembly line replacing auto-workers jobs. Someone had to build those robots.

In the programmers case, that someone is a programmer.

So, what can we learn from all this?

Change is good. We need these disruptions to setup the next growth phase. Software is different. The barriers to entry are being removed. Productivity increases as a result.

Be on the positive side of the change. Predict, plan, strategize, and stay relevant.

Happy Labor Day.
Megamos Crypto, Responsible Disclosure, & the Chilling Effect of VW A vs Garcia
HAah. That's awesome presentation of a true observation.