skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on the application. There's an enormous amount of work that can be satisfactorily done with plain old transactional CRUD. I don't think that most business users want to pay extra for interactivity in an inventory management system.
This is fantastic. Both in terms of content, but also in terms of delivery.

I've been toying with ideas relating to some kind of text-book killing general publishing platform for a while, but it's not something I'll implement (in the next 5 years anyway). Obviously people are doing this kind of thing already, but this is certainly the closest implementation to the ideas I've been thinking about that I've seen.
For the people that are complaining about this point of view, remember that this is a PAYING customer who is currently $600 a year for the service. I assume that most people saying not to drop the price are not paying users of this service.

I agree that you should not take into account the fact that most people say taht software is too expensive, but I think that you should also take onto account when people would prefer to "roll their own" than pay for your services as it also demonstrates that you dont have a "lock in" effect and so cant charge a lot more than what the product is worth to a customer.
I have an iPhone 4 as well, but with iOs7 coming I'm afraid it could be time to upgrade.

Newer versions of the OS tend to be optimized for newer devices, I remember how my old iPod touch become slow as hell after they introduced multitasking.
Actually, right now I am anxiously awaiting the latest model of Apple's flagship computer, which will ship later this year and is made out of plastic:

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro
Though this may sound odd, I don't know. I haven't read any of it for a long time.
Ignore what geophile says above about being focused on pay. Not getting paid is a big deal and you should work it until it is resolved to your satisfaction. This is business, not charity. You work and are paid for that work. Period.

Go in tomorrow and ask for two things: 1. a summary of all your checks and withholdings since you started, and 2. your last check. If you fail to get either announce you are leaving on paid vacation (assuming you have some banked) and not returning until you receive your check. The no pay stub thing could be a red flag as well - I've heard of several companies who stopped paying taxes to stretch out the cash.

> Find a new job.

Start looking dude. It's time to make a choice for yourself.
Every failing start-up dies the same, predictable death:

Money starts to run out and there is no cash flow. The first things that the company stops paying for are ... health insurance, taxes and unemployment insurance (you may not care, but this is important to you after you get laid off). Really crooked companies will also quietly steal your 401k contributions. Company perks also disappear.

Any external financial accounting agency is fired and not replaced.

Next, the company will stop paying vendors, and if they are a financial middle man to other companies, they will keep those monies as well.

Amazingly, a start-up can stay afloat for 1 year or longer by employing these tactics.

Next, the cash crunch hits harder. Paychecks are delayed, and a short time later, paychecks are issued on-time, but bounce when you try to deposit them. There are some tactics that you can use to make sure your paycheck clears before your coworkers' do, but I won't get into those details. As some money comes in the door, preferred/mission critical employees are paid while others are not. You might be asked to pay for things on your credit card that are actually company expenses, with the promise that you will be reimbursed.

All the while, your CEO will promise paychecks in a day or two, over and over again. You will go along with this because it's kind of a new and exciting thing to happen to you. It's also fun to meet your coworkers for happy hour and gossip about the situation.

Some people will start to quit and find new jobs. The CEO secretly breathes a sigh of relief because .. he/she won't have to be on the hook for unemployment insurance for that employee.

Eventually, the company collapses under financial pressure from creditors and investors. It's ugly and everyone gets laid off without receiving their last few paychecks. So, the next day, you go online and file for unemployment benefits. A few days later you get something in the mail saying that your unemployment benefits were denied.

After spending a couple of weeks proving that you were an employee by showing all of your pay stubs (which, by the way, it looks like you don't even have those!), you find out that since your company wasn't paying for unemployment insurance, the unemployment office is unable to pay you. You think this is crazy, because it's a government agency, but you are screwed. The local government starts going after your ex-company and its leadership, by threatening them with legal action and jail time. However, there is no money left in the company now, and you find out that the leadership weren't official employees of the company, only contractors. Maybe you'll get unemployment money in the future, but you'll likely find a new job before then.

You and your other laid-off coworkers hire a lawyer to try to recoup your last few paychecks. By this time, the company is totally dissolved. Not that there was any money left in the first place.

TL;DR: Your company is dying and you should leave now while you're only 1 paycheck behind.
Front end can be so much more rewarding but I find it too painful. The user never praises the lightning fast backend or that it runs on fewer machines or uses less CPU. The front end nowerdays rarely has to worry about RAM or CPU but all this silly timing shit that drives me nuts.

-> back end
This would be in effect a statement by Apple that there is nothing much left to innovate in Smartphone arena. Only way to beat competition is by price difference. It used to be that every year new iPhone release was actually exciting making me crave the latest model. After 4S, new innovations have been basically faster CPU, thinner body and resolution. The improvements are on border line justifiable to be even called "incremental". And still, there are so many things left to do with Smartphones. Here is my nerdy wishlist for iPhone (please add on yours too :)):

* Ability to use phone as walkie-talkie.

* Weather sensor

* FM HD radio

* NFC chip

* Built-in programmable FPGA

* Ability to put out digital, analog signals from iPhone (turning it to Arduino)

* Higher precision gyroscope and accelerometer

* Infrared LED

* Ability to run apps in background listening mode

* Infrared 2nd camera

* RF transmitter/receiver (900 MGHz range)

* Pen input

* Pressure sensitivity

* Continuously dimmable screen (all the way to 0)
They're certainly not immutable, and do not exist outside of the context of a society. If you're alone, you have no rights whatsoever; they're something we "recognize" (or not) in other people.

The language we use is probably based on ideas that they supernaturally-granted or something like that... which is silliness, but I don't think we should change the habitual phrasings... people are more likely to treat each other humanely if they believe that rights are, you know rights, and the language encourages that.
Native, baby!

Computer vision, robots, avionics, flight planners, 3D simulations, ...

From where I'm sitting, the web is a fad. (Obviously it is not, it's just how it feels to me)
The gif on wikipedia (http://i.imgur.com/ZQMaGhj.gif) was actually a very good example. Thanks! :D
I do backend work, I don't do frontend work as much as i would want to. It seems to go far slower that backend development work.
My preference is database plus backend (or db as back-end, or db plus middleware as glue). The reason is that the sorts of problems that arise there are more interesting and challenging, while front-end programming has problems of a different sort (the problems are less challenging but they are moving targets).
I wonder if this has changed over time as the HN community has grown - perhaps in the morning I'll try filtering out posts less than X days old and see how that affects the top results.

Note that popularity in terms of votes should also be normalized with respect to traffic/users.
You are one of 3 employees, building 5 products, and the founder is not being completely transparent?

I'd first ask the founder to be frank and open about what's truly going on. If that succeeds, I'd then change the focus to less products. If you can't get both those things to happen, I'd suggest leaving.
Gaze Correction for Home Video Conferencing
we called them McBee cards in 1907
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card
The backend will always be my comfort zone. Even though I've been involved in everything from hacking Linux kernel drivers to designing e-commerce checkouts, the backend still feels like home. Actually I've given this a lot of thought, since I also see this pattern in other full-stack developers. When a group can't make a decision on a frontend strategy, people tend to drop off, start hacking and refactoring backend stuff. Tinkering with the backend is also what we do to get up to speed in the morning, or when we're idling during the day. Maybe it's just me, but even after more than 15 years on both sides, I'd pick the backend any day when it comes to feeling comfortable and seeing progress. These are just feeling however, not proof for any real progress whatsoever...
Tractors may be getting smarter, but the entire notion of large-scale monocrop farming is basically forkin' stupid.

Through recent research I developed the distinct impression that anyone who has managed land for an extended period+ with and without modern industrial farming methodology seemed to say that the general outcome of such was dependence on external entities for seeds, technology, energy, fertiliser and pesticides... and this seems to include both academia and government bodies in charge of agricultural knowledge dissemination.

The most lucid illustrations of this quandry I have yet encountered are Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution (a few decades ago) and the USDA's Alley Cropping instructional video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Kwb5yInPM

Basically, the claim is that higher yields with lower maintenance are possible through non-industrialised methods that rely on crop diversity and natural systems.

My impression is that the US (and Europe) heavily subsidise or artificially protect a lot of their agriculture whilst burning loads of fossil fuels to plant, maintain and harvest them which is a situation that has partly evolved to cater to vested interests in government and energy sectors.

China wastes loads of food, leads the world in agricultural research, and certainly does not yet have anything like a food crisis. Not only that, but their population is stable or dropping.

Overall, this article is pretty FUD.

+ Not I!
If someone posts that same link on HN, and we all comment on it, are we all guilty? This seems like a very slippery slope. Wake up America, please!
Debug 20: Ryan Nielsen on Apple and OS X
After spending the better part of 7 years doing what has come to be known as "front-end", and then the past 3 becoming better at "back-end", I've started advocating that the division needs to stop in general. If you can write JavaScript but not something like PHP, Ruby, Python, etc., that's a problem, and likewise the reverse. It becomes a real bottleneck to feature development when you draw these arbitrary lines in the sand, and a lot of it is just mental roadblocks put in place by the labels
I think things will become much much worse for Microsoft before they get better. I'm afraid they will lose small and medium size enterprises and ISVs because their licensing structure has become so complex, overpriced and antiquated that a new generation of customers will refuse to deal with them.

In the past there was piracy as a way to lower the barriers to entry. Today, piracy has become dangerous for small companies in developed countries. All of a sudden SMEs and ISVs are confronted with scores of product feature matrices, weird dependencies and restrictions, kafkaesque partnership programs and long-term committments.

Sometimes they are just plain stupid. For instance, I recently came across this page that explains developer account types: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/jj863494.aspx

It seems harmless if convoluted at first sight. But look at the dependencies they have created. In order to sell Windows desktop apps in the Windows store and use all device capabilities you need a company account, and to get a company account you need to be recognized as a company in your own country.

That's effectively a wholesale import of tax, social security and incorporation laws of countless countries into Microsoft's own terms of service. Microsoft operates in many countries so they have to know how onerous this rule can be. They are erecting a huge barrier to entry for individual software developers and early stage startups around the world.

I'm sure they will claim it's for their users' safety. But this must be the most uncreative, idiotic safety measure ever invented, particularly if you know how easy it is for real criminals to game this system.

Now, I'm not saying that developer relations is Microsoft's most serious problem. Not at all. But it goes to show how incapable this company is of putting themselves into the shoes of those who have to deal with them in any capacity.
Super Fun Kid Time (TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon)
Okay so I'm instantly biased given that this is my daughter, but I think that this is what our community should be about. A young person following her dreams and trying to build something, and put it out there for all to see.

Given the negative stories around the hackathon this weekend I think the good ones are just as worth reading.
Backend generally has a concretely defined api/functionality. Front end runs the risk of someone objecting about things like pixel width, color, etc.

I much prefer backend to frontend for the projects I work on.
Why would Google develop a desktop Android or Office, when they've already got this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_OS
> had not even been given pay stubs for over half a year

In most states, that's actually illegal. Employer is required by law to give you pay stubs.
Bullshit. Typing out http://some.website should never be a crime. Period. Look up the first amendment.
I improved my cable modems signal with 7db by soldering the cable directly to the circuit-bord.
Thats a lot more than 1db and the price was essentially zero.
There are only 2 SKUs of Windows 8 that I know of. Standard and Pro. (At least that you purchase directly, not already on a device).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352061

As nobody else had submitted it that's what she presented. And yes, I'm the proud Dad so maybe a little biased.
Daniel Glazman joins Samsung Open Source Group
Not really, not if we want women to feel they're welcome and safe in the tech community. That being said the guy simulating masturbation on stage was worse.

Of course I'm a little ticked off more than most because my daughter presented fabulously, brought the house down, and now her name is dragged through articles forever about this sort of childish bullshit.
You put the apostrophe in the wrong place.
So if I should find out someone is HIV positive and looking for employment, I should be able to type out the preceding sentence to the HR departments of all prospective employers due to my First Amendment rights?

How about inciting a lynch mob (you know, the kind that hang 'uppity' persons off of trees)? It's just speech, right?
I have voted both as it depends on the type of project.

Front End work when doing native applications.

Back End when doing browser based applications. I rather leave the pleasure of dealing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript pixel perfect UIs pain to others, when possible.
The math: https://www.google.com/search?q=2%5E128+%2F+1E12Hz+in+years
Student loans are increasing the cost of college
I have taken the time to try to work with Mutt, and some other console email tools. I would love to be using something like that full-time, since I practically live in terminal windows.

But ultimately I can't; I don't need pretty colors or graphical tricks. I do need something which understands that it's not 1975 anymore. My mail no longer lives in a local spool file, and there is no longer a local sendmail. I have multiple email addresses, which use IMAP, and remote SMTP.

And none of the console clients -- including Mutt -- can really do that. Every couple years I try Mutt again, and try whatever the current crop of attempted successors are, and get thrown right back into 1975 again and give up in frustration.

(and Mutt, last I checked, actually considers it both a feature and a point of philosophical purity/pride to refuse to acknowledge the fact that anything other than "shell out to local sendmail" exists. Also, IMAP was unbearably slow, usually requiring a full re-fetch/re-index of the entire remote inbox, potentially hundreds of thousands of messages, every time Mutt started up, and multiple IMAP accounts were an unholy mess)
It is not plastic
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec doesn't even consider remoting, and to date Wayland has just punted on it. Is there any way they can both lose? The brief era of only caring about the machine under my desk is coming to an end, and any display system that isn't designed around accommodating latency is going to become a terrible mistake.
> And then he and Ives went onto Titanium and ultimately settled on aluminum. They've not made a plastic computer since.

Macbook from 2006 to 2011 says Hi!
We are soon past the need for genetic diversity. That is just a word for 'random crap we found when civilization began'. We're way past that

I'm not going to comment on the biology/GM side specifically, but there are many scenarios in history where man thought he had dominated nature and got his ass handed to him. Often, entire civilizations descended in to chaos and completely disappeared. Agricultural examples would be the Maya, Angkor, etc. Others are hanging on dimly, like Haiti. Nuclear catastrophes would be another category. Some say the significant destruction of recent earthquakes in western China result from the mega-dam project. Then there's climate change.

You have to zoom out sometimes to see these things: don't blindly put faith in technology, it's not the answer to everything. Sometimes, re-orienting your thinking to be closer to the natural order of things is faster and more effective than trying to out-engineer reality. Biology is no exception.
Because it sucks?
I wonder if it's possible that the NSA did have awareness of the Boston bombing in advance but couldn't stop it preemptively without giving up the info that they were tracking anything and everything. Remember the security detail looking guys Reddit excitedly found when scouring photos? Perhaps they wanted to catch the bombers in action but failed?
the thing that keeps me away from ansible is the pricing model. I find 100$/year/server way too much. and nobody can ensure me that the OSS version is all I'll always need.
I use LPeg myself. What I like about LPeg is that you can compose it. Once I have an LPeg expression that parses, say, an IPv6 address, I can reuse that expression in a larger grammar.
BSOD as a service could actually be interesting, if you turn it around: a webservice to collect tracebacks and do interesting stuff with it, so that developers can quickly find bugs -- like Mozilla's feedback tool, but available to everyone.

In fact, I bet something like that is already available and I just don't know it.
Inciting a lynch mob is conspiracy to commit murder, so it's not a restriction on free speech that would prevent you from doing so.

Telling everyone an applicant has HIV is disgustingly immoral but I don't know if/why you should be barred from doing it. That's a much better question than the lynch mob.
Yes. A "best of all time" should account for "inflation".
Oh really?? Cool; just because it isn't true that Steve Jobs wouldn't release a plastic computer, that doesn't mean I want to spend ten grand on one... :-D

So what material is it? Do you have source for that info?
Neither of those actions are 'just speech', quite in fact they are punishable through the existing legal framework and in neither case is the crime specifically the speech. The crime is what you use the speech to do, whether it is oppress someone, punish them, or bring harm to them.

Pasting a link to the stratfor archive - content that was already available in lots of places - does not do measurable harm to anyone. The idiots at Stratfor who stored CC information without proper security, or the people who leaked that information without paying attention, are the ones who did harm. Once that information was out there on the internet, no single link was going to magnify or increase the magnitude of that disclosure.
Great points all around.

I do agree that for larger company/enterprise type deals, the current iDoneThis pricing may not work and IMO, that's a large opportunity.
Discrimination of that type in hiring contexts is illegal already, IIRC.
One of the bigger sites using this would be https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/.
> Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and plans to switch.

Indeed, but the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X. Wayland provides graphics multiplexing; that's it.

Possibly mangled analogy: it's like saying we're switching from a LAMP stack to Postgres; it doesn't make sense as a statement.
Speaking of untrustworthy employees, and HUMINT, the NSA/CIA could just have agents infiltrated at Google, to get access to a lot of that data.

This is what's so striking about this. I thought Google already encrypted all data, and only a few people had access to it. Didn't they say this many years ago?
Especially if they integrated it with Chrome (a la VPN over SSL). If I have to pick between Google having all my traffic and the NSA, its an easy pick.
LOL, this country.
The groupon post - http://www.groupon.co.in/deals/shopping/Groupon-India-Onion/...
Orthogonality.
Yes. Also, heat is another way of consuming power...
The timing suggests this is supposed to be a PR move. And a cheap/ridiculous one at that.