skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really hate the attitude in the first few sentences. The "your life is better than others so be grateful" idea never really applies, its like saying "your neighbor gets beaten three times a day, so don't complain when you only get beat once!". Just because someone else's life is worse than yours doesn't mean your own is so great. Also, the person breaking their back on a farm might be doing that because they made choices in life which lead them to have a poor future.

As for your job being what you make it, I totally agree. There are lots of ways I have made my work life better recently even when I hate my job (for example I got a keurig) and until you do everything you can in that aspect you can't be sure you won't be happy. When you do all of these and THEN still aren't happy, find a new job.
Hey Gartner, Dell dude got busted selling pot...
what bills do you have if you are permanently joyful?
printf("%lld", (int64_t) t); wouldn't build on a system that doesn't have int64_t, so one needs to use long long.
What justification does OP offer for calling mobile apps 'basically worthless' (followed by the condescending 'let it sink in', but let's ignore that)?

I'm confused: is this whole thing supposed to be sarcasm? Or does OP mean that apps are viewed by users as worthless because they are so cheap?
Companies have been made and destroyed on the golf course. It's a reality that sucks.
There' a difference between having "large swaths of time that are a bit mind numbing", and having those swaths taking most, possibly all your working time. OP said:

> I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this"

-----

> Our job is not to program, our job is to create value.

It's supposed to be the job of every worker out there. Even janitors (believe me, clean toilets are quite valuable). Or maybe you think our job is to think about what creates value, then do it (or have it done)? That part is not programming, it's business analysis. The OP was a junior programmer, and as such likely had no say on BA. Heck, in general, junior programmers don't even get to chose their programming language, nor their build system, nor the high-level architecture of the programs they write. Genuinely thinking of creating value? That's a pretty good way to get fired. Just do what you're told, and watch (edit: and learn from) the consequences as they unfold.

-----

> You should be getting your jollies off of making cool shit happen, solving real problems, not necessarily that you just invented some sophisticated new algorithm.

True. However, the OP said:

> Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS.

This is not making cool shit happens. It's loosing untold amount of time battling accidental difficulties. Solving "real problems" is precisely what the OP would have liked to do:

> There were a lot of really hard problems that programmers had to solve that didn't exactly involve javascript hacks to make internet explorer users happy

Working around a problem (such as IE6) that could in principle have been avoided in the first place, is not the same as solving real problems. Computers were supposed to augment the damn human intellect, and now they're mainly used to extract money from other people. This emphasises the short term and zero-sum aspects of our economy, both of which are poor at advancing humanity forward.
Nigeria attack: Students shot dead as they slept
The author's argument is faulty. The value from being able to take notes / manage to-dos properly on a multitouch device may be rather great to many people.

However, the price is not determined by this. The price is the result of an equilibrium. There is a process of underbidding going on which lowers the price for the app very close to cost of producing it, until it is unattractive for new competitors to enter the market.

The magic thing about this is that it delivers these products to the world in great number at close-to-zero pricing and that's pretty nice for the world as a whole.

Think about it this way: It was worth buying mainframe computers at many million dollars a piece and with embarissingly low computing power back in the 70s to some people.

Obviously, when these people buy a computer with a million times the performance at 1/1000th of the price they get a great deal. So it's fair to say that the value of commodity computers is to some people much much higher than the market price. That does not change the fact that producing commodity computers is a cut-throat business with ultra slim margins.

So what I am trying to say is that this emotional / ethical notion of value needs to be seen as distinct from market pricing.
We are off air for today. Will cont tomorrow 9am gmt+2.
Haha I love so much when the media misinterprets skids for real hackers.
Yes, I chose to stop there for pragmatic reasons, however, the intention was always to add the other 4, 5 & 6 byte forms if/when needed.

This was as much as I needed to test my wide char code (and to parse written languages e.g. Chinese). At least left like this my code would error properly if it encountered a character it didn't know.
I really dislike articles that generalize based on race, religion, sex, etc. It's inappropriate and says nothing about individuals (all of whom are unique).

When you're researching a large nation with more than a billion people, you'll find a lot of people who have degrees and a lot of people who do not and a lot of people who like chewing gum and (again) a lot of people who do not.

The only thing the results should tell you is that there are a lot of people there. They say nothing about the average individual.
> If work was always enjoyable, then they wouldn't need to pay you to do it.

Why do football players, musicians and movie actors get payed 1000x as much as the software engineers who made the technology to make possible their success? TV, Internet, radio, now all HD quality. So that some people can enjoy their work and earn millions while we who invent and produce the infrastructure should suck it up and call it work?

Does our society really encourage people to do stuff they dont really want to do, stuff they dont find enjoyable?

Just my twist on this.
I think most of the disappointment comes from not being able to work as you'd like to, and with colleagues that just don't care. The solution to that is freelancing or changing jobs.

Or, as jwz has done, open a bar and sell beer instead.
Meet the Real Heisenberg
GNU Guix 0.4 released
That's not the same at all. Comparing getting beaten vs getting beaten more is not the same as working in an air conditioned office vs a farm.

To make any job "fun", I always have IRC and messages going so I can talk to people a lot of the time. Keeps the day exciting.
What I find particularly messed up is the huge relative difference in the price of the mobile device and the apps that people install on it.

When it comes to buying the device, thousands of people line up outside Apple stores and pay - I don't know - $600 for their device.

Android devices are the same, many people easily spend ~$400-$600 on their device that they may only use for one year.

So a good chunk of mobile users are people with good income, living in rich countries and are well capable of paying $5-$10 for their apps that they run on their expensive/high-end devices.

Yet when it comes to paying for apps they struggle as if their monthly income is $10.

There are many factors involved but I think the most significant one is by far the psychological perception of the value of apps that has been created due to App store and Play store pricing.

There are also many people who are willing to release free and good-enough quality apps because it's their hobby or maybe they want to create a portfolio for themselves.

This reduces the perceived value of these apps.

In contrast people can't find other professional services/tools for free. I mean, say, lawyers, doctors, accountants, electrical engineers, etc... don't produce and provide their services/work for free where you can download a free health checkup from a doctor whose hobby is being a doctor.

So the perceived value remains high.

Software engineers are unique in this regard because they 'discount' their work constantly and justify it by saying 'i love doing this'.
Not to say your opinion doesn't count but theres a huge difference between being the founder of your own company and following orders from a pointy haired boss.

True being a boss is not all roses but your problems shift to a higher order, such as how can I build something customers would love... Versus how can I fix this trivial bug because my boss told me to?
I have found all of my procrastination to stem from lacking a certain degree of knowledge of how to perform the task that I'm procrastinating. When I don't know how to do something or I don't know how long it will take, then I don't know where it fits into my schedule, so I never fit it into my schedule. Most of the time, I grossly over estimate how long something will take, i.e. "all day" when it's probably only a 15 minute issue.

Of course, there is the opposite issue of grossly underestimating the problem. I've had "close old checking account" on my todo list for well over a two months now. I thought it would take 15 minutes to just call them, maybe scan a signature or something, and be done. They actually want me to come into the office, which is over 3 hours away (hence this issue of wanting to close the account). It is experiences like that that help to keep the gross-overestimation/procrastination game in business.

How do I fix it? I choose a day where I decide I will be fine if the only thing I get done is I find out how long it will take to get one thing done. Usually it's not that bad, though. I usually end up getting a whole slew of things done. But being OK with not getting anything officially done for a day helps me to kill the procrastination cycle.
As a keen rider (S1000-RR) I would love this. I mostly commute on mine and in the hot Toronto summers the heat is what kills you. I'm pretty sure this thing would run way cooler.
Why you should create a Social Resume
What I do in the shower
So, my Mom decided to secretly film me/ spy on me to show people what I do in the shower. As you can tell, she is not that great of a spy... LOL!

Anyway, she caught me singing "Nessun Dorma" by Puccini. Enjoy! :)
I use a 1-2-3 system that works fairly well for all my work related tasks. One main task, two medium ones and three small ones (guestimated myself). I always start with the big one. This is fairly conservative and less than I do on a typical workday but I think not adding too much is important.

I write them down in a notebook each day in the morning (might be better doing it the evening before) and then cross them off when done. Usually I add more adhoc stuff when I'm done with my "pyramid"

I keep track of long term stuff, ideas, projects and so forth in Trello but the day to day todo lists are in a plain notebook.
I also keep my inboxes empty and make it a point of emphasis to congratulate myself on removing stuff from my inbox (30 minute mailcheck is usually one of my 3 small items).

Personal stuff...I don't plan that at all.

For me that fixes most of the stuff mentioned in the post. The notebook TODO list works very well for me.
It's a pure client-side personal search engine for bookmarks, using HTML5 local storage. You can add (and search) arbitrary text to the record. It can import your existing bookmarks, too.

Sorry about the vertigo. :-)

If you want to skip the presentation and go straight to the live site: http://pse.contraterrene.com/engine/
Is a mobile/cell phone a computer? Legal proceedings started in a misuse case.
I was storing a lot of raw data (the content of the page crawled, PDF files) and there's no real gain to keeping it inside of the index.
What I do in the shower
The no-logging VPN was a dead-ended according to the article. His 'sin' was that all of the RATs were connecting back to him directly (via the no-ip dynamic DNS).
Nothing technically relevant here. Just your regular not-so-clever asshole behind a computer.
I have my doubts that prices are going anywhere but down. You can stubbornly keep your app's price high if you want but a couple of dozen others will gladly step in your place.

I think the author is wrong here; apps do offer real value but they are still close to being worthless economically. What developers should start realizing is they shouldn't spend so much effort on todo lists, podcast clients, rss readers, or any other trivial app category that many people do as side projects for free for fun.

As a result we might get more genuinely innovative apps as developers look more closely at what niches are being underserved.
Definitely. JetBrains have the best IDEs out there and you save a lot of time developing.

So it's CHEAPER to pay for PHPStorm.
that's open source exist.some part of the work doesn't give the flexibility what you want to build.if you're happy with it share it and share your happiness with others.
Seconded. It's not our job to create value.. Well it is but in a perverse way. It's our job to follow a boss' order and do what he thinks has value to his life, his salary, and him not getting in trouble with higher management
Would the FBI need a warrant to get that info from the ISP? If so that's probably why they went the FB route.
Animated Border Menus
RFC for an "open source" pharmaceutical
A Javascript URL Builder and Manipulator
Python bindings for Valgrind's VEX IR
Hate the title.
I think this is the direct consequence of the way IT is taught in many places. The guy was truly a researcher, a scientist. He was able at doing theoretical tasks well, and this is also an important work and good calling. But as I understand he chose the "commercial IT" career. This is not science, in fact they don't need smart people, although they hire them. And the result is you work in a wrong place: too much chore, brain not needed, technical dishonesty, and often you cover your management's ass with your work.

I think programming is easier for those who learned it at non-IT work: they don't have passion for theoretical, ideal things, and every chore solved is a holiday. I did like this. I had no time to argue about semantics/approaches/OOP, just to resolve problems with very limited time. Then I went to professional IT companies, and except for money and some smart guys around, the work isn't inspiring.
I can totally sympathize with the way the author feels but at the same time I'm very aware of how much of à luxury it is to be a software engineer. especially nowadays with so many emerging technologies. if you're current job has become stagnant and your not afforded the flexibility or the ability to influence change then it's time to move on. if you're afraid of losing a opportunity coming from equity or share s then that does factor in. best you can do is try to apply all the amazing things you learn from sources like hacker news and wait until you're next move becomes clearer. wrote this from my nexus 7 . really like this hackers news app.
There is already http://getsimpleform.com/ for this. Ironically, its the most popular thing I've built with a fraction of time I spent on other projects like https://substancehq.com/ .
I think, as a founder you are missing the point that 99 out of 100 times you are told - explicitly or by work schedule "do not do it in an interesting, performant or elegant way, just get it working somehow and move on"
My old^3 workplace has had an equivalent for years, but running via IRC/SMS (it's been around since before phones were good at complex webpages) - a small, tight Java codebase. Sometimes I despair at how many extra layers of cruft seem to be spent making everything webby (memcache for an app this simple? really?), when the end result is the same level of functionality.
Step 1, add a talk page about "How to add bias into Wikipedia" discussing bias from a very pro-Israeli point of view.

Seed distrust, misinformation and be obvious that this article is biased, make no attempt to hide it, this blatant display will despite the reader knowing about it, build trust in the article and writer. Its magnificent. Use this trust to point out the negative sides of the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Step back and watch as the readers take your/the Israeli side, as the trust built from exposing bias is still valid as previously mentioned. Go Israel. There is no Israel lobby in USA, but there is an Arab one. Its called an Israeli salad not Arab salad. And so on...
Not really, when the 6 million devices are almost all part of the dying feature phone* niche. It only goes down from here.

* I consider the iPhone to be the first "smartphone" by a reasonably modern definition of the word.
I use org-mode and emacs now for bookmarks.

Org-protocol + bookmarklets makes it easy, just click the "Bookmark" bookmarklet and it sends the URL/Description (anything on the page that I want really) to emacsclient which uses my own capture template and prompts me for some keywords.

C-c / /, ack, and ctags makes searching those bookmarks very fast and easy for things I vaguely remember!
I would argue that authors are with software engineers on this. You can find many free works online from authors who were unable to get a publisher interested. They may not be as organized as software engineers, but they are definitely out there.
Sure, but I could top-up that Triumph and extend my range pretty much anywhere as gas/petrol stations are everywhere.

With an electric bike, the options start to become limited and a greater range is desired.

I couldn't see a re-charge time on the Mission site, but the Saietta cites a 3.5-8 hour full re-charge time dependant on the power supply available.

Depending on temperature/weather a ride from London to Birmingham would be risky. Unless you'd planned in advance and left at first light so you could ride back at dusk, you'd probably have to stay overnight even though the ride would have only taken a couple of hours (max). That may be great if you want a day out somewhere, but less great if you want a day out riding.

And this is being marketed as a "superbike". But it couldn't participate in existing race events (even if rules permitted an electric bike), as the distance of a race at Silverstone is 263 miles. Both the Mission and Saietta could not complete even half the distance of a race event, and even if you step down to track day events the electric bikes wouldn't last the event (7 x 20 minute sessions @ 80% speed is beyond the range of the bikes... you'd hope to go faster than 80% speed anyway).

So what is the real current usage of a bike with such range and re-charge time? Commuting.

Suddenly that's one hell of an expensive commuting bike.
Seeing how it turned out, I'd say he was rather unlucky that he got Miss Teen USA's computer.

Little bastard could use some jail time.
This is pretty neat, when I finally got to the tab i opened it on, it was on the last slide (of a deck i did not know existed). When I clicked to try i had no idea what was going on. My suggestion, write your presentation in paragraph form and put it with the product somewhere.
> Why do football players, musicians and movie actors get payed 1000x as much as the software engineers who made the technology to make possible their success?

Do you think their jobs are cake walks? You think football players really enjoy the training, really enjoy destroying their bodies on a weekly basis? You think musicians haven't toiled for years and years making no money at all before reaching the level where they can make a living?

Even if you believe that they enjoy every minute of it, you are pointing at an extreme minority. Software engineers are in the top 5 best paid jobs and frankly, our jobs are ridiculously easy and enjoyable.
> the business of creating products which offer very little value to people

my view is it's not that most apps offer little value, but the consumers' perception of value is skewed. You can buy tools today for <$5 that would have cost $50, $100 or more a few years ago, and are miles better than their old counterparts. Also, in a way, Apple is forcing the trial + buy model to become free + in app purchase, so paid upfront becomes a huge negative.
The intro was very long and boring. You should be able to explain exactly what your service does while standing on one leg. That spiel would give someone a vicious leg cramp.
I'm curious what guarantees you're looking for that you don't get with Go that you'd get in other languages. I haven't worked with the more esoteric languages like OCaml and Haskell, so I might be missing something simple.
Thanks for polluting my web history so that I can't just hit "back" to get to HN. :P
>I always have IRC and messages going so I can talk to people a lot of the time

In a lot of software shops, you are not allowed to chat, use IM or even bring headphones (like here)
End of Day Alarm Concept
Drug ?
Using Haskell at SQream Technologies
Caste system it is all about qualification. Only trader community can trade. Only priest community can pray. Now hereditary qualification a has given way a little bit to official qualifications. Qualifications gets precedence over skill.
Why is it emotionally easier to spend $5 on a coffee vs spending $5 on an app?

I have a theory on this - I think we price experiences differently from objects, and have a much higher bar for buying an object vs buying an experience. And I think the reason for that is ultimately loss aversion - if we buy a bad coffee it's gone and we can forget about it, whereas if we buy an object we're stuck with it, a constant reminder of how we made a bad choice and lost money.
As someone who bought Clear I fully disagree with the premise of this post. All they had to do was recompile the app and potentially fix a few small bugs. You can't sit there and act like it was some monumental change that warranted screwing over your existing users. If they are unhappy with how much money they are making then they simply need to raise their prices.
Since many of the comments here seem to miss the op's point:

He is saying that Indians seem to think that you need a degree to be successful, and discount the entrepreneur category by itself. He clearly thinks this is untrue and a counterproductive attitude, but there it is.

He is probably bringing it up because it is hard enough to be an entrepreneur without people constantly telling you that you will fail for one arbitrary reason or another.

By the way, this holds pretty much true in the United States -- most middle- and upper-class people think you need a degree to succeed.

But the entrepreneur category is probably given more respect. E.g. my friend's daughter is postponing college to work on her startup - she mostly getting very positive reinforcement all around.
> It's a good idea, but penalizing jobs for mentioning pizza, beer or ping-pong is ridiculous. In fact calling those "hollow rewards" at all is ridiculous. They suggest a friendly, social atmosphere, arguably one of the more important features of a job.

Pizza and ping pong aside, mentions of beer and alcohol are a big no no and making those things present at work is a horrible idea. It alienates those who don't drink and those who have previously had drinking problems and, if my experience is accurate, those types of places heavily rely on drinking events for socializing, which further alienates.
Non-tech-savvy folks I would hope would understand the wrongness of a bunch of children being thrown in solitary for wanting to play Angry Birds.

If the American people can't and won't see the wrongness in that, then America truly is utterly doomed, and its populace deserves the darkness that will ensue.