skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> _but I didn't realise that Jobs gave Gates the actual computers before they were released ... including operating system and all_

Microsoft was by far the biggest software developer for Mac OS and had more programmers working on it than Apple (and feeding stuff back to Apple). Gates appeared on stage at the Mac launch to promote it, and Gates and Jeff Raikes (ex Apple) tried to get Apple to license Mac OS with Microsoft's support.

Like Apple, Microsoft also hired ex-Xerox programmers, so the two companies were both collaborating closely and drawing on a common source.

Otherwise, as others have noted. Gates was a nerd and had vastly better technical skills than Jobs, who basically had none at all. Jobs was a marketeer who capitalized on Woz's technical skills.
>Pre- and post-checks are of course possible, but I've rarely seen them used in practice.

I agree, I wish more people (especially Javascript developers) saw the value of pre (and post!) checking.

>The reason I call it one of the biggest advancements is that it is actually being used in production, has low overhead (both in cognitive load and performance-wise), and actually handles the complexities of duck-typing. It shows that it is practical. (By contrast, Erlang is sufficiently different to most other dynamic languages, both in use case and semantics, that it is difficult to generalize from Erlang to say Python).

This is fair, I just meant to point out that conceptually this isn't new, it's just a new implementation. Can you expand a bit on what you said about duck-typing?
It's shorthand for an end result that is in practice similar. If I fork the project, add new features, and license my new code under the GPL, a user of the forked version needs to abide by the copyleft provisions. They could, of course, continue to use the original Apache v2 code without my GPL'd additions, on a non-copyleft basis, since I cannot relicense the existing code.
Moneyball at work: Big Data in the workplace
Just a slight suggestion that doesn't actually have to do with the article itself:
Make your links stick out more. Maybe I just have bad eyes but I really can't tell if a word is a link until I hover over it.
I meant changing ssh port from 22 to whatever, not breaking the protocols, since it's internal use who cares (I found people who does). Actually you only need to follow port standards for public-facing stuff, typically just DNS, mail (pop, imap/s), http(s)
11 Years of Teehan+Lax
Coral cache has it:
http://blog.splinter.me.nyud.net/salaries-for-developers-and...
C is to low-level OS-independent programming as Rails is to web programming.
An open question - does this move to Open Source increase anyone's likelihood to work there? My impression is there are reasons for and against working at GS, but their commitment to Open Source isn't on either list. Thoughts? Am I wrong?
It doesn't sound like it is sustainable to have these subsidies for very long:

- At current rates the Feed-in Tariff pays you 14.9p for every kWh you produce, whether you use it or not. The Feed-in Tariff is TAX FREE and RPI Linked.

- Export your excess electricity to the grid and earn an additional 4.6p/kWh.

(http://www.hanergy.co.uk/why-solar/feed-in-tariff)
Tenth Anniversary Treats: Win a full bookshelf (of Pragmatic Programming Books)
The About Krita booklet says: "Krita is pervasively multithreaded and can use all cores in a multicore machine."
http://krita.org/aboutkrita26.pdf

The Krita devs have talked about using OpenCL to speed things up with hi-res canvases: http://kde.6490.n7.nabble.com/Krita-performance-td1530904.ht...
You can make a derivative that also includes GPL parts, and the entire package will be GPL for practical purposes.
I was going to say the same thing. What is it?
> Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords

No they're not. A username is something you intentionally give out to other members of some community so they can identify you. A username is by definition not secret at all, and it must necessarily be easy for others to replicate. It is not easy to replicate a fingerprint.
The problem is that this is a tax dodge for rich middle class people - at one time selling your solar energy back to the grid you got 8% return for 20 years guaranteed by the government.

Even after the scheme was amended its a nice little subsidy for richer people it's the poor sods on key/coin meters that are paying for this.
It clearly isn't actionable? I can rely on your legal expertise for that assessment? Had you heard of per se libel before he brought it up?

And, is that what he's saying? "Don't theorize about public figures"? That's not what I read.
Mysql has Transactional DDL?
P2P Bitcoin exchange [pdf]
Did you mean "strengthening federalism"?
It is an easy way to deploy a project from Github to your own servers in less than 15 minutes.
The complete history of Twitter, as described by the New York Times
Reason by analogy much? Layered security and out of band. Flaw in ssh? Still have another speed bump in the attack vector.
Snabb Switch and Terastream
Salary Negotiation for Geeks
Honestly, this is not my experience at all, and I'm not a DBA. I install postgres, I fiddle with setting up a user & pg_hba.conf to allow connections, and after that it's basically game on.
Because these numbers are drawn out of a rabbit's arse?

They don't provide methodology, or any decent description of categorization; this infographic is worse than useless, it obviously has an agenda.
Thank you eli_gottlieb, do you have a link to where to buy their book and a link to their website?

My AGI project is stalled and this level of AI is beyond my understanding right now, and I have to find a better source to read. I've been using an old AI book from Radio Shack that my father-in-law gave me just before he died in 2002.

I think it was designed for the Tandy 1000 series and BASIC or Prolog that he used to have but I have been trying to convert it to different programming languages. The problem is my wife cleaned up my stuff and I cannot find it anymore. I think this was it: http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Artificial-Intelligence-... but I am not 100% sure so I have been guessing.

I got sick and became disabled in 2002, and then my father-in-law died of cancer while I was in a hospital almost dying myself. I wanted to finish the AI project he wanted me to do for him, but I've been sick and in way over my head.
This Guy Just Sold $600,000 Worth Of Board Games
If you're concerned enough to set up an SSH bastion host, do the right thing and set up a VPN. Not only is it a completely separate application (vs two SSH daemons which might both be exploited by a single 0day), it gives you fine-grained control over what users get access to what parts of the network, it doesn't magically grant a user shell, and ultimately allows for tunneling any network service without fumbling with SSH tunneling.

IMO, If your aim is to provide a clandestine entry point to your network, port knocking is amazingly effective. Your host can be completely silent on the internet and seemly be offline but still provide network services. Keep a honeypot online on the same network and most attackers will be busy for weeks/months.
This would make one think that in the 70's all software engineering was awesome and exciting and everything that was done was cutting edge. The truth is that at this time it was the same as it is today. They were writing machine code (because they had to) and drivers for everything. They used punch cards and time sharing machines. They didn't have GitHub or the Internet so code sharing was not really possible outside your immediate social circle. I think that there were some people then (just as there are today) who worked on exciting stuff, but the majority were just doing a job.

This is very true. It's easy to have some appreciation for being closer to the machine in prior eras, but it is a much better time to be a programmer today. There are many more tools, and much more collaboration available. The time from idea to completed project is much shorter. The ability to scale projects is much higher. The wait time for code to compile and run is much shorter. I can go on and on...
Benford's Law Mantissa Test
I have a hypothesis. Is it possible that the people who talk with wide-eyed wonder about programming after doing it for ten years and the passion that they have for writing software haven't come to appreciate the banality of almost every problem that they're going to be asked to solve in the software space? If you find putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms challenging and engaging after ten years, you may lack the mental capacity to really appreciate and understand why programming is terrible.

The reason open source software exists is because programming is terrible - if programming were the digital orgasm that these people pretend it is, people wouldn't have been bitching for years about how bad the open source ORM they're using is - they would have rewritten it already, twice.

Programming is a menial mental task for anyone with the capacity to properly abstract their real world problem into a solution that a computer can understand, with a few bits of crunchy debugging on top, that has no reward on its own.

We program, not because it is fun, challenging, or fulfilling, but because it is morphologically necessary for our continued existence as solution creators and problem solvers.

90% of the time spent programming is a slog. All of the enjoyment comes from the 10% of time spent solving cool problems, but more and more as open source technology gets better, sturdier, and more engrained into IT, the 10% problems are being solved before ldconfig is done doing its thing, and so you're left with 95% slog or 98% slog.

Are there domains where programming is still hard? Most definitely, but for most programmers programming is no longer drole.
How about video decoding? Can it rely on gstreamer for codecs support?
I started on £25k
I feel like this isn't asking the right question. The answers you're going to get are going to be a combination of a) people's perception of what Rails and Django can do and b) people's perception of what the future of the web.

So, let's first look at what Rails and Django can do. Ruby and Python are both slow languages compared to Java, Go, C, and even JavaScript (thanks to companies pouring a lot of work into it). However, computing power is increasing. In the Ruby and Rails world, there has been good work on JRuby, Puma, etc. to help concurrency and move away from the process-based concurrency model. I'm less familiar with Django here, but Python does have frameworks built for concurrency.

Now let's look at Node.js, Java, and Go. All three have good support for handling multiple connections within the same process (via. eventing, threading, and goroutines). Rather than taking up a process per connection, they just add a little bit of RAM overhead and get to stay in the same memory space with cheaper context switching (or none in an evented system). That deals well with long-running processes that would otherwise block a process, tie up RAM, etc.

So, Rails is improving its support for running in a threaded environment and while I don't know as much about Django, Python does have other options addressing this issue. But as it stands today, alternatives have a speed advantage and somewhat by-default operate in a better way for concurrency.

Now, if we're looking toward the future, what do we need this for? We don't need this for things like serving CRUD. If you're trying to keep lots of connections for a chat application waiting for a response, that can be better served by alternatives. However, it should be noted that 37signals does chat via Rails. When thinking about the future, you should think about what is happening in the application and how that affects things like context switching, RAM usage, etc. I don't want to predict the future. If you want to, think about how applications may work that would be better served by systems that don't rely on process-based concurrency.

As some unsolicited closing advice, I find that a lot of people spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over their tools. They want to pick the one set of tools that will last for eternity. Just as your laptop will age and be replaced, the code you write will. Obsessing over tools keeps many from doing anything. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. I'm guessing you see things you want to build - things you could improve upon. Don't worry about having to modify, extend, and do things differently in the future if it's keeping you from doing anything today. Tools are just that: tools. They aren't your product. They're meaningful. Using a better tool is more enjoyable and can create a better outcome. But don't obsess about it trying to guess the future and insulate yourself from future work. Build!
Highland Creek Partners, Canada’s newest search fund, now seeking targets
That does not follow. Making a service unavailable to an attacker is an excellent way to prevent it from being attacked. And ssh may have holes in it, it was written by people, people make mistakes and there have been holes in it in the past.
If you haven't read the Vanity Fair article mentioned, you should. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...

Here are some damning excerpts:

"“Did you take the strats?” asked one (meaning Goldman’s trading strategies). “No,” said Serge. That was one thing the prosecutors hadn’t accused him of."

"McSwain [the FBI agent] later conceded that he didn’t seek out independent expert advice to study the code Serge Aleynikov had taken. (“I relied on statements from Goldman employees.”) "

"the F.B.I. had not sought help from someone who actually knew anything at all about computers or the high-frequency-trading business"
yawn Nothing much to see here.

Do something about the labor and permitting costs of a solar install in the developed world and I'll actually be impressed.
How A Box Of Cereal And Acting Like A Cockroach Helped Airbnb Succeed
Lattes, Slowmo and Why Mobile Video Will Catch
This 'response' was needed. Thank you! If anyone is interested in getting a refreshing perspective on job and life satisfaction, you might consider reading 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' by Cal Newport - great read on what provides for a fulfilling career. I think the original writer of the post could benefit from that.

http://www.calnewport.com/books/sogood.html

Enjoy
Funny, I have teen/pre-teen children and my reaction is the exact opposite.

I, mostly unsuccessfully, ban the children from having passcodes on their devices so that I can do backups, act as communal spy for various parents etc. They, on the other hand, mostly add passcodes (then change them regularly) so that their siblings don't go onto their phones and change the wallpaper to amusing photos, delete Minecraft etc.

Having Touch ID whereby only they, me and their mother can access their devices is manna. And it makes confiscation substantially more meaningful, assuming you can switch individual prints on and off.

I can't wait, although, as I'm too cheap to ever buy them the latest gear, it'll be a couple of years before this particular paradise occurs.
Completely agree, I have the same experience and reached the same conclusion long ago.
PHP does not feel "old and safe". It's probably not the right comparison point to Rails, which is more like CakePHP or Symfony, or the various frameworks influenced by Rails.

Having worked on Rails since 2005, I think the bigger problem is that it has become more complex, and harder to get started with, as the pendulum swings from eliminated.

One bigger change is probably as you state, that we will get away from frameworks whose primary responsibility is generating HTML, which affects all of these things similarly, and node.js would get caught up in the same thing.

Another big change is the pendulum swing from Object/Relational systems to Functional/BigData systems. This is a big mental shift for programmers trained in the Object-Oriented approach.
Two Things To Know About Networking
I'm super excited about the promise of solar panels, because my house has unobstructed exposure to the sun, and I live in the Bay Area, so we get sunshine 300+ days per year.

However, every time I revisit the math, it never works out. Even if I purchase it myself, the payoff times are never less than around 17-20 years, depending on how aggressive I project the rise in electricity rates. Given that solar panels have a serviceable life about 20 years, it still isn't cost effective yet.

But I'm getting more and more optimistic that in the next few years, we'll reach a level where solar panels make sense.
CloudControl (German PaaS) announces Screenshot-Add-On
> There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name.

As I understand, this has been tested and found wanting: you can ask people to take a group of things colored aoi / blue-green, when they have words for neither blue nor green, and ask them to come up with some additional categorization. Instead of categorizing at random or something, they form two distinct groups of... blue and green. And you can predict what colors a language will have based on the number of words it allocates to color (eg. if there's only two color words, they're always going to be black and white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... )
lol, Switzerland != Swaziland
Co-founder Communication – It Can Save Your Team
If you're looking to cut cable now, I'd highly recommend Roku. It has Hulu+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. (Aereo is also awesome for showing broadcast TV, although that only works in a few markets). The only thing Roku doesn't do well is Youtube, which is why I also got the Chromecast. As an aside, is anyone else noticing synching issues on Chromecast? When I play a Youtube tab the sound and picture aren't quite synched up, which is really frustrating.
Excellent. This is what I wish I could have said in response to that other article, but couldn't find the words for.

This post is exactly right -- and I've seen a few newly-hired programmers in their first job out of college who had a very difficult time adjusting to the "real world", where programming isn't about fun and games and self-fulfillment any more, it's about creating real-world value.

There's nothing unique to programming in this -- journalists discover they can't write about whatever they want, scientists have to follow the funding, etc.

However, I do wonder if programmers, on average, might have particularly inflated expectations of what their jobs will be like? Just like the original blog post expressed. And what makes this so?
Ronin has been acquired by GoDaddy
Exploring our World with Freebase,  Hadoop and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce
I've never noticed latency issues.

Edit: Timing

Running the client: 12ms
Server Startup: <400ms (due to the way OS X services work hard to time directly)
Server Shutdown: 925ms

Those are on a 3 year old Mac Mini - hardly a stud machine.

Why are you using the command line client anyway? You know pg_admin exists and is free and runs everywhere, right?
The most frustrating thing for me with Hulu Plus is that even when you're paying for it, it still shows you commercials. So my solution was to get Chromecast and just stream normal Hulu via a Chrome tab. At least that way I'm not paying them to watch commercials. . .
I think it is a symptom of MS being a software company. They lived with the hardware they had and supported any old crap compaq wanted to put into an iPAQ. Since Apple controlled the hardware their low end hardware was much better than MS's lowest supported hardware. It allowed Apple to do more in software, and jump past where MS was. MS's big problem is that they let that kind of thing continue for far too long.

TLDR Embedded systems need tight integration between HW and SW MS doesn't have it because they only do the SW and let others do HW.
Heh...unusual to bump into another HN'er from the North East. My folks used to do the family "Sunday Drive" through Portnockie then onwards to Cullen for a fish supper or picnic on Cullen beach. I'm in Dunning now.
Django and Rails both run on the JVM.
Both have scaled to massive projects, even without the JVM.
> the two most influential frameworks (Rails and Sinatra)

You admit that you're a Ruby developer, so you must see that this is slightly blinkered. Influential on what? There's not much Rails brought to the table which was entirely unique, it was just a very good MVC framework in a pleasant language that came along at the right time. And lets not forget that development on Django (which was also very influential), began long before Rails appeared on the scene.

Sinatra I've only heard of in passing, but in the Python world, web.py, Tornado and flask have been also been very significant.
We prefer working with people with lots of intellectual horsepower.
How was a startup able to offer an insurance product with only a few tens of millions in VC? Were they partnering with someone? I would love to read more about their business model.
InnoDB, not MyISAM, has been the default storage engine since 5.5 which was released nearly 3 years ago.
Wow I thought I was cynical. Have you considered doing something new? Learning a new framework or language often gives me a fresh perspective on past projects.
WARNING: A lot of Play/Scala cheerleading from a former Ruby developer. I can't help it. I love my job. Feel free to summarily disregard. ;-)

Play is an evolution for sure. But I'd consider it "beyond". Validation concerns are where they should be: At input. Not the Models. Comet, Websockets, etc are all trivial. Chunked Responses FTW. You don't need different responders. Render _anything_ by having a Writable in-scope.

Our API calls to render our models as JSON look like this:

api.photos.get(id) map(Ok(_))

The plugin universe isn't there yet, but I tend to think most apps out-grow most framework plugins pretty quickly.

Honestly, I find Play/Scala _more_ productive than Ruby MVC in general. Fewer bugs. Much better performance and memory usage, so fewer constraints (that one is huge). Rework is much easier, but also much less necessary. The language itself is a joy (IMO) to work with.

The Java ecosystem is a huge enabler. You can have complete control over resizing images in ImgScalr, faster, with no external dependencies, in less code and a flatter learning curve than anything I've ever used in Ruby. Scala itself presents a lot of new things to learn and get comfortable with language-wise until you feel you're back in the groove, but once you've got it, I've found that the ecosystem makes the complex things much easier, and the language itself makes the easy things engaging as well.

Ruby doesn't really help much trying to tackle hard problems IME. Image Resizing? Better shell out to ImageMagick. Dubbing a video? Hello shell my old friend. Cache coherency across a cluster? Fire up another external service (maybe Redis) to manage and start working through failure modes and failover scripts if you care about availability. Compare that to Hazelcast. Need to serve static assets? Better setup an NGinx proxy. In-memory near-caching? You don't have the memory for it, and the GC can't handle it anyways, stick to Redis.

Put a crew of experienced Play developers head-to-head with experienced Rails developers, give them the same goals (and non-goals), and you'll have a faster, more maintainable solution from the Play team in the same or less time for anything but the most trivial apps.

IMO. :-)
It does if you factor in the extremely expensive, yet largely unaccounted for, costs associated with generating electricity from coal.
Author Tom Clancy dies, aged 66
I hate the term "sucks" when applied to someone's serious work.