skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes I feel that I don't spend my time on earth in an optimal way. Then I read about people living their life by doing editing wars over a salad(!). Life is not that bad actually when I think about it.
At least with Apple, I'm pretty sure that if you're an enterprise customer you can run the entire provisioning / update service in-house, including specifying which apps are allowed and how/when they should be updated. I know at least a few big enterprises with high security risk (banks, oil companies) that have allowed iPhones on their networks.
They can let employees go, like they have. Office space is somewhat harder to deal with, but it can be sublet without tremendous loss.

Compare to, say, GM a generation ago. They had massive factories that needed maintenance whether being used or not, plus union contracts that kept unemployed workers in a 'job bank' that paid 80-90% of wages, on the (incorrect) assumption that any job loss would be temporary.
"The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums."

Definitely reads like a crack team on the case. We're all safe now, folks.
Well, IE is a world in and of itself, but I rather enjoy battling shitty APIs and badly document web services. It's a great feeling when you can get a reasonably elegant fix to a braindead decision implemented in the system you're interfacing with.

Even as a hobby, I've always preferred writing a script that parses badly broken websites and sends commands over SSH to an ncurses program that does something fun and useful, than calculating some number that has been known since the 30s.

Brokenness is fun, a challenge. It's straightforward CRUD that I dread.
On the contrary, for the stockbroker there's only a single bit of information in there - the answer to the yes/no question "should I short Dow?"
1) Self taught. Books, mags, studying code others wrote.

2) In 1972 the community college near me had public accounts available to any person who walked in off the street and said they wanted one. Learned APL from a used textbook.

3) Was working a comm tech at a finance company (also self-taught btw) and started using computers + code I wrote to solve problems at work. Had been coding for fun at home on Apple ][, C/PM and Mac. Figured I could be coding for a living, so left and found work programming. Been doing it professionally since 1987.
I'd be in violation of your visa/visa waiver. I have to pay UK corporation tax, something you won't be able to do with a National Insurance number (right to work in the UK) or working on a work visa or something.

I have American friends that have come and worked in the UK, but all for companies, none have setup themselves, so not sure if it's possible.
I agree, what I mean to suggest is that the developer of this software was not necessarily wrong to mark those as hollow because there is a (probably) larger amount of developers who don't mind business-style, hence the suggestion for an option to enable/disable.
"Bad deal for investors" is something I can't disagree with. I sure wouldn't put any money in them.

This doesn't mean that they're going to go out of business and everyone needs to race to abandon ship, though.
>Mentioning pizza, beer, ping-pong, or swearing in a job ad are all will-not-apply conditions for me.

Every job or job posting will never be everything to everyone. If I considered those words a turn-off, then I'd be happy for job postings that lend themselves so readily to such a quick filter.

>As a philosophical exercise: consider replacing pizza with sushi, beer with wine, and ping-pong with Zumba. Still a sensible ad for a tech job?

Sure, if you're Google or just have a lot of money. "Pizza, beer, ping-pong" are mentioned because they're cheap LCDs rather than a hallowed tech lifestyle.
Two considerations:
1) a real genius, using VPN for sending email and then using his own IP for remote back connection from the infected clients
2) why FBI went to FB to search for his name and check who he is, when they could use the dyn-dns logs (or even just do a lookup on the current-at-that-time IP) and ask his ISP who was using that IP address?
How would use of the JVM "ruin" a device?
For orbital supplying cargo to ISS is a purely business decision. Make money doing it. Nothing wrong with that approach. It is clearly one reason why they are using 30+ year old stock of Russian engines for Antares. There is no reason for them to innovate.

On the other hand, for SpaceX, these are just milestones on the highway to much greater things, like Mars. Cue they build almost everything that makes up Falcon and Dragon in house. I will cheer SpaceX over Orbital for this one reason alone.
> If work was always enjoyable, then they wouldn't need to pay you to do it.

I can't pay my bills with enjoyable.
There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev. The field is changing at a fantastic pace, and there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with. Its wide open. If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.
I don't know if it's easy or hard. I'd bet it's rather on the easy side. What I know is that it's not with having dealines to produce the next product that anybody will have the time to take some step back and come with a better (more automatic) way of doing things.

What's painful, it's not doing something repeatitive. It's being presured to repeat it, without being let automatizing it, which is what we should do as programmers.
So many negative comments so let's say it loudly: this freaking rocks. Massive kudos to the team.

Maybe the performance is not yet on par with C. Maybe it will never be. But using JS means we can use this for very rapid prototyping and move on to C when we do need the performance.

The people complaining about performance are the same ones who build very fast and scalable products that nobody uses.

And about JS, let's remember there are two types of programming languages: the ones which everyone complains about, and the ones nobody uses.
Android and Apple already do compete for this space. They both provide provisioning, encrypted storage, VPN, exchange support and remote wipe, and that's pretty much what 90% of the enterprise needs.
You really should man up and either find a programming job you like, or go do something else that makes you happy. Sounds like you're in the wrong profession.
I enjoy programming as a hobby and I enjoy write code for employers. Both present different challenges but in essence in both cases I'm programming and solving problems. The benefit of doing it for employers is that they give you problems you wouldn't necessarily have in a hobby project.
This is life. And life landed you a crappy job. That's not the point though - the point is how you handle this and so far it looks like you're not handling this very well.
That's a very pessimistic view of software development. The thrilling part of the work is building things and seeing people use them. That's what it's all about.

There is always grunt work, but instead of "battling" javascript and CSS you could use the opportunity to learn more about browsers, interface design, etc. Channel the frustration into building new, better frameworks, or helping improve the existing ones. There are plenty of opportunities to exercise your CS education in fast-growing or large-scale businesses. And for all I know, solving problems in the kernel or coding OpenGL could be even worse.
And how reliable is Gartner compared to let's say coin flip? Saying now blackberry is dead is post-factum. This was valuable info in 2010 but right now it is obvious.
Show HN: Escape from Bookmark Hell
> it can also mean pizza and beer at 3:00 on Fridays

Which means my last chance to accomplish critical tasks before the weekend is hosed, because there's a bunch of noisy, unproductive, drunk idiots around who won't answer questions and keep trying to push their idiot-sauce onto me.

> ping-pong in the break room whenever you need a break

So whoever sits near the break room can't get anything done because there's always noisy, unproductive, screaming idiots hitting a ball around.

> getting lumped in with the type of company you mention

As if the type you mentioned is superior?
Not Pallywood, then? :-)
I have always been impressed with the level of ibm's documentation. Aside from the likes of ubuntu, arch, and my personal favorite: OpenBSD.
This is going in a direction that manufacturers have so far mostly avoided probably out of tradition.

These days lens design is already highly automated with simulation software to do the optimization. High-end lenses are just lenses where you've relaxed some of the conditions to get better quality (bigger, heavier, expensive types of glass, lower manufacturing tolerances). And yet some of the parameters lenses are still optimized for (color transmission, field curvature, etc) are increasingly something you could fix in post-production if you had an accurate model of the lens.

This makes particular sense for non-interchangeable lens cameras where the sensor+lens combo is known and manufacturing tolerances are already low, so your lens modeling can be quite good. It should be particularly useful in smartphones where all the other restrictions are so tight (small size and weight require it).
The benefits of a total surveillance state
"The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums. The subject has a significant amount of money flowing through his bank account."

Well I'm fucked. That's my job!!!
I'm not really sure what point you're making with these remarks, but it does come across as rather biased.

It is entirely possible that some of these "Adria-Richards-esque thought police" developers, as you call them, weren't very good, but labelling Rowan or the contributors as incompetent is just plain ignorant.

My counter to your comment is that if you want to hire developers who's performance is based entirely on the lines of code shipped, then that's your prerogative. I, on the other hand, prefer to hire developers who can think for themselves, who have the motivation to be creative with their work, and who like to involve themselves in other projects.
> I've practically never heard of people getting funded with hardware ideas outside of Kickstarter.

You mean you've never heard of small startups getting funded with hardware ideas, which is unsurprising considering that it takes significantly more money to develop a working prototype than it takes to develop a web application.

Kickstarter is not the only place where people get funds, and startups with four people working 80-hour weeks are not the only places where innovation happens.

There are things like littleBits, of course. But the fact that new electronic gadgets keep hitting the shops is a clear enough indication that they get funding from somewhere.
That is a bit too harsh. But at a minimum -- check the references on those subjects.
I like them for being a resistance against the lots-of-overtime, don't-hire-people-who-shoot-hoops companies.

I don't like them because they can potentially be yet another bad force trying to dictate what software culture "should" be. I personally would hate to work in a VBScript shop, but who are they to say it's "uncool"?
We don't want that ! I just got my nerd analytical side out. Can be scary, but it doesn't bite :)
Interesting. At the same time it took Ford to build cars. But perhaps we will have new types of collectives instead of corporations. I think there could be new types of systems of laws. So Bitcoin in the end could become something like a protocol for software agents to act in the real world. Mike Hearn has spelled some parts of this out. It's a bit of a shame that Satoshi didn't write more, because these ideas were close to the original cloud of ideas.
Reality kills a lot of interest. Rules, deadlines, no one cares about good design... just get it out. Only you and a few like-minded co-workers realize how neat some of the solutions are. No one else cares.

Make it a hobby. The stuff you care about at least. Apply things you discover there in your professional life and you'll stand-out and be noticed.

Most programmers don't love the job. They don't go home and think about how something can be made more efficient or scale better or fit into smaller spaces. Hell, most don't know the meaning of time and space and why those things matter. Those who do (so much so that they make a hobby out of it) are the kinds of people you want working for/with you.

Hang in there. It's not all bad.
Well around here they're busy DoS attacking the Job Centre.
Can you be specific so I don't have to hunt around for what you're hinting at?
"Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible."

Most "programming" is just "digital plumbing". No matter how flashy or utilitarian the taps or basin are, underneath the job is pretty much always the same - you hook up hot water to one tap, cold water to the other, and the sink drain to the drainpipe. You can do a great job or a shoddy job - so long as nothing leaks _too_ much, it doesn't make any difference to most people.

Almost all of the programming jobs in the world are like that - call it CRUD or MVC or Mobile Apps or Web Apps or websites or SaaS, or PaaS - you're mostly gonna spend your life hooking some user interface up to some data store doing some sort of filtering or data transformation in between - and hopefully having some real-world side effects that generate value for someone, be that entertainment, education, ecommerce, improving the efficiency of some previously manual or tedious process, or often - just releasing a new version of the same old thing because marketing decided it's time for a version number change and a few "new feature" checkboxes for their competitor comparison. Most "day to day programers" _don't_ get to write new 3D renderers or physics engine for exciting games or write the next great crypto system or solve hard computer science problems or software to control new spacecraft or fighter jets - or whatever "interesting programming problem" you can name. But if you're lucky, you might get to solve real world problems your business/clients/customers have – by hooking some fancy new off-the-shelf taps up to some standard boring old digital plumbing in fairly standard ways – occasionally you might even get some new-to-you plumbing job, perhaps plumbing in an espresso machine or a fridge-with-ice-cube-maker-in-the-door, and that'll be fun - the first time. Maybe even the second and third time - then it'll be "just another standard plumbing job", with a different fridge or coffee maker.

I saw a presentation a week or so back, that seems to me a lot like the article-writers original "I'll write some code to find Mersenne Primes!" - it was a bunch of local guys presenting (at DorkBot here in Sydney) about the new ASIC USB BitCoin miners they were building - you _can_ find and attempt to solve interesting computer science / math problems, but there's _vanishingly_ few people who'll employ you to do it.
Oh my goodness!

Every single reply is "self-taught"!

Why have courses?!!
Mustache + data-binding = Live templates
> And for all I know, solving problems in the kernel or coding OpenGL could be even worse.

For me, solving problems in the kernel is immensely more interesting and rewarding than fixing the n-plus-oneth CSS aligning bug. It also comes with the added advantage of using real development tools instead of nuts and bolts that barely help you.
We had this argument where I work (with thousands of consumer and business customers).

Some quick A/B testing and surveying indicate that "People have email clients configured and they know how to use them" is very wrong :) With an actual contact form we had a massive spike in pre-sales requests, with a direct spike in new business.

This is especially prevalent for business users, who will often make a sales contact. Anyone with a B2B site that only has a mailto: link is losing out!

As to the rest (rich text, etc.) I agree. We built our contact form to push the (plain text) request into a mailbox & send a pleasant information email to the customers address, which accounts for a lot of the points you raise.
I would say yes. PHP Storm, if nothing else, is a lot more system friendly for me than any other IDE I have tried (incl. Aptana, Zend Studio, Netbeans, etc.)
I wrote something like this as a module for Drupal a few years ago, and it still works very well for most sites: https://drupal.org/project/honeypot

The honeypot (or honey trap) is somewhat effective against most bot software, and the timestamp protection is actually pretty effective against most human spammers. However, there are many sites that will require active spam prevention due to their popularity, and thus targetability.

Also, regarding accessibility, there are many ways of implementing these spam prevention techniques without impacting accessibility, even without using JS.
Good job! Very easy to navigate with lots of useful items. Thank you.
Nothing is more unfashionable than last year's big fashion.
I would suggest rather John Law's 1705 essay "Money and trade considered: with a proposal for supplying the nation with money". Interestingly enough Graeber's history of debt overlooks this crucial step, namely the establishment of fiat currency of which there are different forms.
TEDx: Explaining the Jolly Roger, Piracy and its revelance today in the Commons.
The competitors of Miss Tween, Miss Pre-Teen, and Little Miss America need a competition to move into?

Child beauty pageants is a reasonable amount of money. $20bn according to WP. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_beauty_pageant)
I would move "frontpage" to its own warning category, not just "notice".
Smartphone OS lifecycles charted: the 'six year rule', the demise of Blackberry
> penalizing jobs for mentioning pizza, beer or ping-pong is ridiculous. In fact calling those "hollow rewards" at all is ridiculous.

More than often they are not only hollow rewards but hidden age/background preferences, it basically means "we want somebody straight out of college" or "people who got nothing better to do than stay long hours at the office". At a certain age or situation, you're usually no longer excited by the opportunity of playing ping-pong and drinking beer at work, you want to do your job, get paid, and go home.
Erlang calculator on steroids. Well done!
> That a few companies have tried to introduce proprietary extensions is another topic, it doesn't mean that there is a real choice for developers.

I spoke in the past tense because those were choices available to developers... JavaScript seems to have won out as a preferred choice. EMScripten opens up a lot of possibilities though...

> In no other software space would people tolerate to be forced into a technology like that.

I think history would beg to disagree.
Quantum Computers Check Each Other’s Work
A lot of people hire people like themselves or - to paraphrase previous posts and threads - people they would like to hang out with. And hiring managers are typically younger than 50 and don't want to hang out with someone in their 50's and/or don't want to hire their "parent".

Many people see 50-year-olds as "old dogs who can't/don't want to learn new tricks", regardless of past achievements/tricks.

And many mid-size to large employers still harbor the illusion that they can hire someone who will stay with the comapny for life, or close to it. Thus, they don't want to "waste time" on someone who will "retire" soon anyway. They want someone to "invest in" and for them, that translates into a younger person.

Finally, some people simply don't want to hire someone who knows more/is more experienced than they. Sometimes it's because they fear that person will have an attitude; sometimes it's because they have a need to always be - or perceive themselves to be - the smartest kid on the block.
I can't believe this idiot was sending the data back to a .no-ip.org domain. Aside from the fact that he did some pretty awful stuff to a lot of girls and deserves to be jailed, how could you be so proficient in web camera hacking, frequent so many hacking forums, and still not know to send the data back to a domain that can't be linked DIRECTLY to your home machine?
> I would be more interested to find out if the method has any impact on accessibility, for example if screen readers are unable to use these forms.

Which could make using this illegal, depending on where you are (it would in the UK).
"I only want to work on the things that are fun and interesting to me," said every person in every profession.

This is why I started working for myself. There are some things I have to do that I don't enjoy, but for the most part I do get to pick and choose how I spend my time.
> he loves the rush of feeling holier-than-thou

Or perhaps he just doesn't want to work with douchebags.
Limited time to write, but I'm not sure you fully digested the 'economic calculation problem' entry, and perhaps some associated things.

How do you know how much of something to produce? Sure, science happens. Enough? It's very difficult to say.

With a market, outside of big market failures, you can be reasonably sure that, roughly, enough of the right kind of a given good is produced because of the feedback mechanisms involved: South Korea has abundant food - more than enough to feed everyone. North Korea does not.

If the government were the sole purveyor of software, sure, it would still get written, but I think that not enough would, and that it would turn into a big ugly mess.
Gartner quadrants are like the App Store for enterprise software. When you're tasked with choosing say an app for handling Supply Chain Management often you're first step is looking at the Gartner report for that space because it gives you a good market overview of who the major players are in that space and how they relate.

Hence Gartner coverage can be a great channel for acquiring b2b enterprise customers. It also helps establish credibility.

Someones not going to buy a product just because a Gartner paper, but it provides a starting point for evaluating vendors.

Similarly no company is going to look at this and stop using Blackberry tomorrow, but it puts evaluating BB usage/potential migration onto their radar.
Oh?

When did we ever have a refinery above a deep-sea oil well?

When was the diamond cutting industry ever primarily located at diamond mines?

I can think of any number of examples where high transportation costs were never high enough to cause the production site to control "industry" in general, or even the specific industry it was in.

Consider ivory. For several hundred years, Greenland was the main supplier of ivory - specifically walrus ivory - to Europe, until elephant ivory from Africa became more abundant in the 1400s. But Greenland's dominance of a handful of goods (polar bear fur being another), did not lead to "industry controlled by" Greenland.

Beaver pelts would be another example. The market was in Europe, the trapping was done in the US (due to near extinction of the Eurasian beaver). The individual trappers in the American wilds did not control or dominate the fur market - it was the trading companies which did that.

And again I mention South Africa. Its "estimated share of world platinum production amounted to 77%; kyanite and other materials, 55%; chromium, 45%; palladium, 39%; vermiculite, 39%; vanadium, 38%; zirconium, 30%; manganese, 21%; rutile, 20%; ilmenite, 19%; gold, 11%;" and so on.

But the market is so large and complex that domination of those niches doesn't naturally lead to domination of the entire market by South Africa.

And overall market domination is what stcredzero proposes for Mars.

But I can be wrong. What is your scenario for how economics will "favor industry controlled by Mars"?
> People with a mission to tell The Truth have a lot more patience and determination

The Truth™ is usually biased. I'm not sure if that's what you wanted to express with your comment, but it's exactly those people who want to get out the(ir) truth who have the most patience and determination.