skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, though outside of SF and Berkeley Oakland, far fewer people are within walking distance of a BART station, so a lot of people have to drive there. It's easy to forget this if you're carless (as I am) until you go somewhere else and need to figure out how to continue your journey beyond BART. Look at a geographical map and see how far apart the stations are at the extremities.
How are engineering and VP of engineering "totally different"? AFAIK, there is no special qualification that makes you VP material from engineering material. An engineer with enough experience can do the job of a VP of engineering just fine.
> You build master election on top of the test and set functionality of etcd which gives you a cluster wide locking mechanism... But, nothing is stopping a regular etcd client from building master election on top of the current API.

Could you give some pointers on how to implement master election on top of test-and-set? What is the algorithm? I've tried searching for it, but I've likely missed correct keywords.
Sure the glass slab from 1989 may have 50x or 70x bigger "wires" in it's microchips, and it may have bigger pixels, but I see more in common with the $100 1989 device and the modern glass slab than I see difference and change. Sure, certainly the extra miniaturization both chip- and product- scale is good incremental change, but the componentry is the same and rate of progress has tapered massively.

Wireless is certainly one place we've been radically helped, and that's hugely attributable to DSP processing, which is great. But see above tapering.

How's this for some bounding? Let's go back to 2000. AMD has just dropped a 1.4GHz Athlon, and is 3 years from Athlon 64. Intel, in November drops Netburst, 1.5-2GHz. Intel says are going to take NetBurst to 10GHz by 2005.

What I'd point out is that all these advances you cite have inflection points, something that took available technology that was on the shelf and under developed and mused over, into being radically ragingly important in a very short time. And then we milk that system heavily, get huge gains, and then... and then... cross our fingers hold our butts and wait for the next thing to jump up and remake the world. This "rocket" moves in fits and starts.

It's easy and convenient to point to historical context as you do, and to convince ourselves of progress. Rather than take hold of these mix of points and see amazement, I see very small case studies in a larger world that loses the radical element, the dynamics, and creeps towards stasis. The number of things left on the shelf to develop, to fully industrialize into, is not unboundedly infinite. It's up to us to dream hard, dream big, to fight the creeping in of stasis and assert our status as homo sapien, the shaper of the world about, and we need to find big enough dreams to fuel that. To do that, we need to keep everyone dreaming and potentiated, not just the Musks of today.
In addition, Mono has improved tremendously over the past 12-18 months since Xamarin has taken over the project. It's not yet in the category of some of the very highly-tuned JVM implementations (or the .NET CLR on Windows), but performance and support are plenty good enough for most applications.
They could have been toast from running out of dough. Luckily they found a breadwinner to help them rise to the top.
Flash is only cross-browser and cross-OS for {IE,Firefox,Chrome} on {Windows,MacOS}. It barely works on Linux, doesn't work at all on iOS or modern Android, and is in general a huge barrier to adoption for free software. Not to mention its rich history of security vulnerabilities. The only reason Flash hasn't been completely abandoned yet is because it's currently the only widely-supported option for DRM.

Anyone who has worked extensively with legacy software can tell you that the procedure for removing a deeply hated but heavily used piece of code is:

1. Wrap the entire mess in a giant API.

2. Reduce that giant API over time by rewriting bits of the mess in clean new code.

3. Eventually you will have a few remnants that can't be rewritten, safely contained behind a minimal API like rotten food in a garbage bag.

4. Wait until the market forces requiring (3) are obsolete, which may take years.

5. Throw away the bag.

(1) is NPAPI and ActiveX. (2) is <audio>, <video>, <canvas>. (3) is EME, the trash bag that will let us isolate DRM from the rest of the browser. Don't fight against it on the basis of hating garbage. Everyone hates garbage, it's just that we're more interested in watching House Of Cards than in throwing it out right now.
You implied that they should be paid enough to live in downtown SF, which I think is equivalent to claiming they should be paid more. If not, let's just assume I can come up with some convoluted reason why I'm not talking about their pay either, and we can just stop talking about it.

> Pieces of paper from a broken educational system are not determinant of how much someone can or should make.

Certainly agree with that. The demand for the work you can do and your ability to do the work with quality should be the main determinants. So I guess we'll see how much the city is willing to pay, and how far the BART workers are willing to push them before they just get replaced. Our discussion on the matter is kind of a non-factor.
Ok, thanks :-)

[edit: also, yes "blocks" was an unfortunate choice of words earlier, I did mean logical blocks of code, not actual Smalltalk blocks. Like typing in the text in the demo-example above and having it all evaluate (or if not all, maybe the first and second half separately).]

I guess I'm leaning a little in the direction of the "tagline" of GNU smalltalk ("The Smalltalk for those who can type").

I'm not entirely sure I really want a "vim" mode -- but some form of keyboard-driven modal editing/editor/browser-thingy would be good, I think. I definitively need an interface that is (fully) usable without the mouse, due to wrist-strain.

On a similar note, this looks very promising (both as a VM and as inspiration for shorcuts):

http://forum.world.st/Tiling-Window-Manager-status-update-td...

Will have to find out if it works under Pharo 3.0...
archlinux. It forces you to learn more indepth about how linux and operating systems work. For most mac-like, go for ubuntu
Disclaimer: I liked Ting enough to buy Tucows stock.

My experience with Ting as a customer has been excellent. Rates are great, flexible, and sensible. Customer service has been good. Flexibility with onboarding used and refurbished phones has been easy.

For about what I paid for voice and SMS on Verizon a year ago, we have two smartphones and a hotspot running both a person and some hardware across the country. My tightwad father's adopted the service (his first cell phone), and has since added another line.

T-mobile is starting to do the right things, but Ting already is.
Twitter pays engineer $10 million as Silicon Valley tussles for talent
True true, sorry was thinking manly about Western terrorism, but I totally agree.
What I implied is that arguing they shouldn't is detached elitism.

You're free to stop talking about anything you want at any time.
Childcare != daycare. Even if one parent stays at home, you still have buy special clothing, children need more medical attention, school supplies etc. etc.

Leaving wife out of work is reserved for the upper class nowadays, even not all of them. Definitely not for the bus drivers.

It used to be that quite normal across all classes for one parent to go out to work and one to look after the family. One wonders what the point is in increasing economic growth if it's to make us less well off than we used to be.
She makes a good point. Netflix doesn't work at all in Australia. This is very much an American thing.
So where exactly should we have stopped doing math, in order to remain optimally secure for all time?
Festival of open houses taps San Francisco's tech startup allure
> Apparently the times of legalism were around 3rd century BCE, and then "In later dynasties, Legalism was discredited and ceased to be an independent school of thought."

Thankfully. Once the empire was united, there wasn't as much need for Legalism and it was beaten out by the much nicer Confucianism.

> I don't claim that it was all rosy afterwards, but let's also not forget that it were the British that were literally drug dealers to the Chinese

I don't see how that's relevant. The British didn't invent opium because they were monotheists, they did it for economic reasons.
Reading is incredibly important. I am not talking here about startup related material, but wider than that. Startups operate in shifting currents and global trends.

Sources like the Economist, HBR and Foreign Policy are useful. Reading quality analysis is never wasted time. Even if you disagree with it, it forces you to think about why you hold a position.
Agreed that progress is stagnant on the net.

And I'm glad there are some grass roots springing up on the well-tread physical planes. It's great that people are springing their own means here.

I pray to my gods every day that the net too starts springing up some grass roots to show for itself. This "nervous system"'s origins were the smart and the dreamers, but it's meteoric rise into the cloud has gotten it further and further away from being a thing people know and touch and can handle for themselves. I hope it's not too long for the net to spring it's own grass roots, and for people to feel the netgrass beneath their feet.
>> "there is no special qualification that makes you VP material from engineering material"

>> "An engineer with enough experience can do the job of a VP of engineering"

I think that's the qualification - experience.
I think that's another misunderstood thing about math.

By the time you get into higher mathematics, you get to a place where nearly everything is unknown. I remember reaching the level of ordinary differential equations and realizing that "most" non-linear equations had no exact solution at all.

In ways, math and programming have this in common - as the size of the systems being studied increases, a randomly chosen example becomes harder and harder to deal and thus the "art" consists in choosing important and tractable examples out of a world of huge but intractable systems.
Sitespeed.io 2.0
> This causes a slight discrepancy in the bar graph, as the cost of living figures assume all parents to be working, but the income assumes only one working parent.

That seems like a pretty big discrepancy, and makes the cost-of-living vs pay comparison meaningless. If you assume each parent contributes equally to their cost of living, you would pretty much halve the 'cost-of-living' line on the chart.

Even if the other parent only makes 50% of what the bart employee parent makes, it would pretty easily close the gap between pay and COL for most of these positions.
Two questions:

How do I get involved?

What display tech is he using? That was awesome.
Interesting. Let me get this straight. You claim folks who think bart workers shouldn't get paid more are detached elitists. But, you also aren't actually arguing they should get paid more. That seems like an untenable position to me.
Funny... that reminds me that in 'Programming Pearls' (http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/) Jon Bentley recommends the book 'The Medical Detectives' by Berton Roueche, as both entertaining and instructive for the kind of lateral thinking needed to debug.
Soviet rockets were more reliable because they did not throw away the good designs, after they were tested.

I guess space exploration could be completely different, if Space Shuttle would launch and land without humans. Apollo could be used as 'lift' to Shuttle on orbit. Shuttle is excellent truck, but man-rating it for atmospheric flight was huge waste.
Front end of Million Singles Project
What do you think about the front end of the site, in relates to the scrolling up and down?
If the information is not available to the general public and you use it, then that's insider trading. Don't use the documents to trade.

If the documents were misplaced, and you take them, then that's theft. Hand them in to the police. Don't use them.
Are you kidding? SpaceX built a tiny but cost effective rocket engine and rocket for significantly under a quarter billion. Most of the engineering was done under the initial $100m from Musk. They borrowed from well known engine designs that were simple, uncomplex, controllable, and safe, that had only been used on a small scale (they now use 9 of them). They used the cheapest, well-known weld technique, friction stir welding for the rocket.

X33, the last great "try some crazy shit" we pulled, was cancelled after $922m from NASA and $357m from Lockheed Martin. (Leave it to congress to kill the interesting/tricky/useful stuff! Revive this project!)

X33 was 1/10th the weight of the VentureStar craft it was a demonstrator for. It was to pioneer radical new high efficiency high-control thrust vectoring engines burning the most gravometrically dense element, innovative cryonics, sstol, lighweight composite construction techniques, lifting body aerodynamics, metallic thermal protection, and unmanned flight controls. Any one of these things could produce massive massive spinoff technologies in it's wake, and would be incredibly important technologies to be able to point to, and set a new bar for progress.

It's not that private industry is bad (oh, it is), it's that private industry is boring, safe, incremental, and the only massive innovations this world have ever seen have jumped up from the shadows and stolen existing big buisnesses lunch in the split second it took business to blink. Business is the living antithesis of what is most interesting and uniquely human: the radical.
> with two foreign articles he liked.

And if I may say so, I'm a little disappointed in the performance of those submission - I thought many of them were better than my own article, but I think maybe 2 or 3 at this point have reached the main page.
Last ever International Tribune Herald front page
Nope. The top engineers will be drastically more effective than the average developer, in ANY codebase. They take the time to understand it, and change things when necessary. I have seen this in every place I've worked.
I was mostly on board with this, until I saw Crypto-Cat front and center on their 'new projects' page. If anything, it's a step backwards for cryptography. Saying that you're secure and can be trusted, when the underlying model is broken is not a good way to promote 'modern cypherpunk'-ism.

I think there's a heavy dose of self-absorption going on here.

Link to the most recent breakdown on Cryptocat I could find.
https://datavibe.net/~sneak/20130717/cryptocat-considered-ha...
I've done some research in theoretical physics, and now I work as a programmer. And the two are very, very different in their reward structure.

In research it was usual to go for a few months without any relevant feelings of success (and not just me, many of my colleagues felt the same). In programming I usually get some positive feedback a few times a day, at the very least every few days.

That's a huge difference.
I know the CAP theorem, but that's not what is going on here. And now again you are saying that the data loss is a bug. It's not! Like I said, it's by design, they are probably using a fire-and-forget methodology for writing the comments. Do you seriously think there is a bug in PHP or their PHP code that is making a very little percentage of comments get lost? Besides, they have moved away from PHP long time ago for their backend. They are using a combination of Java, Scala, etc. Software that loses some data instead of crashing when under heavy load is not bad software. It has its uses, eg: massive amount (per unit of time) of unimportant messages that no one is willing to pay for.
One of the few things worse than a website full of pretentious garbage is a website so full of pretentious garbage that I can't even tell what it's promoting.
He saw science ending poverty by ensuring everyone had access to the resources necessary for life.

This is an interesting statement, given that it doesn't sound like any of his inventions seem to be particularly focused on ending poverty in any direct way.
"Nonsense" is what the capitalists are spewing: "It's a good life" vs perceived market value. Stick to one or the other. Either it's sufficient that the market work it out, or quality of life matters. Argue one or the other, not both.
I'm beginning to get sick of websites hijacking the scrollbar. Is there a way to disable it? When I tried to scroll down, it kept freezing/locking up and began to flash rapidly as Safari tried to scroll down and the JavaScript forced it to scroll up. While this makes for a cool demo, please don't use this in production, it can impair user experience.
A useful side-effect for many parties, indeed, but one that was not intended by AQ, not one of its goals, did not achieve any of its goals, and has badly hampered it.
I hadn't realized how easy the data was to get[1]. The 300 Station agents make an average of 57.6k/year in salary, 10.5k/year in overtime and 7.4k in bonuses (includes vacation, unused sick days etc).

So for a station agent, they do make very close to 80k, and (assuming that overtime is 2x their normal rate) the 18% on top of their salary means they likely put in ~10% overtime. If my manager underestimated how long a station was open by 4 hours every week, I'd be annoyed, but 10% doesn't seem shocking.

[1] https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-a...
> some conflicts of interest are viewed as obvious. If I publish a journal article with my affiliation being Genentech, I don't have to state that my work is owned by Genentech.

That's simply NOT true...Nature's guidelines on declaring financial interests (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6849/full/412751a...) say that these include "Employment", defined as "Recent (that is, while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through publication of the paper."

Nature is covering this for one reason only: they stand to gain.
Git Subtrees explained
I went to this talk last night and wrote a blog post in response to it: http://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/thoughts-on-cypherpunks-2-0...

The gist of it is that although the Cypherpunks 2.0 movement is doing fantastic pro-privacy work, it will eventually be constrained by the apathy of the average person who uses technology (aka, surveillance victim). I don't know how we can fight this, but we should try.
Ubuntu. Everything just works.
Yes, disagree with the parent for this reason. I've been with T-Mobile since 1999/2000-ish when they were known as VoiceStream (they renamed it T-Mobile in July 2002). That was my personal phone. When I used company-issued phones on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, the difference was readily apparent: T-Mobile always had better quality customer service than the other carriers, more appealing plans, easier to change plans when you wanted, &c.
Yet another unreadable site in the iPhone.
If you are doing something fancy, you should test it extensively.
Otherwise, stick to the basics. At least people will have a chance of accessing to your content.
Personally, I think that both should be weighed into the decision, but BART workers are way above average in terms of how their QoL is covered, and as a result should not have that optimized further considering their already over-market pay and the considerable cost to the taxpayer.
Do you read German? I've only taken a bit, and it's pretty clear that it's an advertisement for various fonts that they're selling.
A few questions:

- Why is 217 too much, and 150 is better? Presumably some organizations need lots of management, while others need very little- how do you, as an outside observer, come up with a reasonable number?
- Where did you get 17%? According to [0], there are 3430 bart employees. 217/3430 = 6.3%.

0: http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?Entity=Bay%20Ar...
I'll like them more when they offer their pre-paid customers the same benefits they have on their post-paid plans. They got a lot of good will because of their recently announced reduced international roaming charges, but "post paid plan" was peppered on every article about that. Give me a break.
In fact, this isn't killing NPAPI and replacing it with a smaller API, it's killing it and replacing it with no API at all: there is no longer a public API between the browser and the proprietary DRM blobs, and in some implementations (e.g. Microsoft's) there's no seperation between the two at all.

Not only that, but in practice HTML5 EME is designed to allow the "proprietary surface" of the web to be extended right down to the kernel and hardware itself. Take a look at the existing Chromebook implementation of HTML5 EME used by Netflix for example: it's tied to approved Chromebooks which are locked down at the hardware level to ensure no unauthorised programs are running anywhere on the machine. Enable developer mode to run your own software and the EME module disables itself. The spec even has restrictions on how videos can be embedded in webpages to support hardware-level DRM.

Now, technically EME implementations don't have to be any more restrictive than existing solutions like Flash, but since they can be companies like Netflix are going to be pressured by content providers into only supporting implementations that are "secure" and give their "high-value" content the protection it deserves. Which means hardware-level lockdowns and restrictions on video outputs (the HTML5 EME spec already has an error code for playback being blocked because the video connector doesn't support DRM).
I live in the UK, and never found anything special about T-Mobile.
I'd say the opposite on the soviet shuttle program. They tired it out, it performed well for them (successfully completing a fully autonomous flight), but then decided it wasn't a very efficient space launch platform and stopped using it.

When you're going the wrong way, the leader is the one who turns around and heads back the other way first.
No, they are correct. If you trade based on non-public information, you are guilty of insider-trading.
This is fun. Neat work!
VoIP for me over 3G tends to be not nearly as stable as an actual phone call.
The main qualification for these jobs is, besides being a software engineer, having experience at project management and political skills to do whatever the company/boss wants...
"An engineer with enough experience can do the job of a VP of engineering just fine."

If you can also manage people.

If you can also manage projects.

If you can also see the broader picture and how your company fits into it.

If you know how to delegate.

If you know how to hire and retain the right kind of talent.

If you can resolve conflicts effectively.

If you can communicate well with both engineers and customers.

Depending on your org structure you may also need to make the correct choices
regarding infrastructure and technical direction as you go consistently and over a long period of time.

I've known a lot of engineers in my career. Most of them were not suitable to become a VP of engineering - including those with many years of experience.

The ability to engineer is often the smallest subset of what a VP of engineering does. It's a starting point.
EvolutionOS: everything works AND it looks good doing it. If you're coming from MacOS X, you'll feel right at home; there's apparently significant Apple talent contributing to it, and many of the design features are inspired by OS X.
Successful experience, too.