skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can only speak for myself. I honestly have no interest in their educational background, only in what they've done, how they think and what they can do for my startup.

A CS degree is interesting but doesn't tell me they can code. I know, however, you can't go from no coding at all to skilled coder in a 2-4 months. I won't hire someone who can't do the job, so I suppose if they DID somehow manage it, that would leaves them to distinguish themselves by presenting a useful portfolio of work. They'd also have to demonstrate that they can talk about coding in an interview and think off the cuff like a coder when presented with problems verbally.

So, it doesn't matter where or how you learned it, but that you can do it very well. Prove it by showing me. This probably doesn't work for a larger company with HR / gatekeepers OR in countries where people are obsessed with paper credentials.
How a crowd funding campaigns went bad
Tech Block Weekend Edition: Our favorite Features of the week
I remember the days of having to lurk in http://www.howardforums.com/forum.php to figure out which shitty phone I had to buy.

It's insane to think of the phone I had prior to getting an iPhone; it was either a Motorola Razr or a Samsung S-300.
Another perspective here, I actually converted that into dollars and realized it's more than my salary (me being in Vietnam). However I quickly came to my senses and comfort myself that prices are different in Switzerland. Thanks for confirming this.

Out of curiosity, I wonder if you can use that money to live somewhere cheaper, maybe without letting the government know. If you can, I think that's a problem to solve before this deal can go through.
Why Snowden and Assange deal with embassies, not consulates
Obviously this is not a desirable property of the system. If it's going to be robust against malicious attacks, it must be robust against well-meaning reimplementations.
Wefunder uses Facebook ad to help Teleborder (YC S13) raise money
This is a great idea. I'm sad that I didn't learn it earlier, in college. I wonder why it seems like most of us in this thread hadn't, as well?
This means that you would structure the land value tax so that enough money could be collected to pay a basic income for everyone? That's certainly an option, although I'm not sure if I would vote for that, I guess that it would depend on the amount of that basic income. Anyway, the important thing would be to agree on a single tax based on land value.

Maybe some people find it too radical, I don't know, but what's clear for me is that the current system is not sustainable. Maybe when the current system collapses completely it wont't be too radical anymore :)
I don't know. I haven't seen these financials.

this made me chuckle. nothing like have a strong opinion based on nada.
This is neat.

Sort of relatedly, I bought the Withings Wifi scale about a year ago, which does the same thing. I really like it. It is easy to go back and look at weight trends without having to obsess too much about the number each day.
Try a Braun or a Panasonic screen shaver. My old Braun gave me the best electric shave, about 99% as good as a blade. Panasonics give me about 96% as good but for half the price. They cut so close that I've gotten nicks from both that drew blood.
How does this financially make sense?

I'm neither an economist nor a mathematician, but how do you give a tax credit to everyone earning money (giving them $30k from the government is largely equivalent to eliminating $30k in taxes for everyone who pays more than $30k) and at the same time give the same, from the tax coffers to everyone earning nothing, or less than $30k? (Numbers here just for illustration...)

Basically, how in the world do you account for the massive drop in actual realized revenue? Where does the money come from without raising the taxes further up the chain?

Extremely simple example:

Person A pays $0 in taxes per year.
Person B pays $1 in taxes per year.
Person C pays $5 in taxes per year.
Person D pays $10 in taxes per year.

If we give each of them $1 back from the tax coffers, the total tax paid now goes from $16/year, to $12/year. Does the elimination of existing welfare programs entirely cover this gap, or does one have to raise the tax rate on the higher earners to cover the spread, and would not simply withholding payments from the top earners make more sense than forcing them to give up their income only to give it back to them at the end of the year?

Personally, I'd be upset if I was forced to give my money to the government at 0% interest, only to know they were going to give it back to me at the end of the year. From the first quarter's contribution, I would have lost money on that due to inflation without the opportunity to offset it via investment. (Which is why I pay the penalties for failing to make estimated payments in the U.S., as I generally outperform the penalties in real rate of return for my cash.)
This is a great idea. I've been thinking of developing something similar. But you cannot sell it as SaaS. It needs to be a one-time self hosted project so that startups and download, install and be ready in minutes. At the same time there are no security/privacy issues that most users here are worried about.
Because it's polite and it limits the diffusion of bad smells. If you really want to see my dick all you have to do is go on chatroulette. No need to follow me to the toilet. Unless you're interested in more than just looking.
>these models are notorious for not working out well.

I guess you know because you've seen it tried so many times?

Here is a fact for your non-economist economic model. Automation is displacing labor.

And, here is a prediction: Automation will continue to displace labor until most menial labor tasks are gone.
Running ASICMiner Block Erupters For Fun, Not Profit
Don't these systems use different object-file formats?
You claim it's a low-latency, HA platform. What does that mean? Details are the only way to make your users feel secure that you won't be going down when they need you the most.
The republicans are willing to take jobs away from families in order to make sure the poor and sick don't get equal access healthcare. That's how simple it is.
Would be interesting to see the comparison of this against https://www.dailycred.com/
> but they decided to roll their own Ivy/Maven compatible dependency engine.

I'd heard about that...as a non-Gradle Ivy user, when they started this, I asked two of their devs if they were going to basically write an "Ivy v2", submit their improvements/patches back to Ivy, etc.

Their response was, paraphrased, "absolutely not, we're building our own thing that is way more awesome and are not interesting in sharing". Which I found disappointing.

I know a clean break is easier, and that the Ivy codebase likely needs it, but Ivy could really have used their focus, and I think it would have benefited the wider Java ecosystem (as many non-Maven builds use Ivy to talk to Maven repos) instead of just Gradle itself.
Can someone explain how they are going to pay such a large amount? Isn't this more than their entire national budget? I punched the numbers into wolfram alpha and they don't add up. Am I misunderstanding something?
Interesting to see what general solicitation allows. I'd be curious to know the CTR or any details on the campaign's efficiency.
Security firm says iPhone bug can thwart remote wipe
I had breaking issues like Unity crashing on a fresh VM install of Ubuntu.
Unless you're starving, money is not important. You obviously want this - go for it! You'll have more fun (re)learning programming, and the challenge will make you grow as a person.
Talent Wars Good for Cities
> The US government ended up spending a decade and over eighty million dollars just to research and rediscover the manufacturing process for this one particular component.

Well, we didn't exactly "rediscover" the process for manufacturing FOGBANK. That's because we never actually knew the process -- we just thought we did.

The previous production process just happened to include a contaminant that turned out to be a critical ingredient. This is what we had to discover.

As for the money -- how much would it have cost to keep the existing facility running for the past few decades? If this is more than $80 million (including inflation), then it was better to stop manufacturing it.
The original point was that obstacle avoidance was not so easy for a walking vehicle ... human pilots usually try to avoid obstacles the same way (with exceptions being cases for the NTSB).
Making the demo widget on the landing page switch to a stream of Paul Graham's essays when visitors are arriving from HN is pretty clever.

The problem however is that it leaves most of the space above the fold empty. I was wondering if some page elements hadn't loaded or if my AdBlock was preventing them from doing so.
This looks interesting, maybe a video of how it works? It's clear that a lot of work has been put into this so kudos for that.
This seems best suited for building a prototype quickly (i.e. Hackathons).
Yes you can. As others have pointed out, it the DE that uses most system resources. For common development task you don't need 3D gimmick. You can install lightweight DE like LXDE or XFCE. I use Xubuntu in my home pc and installed it as a Virtualbox guest in my office pc allocating 1.5GB of RAM. Things have been buttery smooth. For a comparison of system resources used by different DEs see the article http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201109/page08.html. The article is a bit old but still relevant.
10 years, so basically you were programmer in era of CGI/Perl?
Why do you blog? 31 million people do for some reason [infographic & review]
Departmental budget politics can lead to decisions like that.
I know there is ageism, but I wouldn't worry about that if you're really passionate. By passionate I don't mean "willing to be exploited" either. I mean, on your own time you've got some impressive projects you work on.

If you try to go the tired old route of handing your resume to a recruiter, of course you're going to face ageism.

I don't even have that much stuff on the web and I often get emails about what my rates are for freelance work.

So, do some projects, make sure you really love programming, try to pick up some side work, then eventually you'll find someone who wants to give you a full time job. If you're talented and good you can do this no problem. We are in strong demand right now.

If you go the tired route of resume spamming you're more likely to be glossed over unless you've got something really, really impressive on there.
Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark
I agree. However, in communist countries (in which my co-workers lived (ex-Soviet)) The job was just a symbol. There would be department stores that sold hardly anything, with 3 people manning a cash register. This is no different than what Swit proposes.. It's just Swit has chosen to forgo the mock job.
If you can afford it, do another startup. This will help catch you up far faster than any corporate job ever could. Plus you will end up with lots to show for your effort, so in 5 years no one will really even notice the lost decade on your resume.
My advice is to get your feet wet, try to build something in your spare time and bring up your skills...I think with persistence you can make up time, the tools to learn and build are just getting easier and better...the bar to programming is getting lower and lower (and the need to program is getting greater!).

Most importantly, make sure you enjoy programming, then everything else will fall into place. Good luck!
The fire in question involved the piercing of a 1/4" plate protecting the battery from below. If that's a thick enough plate to protect a 12-ton boat, which has more momentum than the Tesla even at much slower speeds, with hardly a dent, then the Tesla incident was very, very out of the ordinary.
> I live in a first world country now, and still use a bowl of water when shaving: it's the environmentally kind thing to do. People who keep the water running all the time while they brush their teeth or shave drive me nuts.

Haven't thought of simply turning the water off between rinses instead of using a cup?
Right, we can't ever expect the masses to learn advanced skills that will be needed in the next cyclic revolution. This has to be the most negative thing I have heard all month. It's akin to saying, 'Our people are so incapable of moving with the times, we just have to throw them food.'
This is very cool, and this is how I have approached my sysadmin and programming work over the years.

When I started, I had very little experience, but a willingness to learn. My boss hired me anyway, and it moved from pushing paper to labs to "OK, we need to update this web application" and "I need you to learn how to deploy a very customized Windows image for 300 computers, and learn to maintain them." Since I was much younger, first as a student and then a full-time employee at uni, it was easy to ask my bosses (the first, if you can believe this, actually wrote his own code to hide a password in the bootloader to run some admin task on the first boot after imaging and then delete after completion; with Windows installations and incosistency, it took him months to get that write; he now is a full-time lit nerd and author, talk about renaissance man) and tell them everything I did and needed help. Not only did that teach me to solve the problem, it taught me how to approach computer problems (kind of like the OSI stack, but more general than networking, and not as shitty as "turn the computer on again and off again") and then onto "how do I debug stupid coding mistakes in scripts with the least time possible" (answer: it might not be a production app, but make sure your scripts have good on-and-off logging infrastructure or you will be sorry).

Unfortunately, I moved on from that job. And if this long-winded post is any indication, I am now seen as too chatty and annoying with this approach where I work. Some people get it, while as the other more senior infrastructure people see it as me questioning them when I ask for explanations or better tips to troubleshoot issues I could see (not that are there, but potentially could see) from my end and know when to leave them alone. As others pointed it, it is essential to enforce this on everyone, and in many institutions, that is seen as being chatty and nosy.

I learned a lot through my mentors, and I wish this could be imposed everywhere I worked and work, but many oppose this as questioning authority. I wish it was different, but oh well.
> intended to perpetuate the cognitive capture regarding razors being things that a lot of thought goes into and that therefore justify high prices

A lot of thought goes into anything that is mass-market and is still competitively priced. The article says, "each razor blade is 5 rupees, or 12 cents". Stuff like Dollar Shave club is way too expensive for most Indians, and that what this article is about.

If you still find it contemptible, fine, you make cheaper razors. If they work, I'll buy them.
Hard work and payoff. Food stamps and welfare doesn't buy trips to Bora Bora..
First of all let me say i'm in a similar situation. Except for a huge difference: i'm in my late 20s. After a technical university background i started a commercial career and eventually had success. The whole last year was incredibly frustrating as i felt something was not quite right and in september i decided to quit and to start a whole new career as a software developer. Starting at junior level, getting half of the money. In despite of the money side, i'm now incredibly satisfied and happy. Was worth it? Yes. (Note: while i'm married, i don't have kids. My wife was incredibly supportive).

I had to seek for a new job, and i had the very same doubts: am i too old? Will recruiters understand my position and meanings or will they consider me just incapable of long-term commitments? Do i have a chance in the current tech market?

Well, this is what happened: One evening i said "Fuck it" and started to apply for open positions. Companies started to call the very next morning. I had my first interview in less than 24hrs. In less than 2 weeks i had a new career. So, given that i know nothing about your situation/environment, i suggest you to just try and see what feedback you get. You don't really have to abandon your current job while searching and interviewing. In general there are a lot of opportunities as a programmer.
I've gone "back to technology" from management a couple times in my career and was always glad that I did. If you've got a reputation as a PHB, you might have to switch companies and you really can't expect to be hired into a technical position unless your skills are current. Get to work learning the skills related to your next position (and don't quit your day job).

Explaining the reversal is easy ... you followed the traditional promotion track and after too many years of drudgery, you realized your true passion is the technology. Forward looking companies will now have a technical promotion track and you won't hit a ceiling like the stodgy older companies. At one point, I hired a newly-graduated MBA (at half my salary) to do the paperwork parts of my job and made sure I was viewed as a "technical manager".
BlackBerry hit with shareholder lawsuit
Nice work guys. I especially like the integrated pricing system. Adding a means of payment is a tricky aspect of a product. If that is taken care of well it saves a lot of time.
> I think they intentionally put bad blades in the cheap razors.

Oh I think the likes of Gillette do far more devious things when it comes to the life of razors. For instance, I can almost swear that the blades on my Fusion razor seem to wear out much faster than the blades on my Mach 3, Sensor, Presto etc. (I've been nearly a lifelong Gillette razor user)

I think what Gillette does is to ensure that the lubricating strip wears out faster, thus causing discomfort while shaving and making one feel as though the razor itself has worn out.

http://gliddofglood.typepad.com/the_glidd_of_glood_blog/2012...
I deduct from your response that you live alone. When you have wife and kids the game changes my friend. You are responsible for the whole family somehow and can't just ignore the money-thing.
The reference is not terribly subtle. Here's what the current reality is, direct from Rubinius article.

> Ruby became popular because Ruby on Rails accelerated the delivery of value by an order of magnitude. This influence is rapidly declining. Efficiencies that Rails introduced, things like convention over configuration and full-stack integration, also encouraged monolithic application architectures. Applications built this way are difficult to change and difficult to scale, which means that under changing conditions, their costs tend to quickly outweigh any value they deliver. Businesses are rapidly learning this lesson.

Rapid being the operative word ironically enough.
> * I can't leverage the last 10 years of my career; it would basically become a lost decade for me

I don't believe there's nothing you've learned that you couldn't apply to programming (not to mention software/application design).

I've applied concepts I've learned in biology class to programming! Also, a lot about programming is management, too: managing memory, managing data, managing workers, threads; just to name a few. Nothing we do in life is a lost to us! :-)

> * my technical skills are rusty

Well, programming is like any other language. If you don't use it, it will start to decay, but you'll never completely
forget it. So, it should be relatively easy (with the right motivation), to catch back up, and then pick up from there.

> * I think recruiters are going to give me a weird look

Well, I can't speak for anyone else (maybe I just have weird beliefs), but I don't see why anyone would give you a weird look. The only thing deserving of a weird look is your statement!

> I'd like to get opinions on whether going back to programming as a career in my late 30s is a good idea or not.

I don't think anyone can give you an answer to this question, but you yourself. You should probably try to get into it slowly, without disrupting your current career and if you're comfortable with it, make two sets of lists: one set about personal pros and cons (did you enjoy it? was it more stressful? do you think you're good at it?) and an objective one (do you estimate your current job pays better? is it more convenient? in which job are you more productive?).

I know this whole comment sounds like a "maybe," but you're the one whose opinions matters the most. :-D
I spent the past 7 years doing project management, and have decided to go back to programming this year. I'm brushing up on technical skills now, which is easier than you think, given how many online and offline resources are widely available.
Being willing to take a pay cut is important, but think of it as a tradeoff for the rewards of more interesting work. Also you can leverage your PM experience.
Definitely do it! Good luck.
Maybe ... but I was using Zope and Plone in the late '90s, so there were definitely higher-level tools for web development then. We were also writing Java servlets in '98 or '99 and when I switched companies in '01, we were already using JSPs.
Sorry, I have failed to express myself.

Rationally concluding that X is the best fit for your problem is not what I'm arguing against.

What I'm stating is that often the technology choice is driven more by fashion then by technical merits.

E.g. in 2007, rails may have been a better choice to build a web chat than erlang or java, but it's more likely that it was just more "hip".
Which is an expensive way to run a company.

Very few startup start with their own server rooms, because part of the "failing fast" is failing cheap. And if you are making infrastructure investments before you find product market fit - well you aren't failing cheap.

I do think there is inherent value in controlling your whole stack, and running all things on your own servers, but I think this is a bit of a luxury most young companies can't afford.
I was tackling a subset of your argument initially. If I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that we need to have the core technology first before trying to piece together something out of it first, and any research without that core technology is useless.

I'll expand point by point.

ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES. I wholeheartedly agree that this is a huge point. However, to draw an analogy to civil engineering - cement is important (and is an enabling technology), but it's not required to make advances in architecture.

ENERGY STORAGE. Suspend it by wires for now, limited-mobility robots are useful in some industries.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE + CONTROL SYSTEMS. This was the core of my previous argument. A lot of what someone perceives as "hard AI" problems are actually "hardware-assisted, AI-guided" problems (your example of control and path planning come to mind). In your video, it showed the operator not being able to move the robot fluidly & fluently. This is the aspect that this DARPA initiative is tackling. Separate the AI (human operator for now) from the hardware-assisted aspects. (Please note that humans can typically take over the "hardware-assist" and manually move, but try writing with your non-dominant hand or run in reverse)

PROCESSING / NEURAL COMPUTING. See above.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES / DEVELOPMENT AND SIMULATION TOOLS. Sure, I agree - but this is a problem that can be tackled right now.

I agree that there are a lot of areas that need to be improved for a "true robot". However, we can improve some subsets right now, and they may be useful in the future.

It's somewhat like arguing that developing advanced image-processing concepts & algorithms was pointless 50 years ago, because neither the software nor the hardware of the time could do anything with the idea. It's quite common in this field that an old algorithm becomes practical due to hardware and software capabilities.