skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I've felt for a while that we need to start ditching the terms 'front-end' and 'back-end', as there is no way to use these terms anymore without following up with an explanation of what this means.

I've been primarily a 'browser developer', with most of my time spent in the Chrome dev tools, editing css, html and 'light' javascript. I call myself a front-ender for this reason.

However, over time I find that I prefer the 'real' programming stuff over battling browser quirks and pumping out html/css structures that I learned over time are optimal. I gravitate more and more to what amount to full web apps where I do stuff that requires, to a degree, 'real' programming beyond just a javascript/jQuery widget.

That's where the real division is, I think. As I get into more and more complicated development, I become more aware of my limitations and my lack of formal training.

This reached a point where calling myself a 'front-ender' is starting to feel less and less applicable, because there's a huge divide between many front-enders I know who are not really programmers, and what I am in the process of becoming, and calling myself a front-ender feels like underselling myself.
Was on mobile when I commented I think..
The problem is rent control - get rid of that and the market distortion goes away.
From your profile:

> Intelligent but bad at communication. Trying to improve my communication skills.

Start by not posting "I hate you" to people on the internet.
You need to understand geopolitics a bit (USA supported /s Croatia against their arch enemy, Serbia). Also in countries like Croatia things are done with a wink and a nod and a lot of rules are bent.

If USA wants you in Croatia or virtually any Balkan or third world country not slaved to China /Russia, you will be placed in a private FBI jet in no time.
I may not 'technically' need more money, but I feel extremely uncomfortable where I am right now. While I appreciate volunteers who do these things, it also makes me depressed as I know their efforts are largely for naught. Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I think it's ridiculous how much money is poured into these efforts when the real cause of the problem is not addressed. Humanity is suffering by the hands of immoral government. Would I fund ventures to kill the people responsible? Absolutely. But this would also include taking out many members of our own government, which is illegal and not realistic. So until some major changes are made in respect to political authority, I feel like it is a waste of effort, and I would not be happy being a part of it. As tragic as it actually is. Thank goodness for the people who ease the pain and suffering of the people who are being oppressed. They desperately need some kind of hope.
So true - enjoying working with Java EE on a daily basis. I am not always entirely satisfied with Glassfish though (my application server of choice), so I'm willing to consider others. What are you using, perhaps JBoss?
Semantically you could make the opposite argument however given the perspective/context.

Abandon can mean relinquishing of control. It would depend on your employees/clients, but given a large enough sample size, I'm sure one party might feel cheated when power changes hands.

That said, ownership gives you that power. The power to relinquish it. It seems perfectly ethical/moral to me.
Well, I designed it to make my own life easier, and if it's useful to other people, then great! Personally I couldn't live without it now, it saves me a huge amount of time in managing projects, but obviously people's mileage will vary..

But something thing about the design of the codebase is that it doesn't need a fancy build system - you can include everything in a project by just compiling a handful of cpps that wrap up all the code into module-sized chunks, so if you do want to use juce in some other tool, it should be very easy to do.
Bonds that pay out when catastrophe strikes are rising in popularity
Avoid RFCs unless you're working on a specific problem. You're also not going to be able to become an expert in all the different fields, so focus on specific fields.

For IP networking, I can specific recommend the following books as "force multipliers" of knowledge:

- Routing TCP/IP (Cisco Press)

- Network Warrior (O'Reilly, Cisco-centric, but good, easy to digest intermediate knowledge of layer 2 and 3)

- TCP/Illustrated (A deep dive into TCP/IP. RFC-level depth but easier to conceptualize)

If you're looking for recommendations for other specific areas, let me know and I can probably point you in the right direction.
"Y Combinator" Google search result soars in the last 4 months
It avoids backdoors. Assume that the Chinese government has backdoored its ciphers, and the American government has backdoored its ciphers, and the two governments don't want to cooperate.

If you cascade the two ciphers, the American government needs to find a real weakness in the Chinese cipher, and the Chinese government needs to find a real weakness in the American cipher. Which they might have, but they at least can't use backdoors at this point.
Actually, the ribbon UI was a great success.
Javascript obfuscation
How naive - as if this were not among the top priorities for spies to learn about.
US map of electric car chargers
They said the same thing on their Twitter Q/A https://twitter.com/GTOMSCS

"@GTOMSCS Is the Degree Awarded same as that for a residential program?"

"@sahuja79 Yes. The degree is the same as that for a residential program. Recommendations are not required but strongly encouraged."

Pretty black and white.
The page says:

"Tuition: $134 per credit hour

Fees: $301 per academic term of enrollment"

And I found this:

"Georgia Tech's M.S. in Computer Science requires a minimum of 36 credit hours for completion."

So at 4 semesters you would be looking at:

$6028
Yes and no.

If Node.js can do things like

* cache responses

* not send duplicate responses but instead maintain a waiting queue

* throttle requests based on # of preforked threads etc.

then it would be faster most of the time.

And equally importantly you can take a page from Yahoo's book and pre-render stuff on the presumably faster server, for mobile devices and robots.
No, but they are doing a new program-of-study (beyond a single course) certificate program called the XSeries Certificate (MITx is offering two of these, a 7-course one in "Foundations of Computer Science" and a 3-course one in "Supply Chain Management")
Actually, to more directly respond to your comment:

So when you have problems with your wiring that your landlord refuses to fix (that are required to be fixed by housing regs) you have two options: a) complain and wait months/years for action or b) fix it yourself out of pocket.

You choose option b and then the landlord raises your rent. You don't think that's getting fucked over? You think tenants should put up with shitty (below required) conditions just because the rent is cheap (as regulated by law)?

Wow.
It largely depends on a culture of the people you talk to. For many Java developers Backend means communicating with the database and application logic. But they would consider templating and other veiw code a "frontend work", even though it has nothing to do with the web browser.

However, if you talk to JavaScript developers many of them would consider all code that is executed in a browser "frontend" but would exclude any server-side templating, partials, etc.

Then, some of them would still consider ALL JavaScript code a part of Frontend, be it a browser code or Node code. This can bring up some fun conversations. One of my coworkers talk about server-side bits of project A a "Frontend" because they are written in Node, but considers same functionality in project B "Backend" because they are written in Python.
If you're talking about an Indian who lives in India, you probably got a great one because you are paying an elite rate. If you're talking about a local Indian, you're talking about something different than the subject of the OP.

Finding a good C++ programmer for 70K a year might be worth sharing tips on, though.
Surely if you count the value of not having to pander to the Saudi regime anymore, it can't be that bad.
Though there's no absolute answer here, and it could very well go either way, as he explains it would most likely be irrelevant due to the fact that PHP can only process serially.

For instance, if you need to run 3 SQL queries in PHP, then the total execution time will be t1 + t2 + t3. On the other hand, if you make those queries in NodeJS instead, it will be MAX(t1, t2, t3).

So, it depends on the complexity of your app and your ability to decouple and separate concerns in the NodeJS server.
Shutdown Cartoon
It will be interesting to see if they will accept students with no bachelors degree at all. Their site says: "significant professional or other work experience with supporting recommendations may qualify as an adequate substitute for the appropriate academic credentials"

However, there have traditionally been accreditation issues with accepting students into masters programs without an undergraduate degree (I ran into this when trying to take non-degree graduate classes at Stanford).
But that is almost completely orthogonal to the issue of nativity. That is demonstrated by the fact that Office wasn't using native widgets before ribbon either and people were happy, and as a counter-example Metro/ModernUI is arguably the native UI for Windows 8 and that hasn't stopped people from disliking it.
Bringing down servers, one character at a time
But other than Coursera and employee development, those GREs are the last academic record I have. You would think my transcripts from '85 would be even less relevant with that line of reasoning, but that might be exactly what keeps me from enrolling.
Interesting! But far from accurate, I'm afraid. For example, my neck is as smooth as a baby's ass.

But let's do put things in perspective. Don't you have better things to do than try to dox people who disagree with you on Hacker News? I'd like to think we have a higher quality of discourse than that.
I love JS, but I have trouble with this idea that people are against using Node because they're afraid of JS or whatever. EGreg has mentioned some situations like millions of users or pushing data to the client, where Node makes sense. But I'm not sure what inherent value running JS on the server has.

Also, while it may be true that the backend devs don't care about the flow of pages that the user browses, the user does care. That means that the services that put together the pages need to work for the user's use case. That means that the system needs to be designed for the pages the user looks at. You can't escape this, this is bigger than your architecture. It's almost like a law of physics.
That's basically it, except in most shops, the controller is this middle ground. It's on the back end, but the back end engineers can't really do the job on their own, so the front end developers end up writing the controllers, calling out to services that are written by the people who are actively implementing the business logic. In most cases, there are really four layers rather than three, and the two groups handle two layers each.

Moving to a service oriented architecture where the two groups communicate by REST seems like it would work just as well in most situations, and this was the point.
I believe the point was that there aren't any equivalent programs for a Bachelors at a respectable school (this is a Masters program), not that GT isn't good.
I think the lines have quickly blurred, to be effective in the 'front-end' I think you need to be an amalgam of both.
> There are so many problems with Scala, that the question of static vs. dynamic typing becomes secondary. Static typing could well be downright awesome, but Scala is still a mess.

Well, gosh, it must be terrible, avoid it all costs!

> I'm repeating the same line for the third time today.

You're obviously not a fan of the language if you find yourself bashing it 3 times in a day, fair enough.

> I find that Scala is for people who find Haskell too simple

Scala is for those that want to get shit done without dealing with Java's endless boilerplate, while still running on the performance beast that is the JVM and benefiting from Java's massive ecosystem. As a bonus you get FP out of the box, so you find yourself, without consciously being aware of it, favoring immutable constructs (map,flatMap,fold, etc.) over imperative mutable boilerplate ridden hacks to achieve the same, thereby, in complete disagreement with the article at hand, becoming a better programmer.

With Haskell you get purity, unhindered FP elegance, and minuscule ecosystem, a language interoperable with...itself it seems.

While it's true that Scala is perhaps overly feature rich, with the to be released 2.11 the focus has been on aggressively stripping out unused features from the language and improving compiler performance.

Following that, perhaps for 2.12, Odersky recently proposed on Twitter a revision of the type system that had FP devotees up in arms since the proposed change removes some of the complexity that makes libraries like Scalaz possible.

At any rate, with Java8 there will be a squeeze in the JVM landscape, alternative languages will be fighting for users as lousy legacy Java is soon going out the window.
Wget is definitely a good start. What's needed is a shiny and usable UI, ways to catalog / tag / search inside your saved data, and a painless installation process. This could use come work.
Maybe someone has an official answer, but I always thought of front-end as anything in the browser and back-end as anything on the server. Front-facing is user-facing. Back-facing is hidden plumbing.

The article seems to be more about UI vs. non-UI code. Rather than have part of the UI code in the business logic, it can be split out. This was already possible, but with Node.js you can have the server-side half of the UI code be in Javascript so all the UI code is Javascript and the business logic code can be in some other language.
As the author hints, there's nothing about living in India or being Indian that makes you a bad programmer. (Which I would hope would be obvious, because believing otherwise would amount to racism.)

The problem is an economy that pushes too many people, including many of the wrong people, into a job that is extremely technical and geeky. Coding is an often thankless and unsexy job. It involves many hours wrestling with compilers and obscure error messages, memorizing arcane rules of your programming environment, and conducting long and confusing email discussions with clients. If you're not one of the warped individuals who loves this kind of stuff, you'll have a hard time finding the motivation to get good at coding.

So when someone takes up coding as nothing more than a day job, the odds are against that person becoming good at it. I've heard from a lot of Indians (including the author of this article) that young people often fall into this trap. The same thing happens in every country, but it seems that economic conditions in India encourage it to happen more there.

For my part, I've met plenty of Americans who fit this profile--bad programmers, not interested in the field, just trying to make a buck. The lesson is: If you're looking for coding talent, it doesn't matter what country you're looking in. You must screen rigorously.
First, I don't accept that the people killed are necessarily plotting anything. If you blindly believe what the government tells you, then why not believe the Russian government when they say they don't kill anyone. Because they kill journalists of course, so they can't be trusted. Oh wait, but that's circular reasoning. How good is the intelligence? Is it as reliable as "Curveball" was (and we went to war based on that)? If so, then we are knowingly killing alot of innocent people, and not just the collateral damage, the targets themselves.

Second, terrorism is not an existential threat. In fact, there is a strong argument that the drone strikes actually increase the number of "terrorists" and make a successful strike against the US more likely, not less.

So the way I see it, Russia kills journalists who threaten the existing power structure, and the US kills more-or-less random people in order to bolster the existing power structure. Two, equally-disgusting, sides of the same coin.
Yandex doesn't have search majority in Belarus but VK has social network majority.
Oh, I also would like to add an anecdote. Several years ago I worked at a bank and we had a system with 2 components. One of them was written in Java, the other - in Cobol. Our management referred to the Java part as "frontend" and to Cobol as "backend".
"Installing Dropplets can be accomplished in about 30 seconds or under. Just download the latest version, extract "dropplets.zip", then upload the extracted files to your server."

yeah, setting up a dropplets server is simple... step 1: already have a server set up.

who are these "simple" platforms supposed to be for if you already have to have a "server" set up that you can "upload" to? if i can set up a server, why can't i set up a database?

this just seems dumb.
They offer "ID Verified" certificate on some courses for a small fee, certificates which should be more valuable than the regular ones. However I don't think they're accredited.
I think that is sort of the underlying theme of this article, in that the definition of "backend" has been traditionally had to define, philosophically speaking.

And you can take my word for it that you should take this guy seriously, or you can check his credentials to make that determination yourself, but suffice it to say I think most would consider him a source of much signal and not much noise.
Attorney General Subpoenaed Data on 15,000 Airbnb Hosts in New York
Marxist analysis is even more often used in discussion of race than of sex. You will often see the claim that there is no such thing as racism against white people, because racism equals power + privilege and white people are privileged. A person shouting ethnic slurs as they beat up a white person is not acting in a "racist" manner, since white people are the privileged group.
I agree there's some subjectivity but "you can't just redistribute Firefox as-is" is NOT subjective. That is flat out wrong. You can redistribute Firefox as-is. What you can't do is redistribute modified Firefox and keep the name.
Node can issue multiple non-blocking commands which can let PHP create children processes to handle each request.

It can work, though you lose a bit of transparency.
If a currency fluctuates 300% in a year, I don't think it's out of line to note that it used to be 100% higher in value. Silk road's closer did drop the price a bit, after all.
I think what EGreg is talking about (benefits of using node over, e.g., PHP) and what this article is talking about (benefits of throwing node between the client and the back-end) are kind of two different things. But I think the similarities address what you're asking.

If node is being used simply as a proxy then—no question—throwing it in to the mix will simply introduce latency (shortest distance blah blah blah). However the suggesting made by both the article and EGreg seems to be, "use the right tool for the job." In the case of the article, Nicholas seems to be suggesting that aspects of your data model might be better suited in the hands of your front-end engineers as they're the ones presenting that data. EGreg is suggesting leveraging the asynchronous nature of node (and evented programming in general) to handle certain tasks more efficiently.

But to answer your question, not necessarily. Even if you introduce additional latency, you might still benefit from putting more of the data model into the hands of your front-end guys (particularly if you're at a massive organization where coordination is the biggest hurdle). Plus, there's nothing stating you can't push the mutations performed at the node layer down farther into your stack and, potentially, remove it entirely. And, there's also the case that node might do the work you've delegated to it more quickly than if it were performed in PHP, negating the loss due to additional latency (but if that additional latency is the concern, I'd recommend relying benchmarking to help you make that decision).
Why Redis is a Great Tool For New Applications and Startups
I wouldn't expect anyone to know object oriented PHP. However, if they have Stanford credentials, I would expect them to be able to learn it in a very short timeframe.

Also, a computer science degree does not make someone a software engineer.
David Byrne: If the 1% stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here
Not using a car (not even having one, if it matters), conserving, recycling, buying new stuff minding that it'll eventually end up in the landfill. That kind of thing.

If you live on a farm or in the mountains, it's hard to go without a car. But living in a modern city in a first world country, there's rarely an excuse.

EDIT: also, consider stopping eating so much meat, because it's not sustainable either.
Worst Elon Musk Interview Ever
Oh god look at this humiliating Elon interview.
> What is wrong with using one coherent language for one problem, and another for a different one?

Some shops really hate doing work in multiple languages. If designing a language for general industrial use, I'd think long and hard before writing a language that was not at least somewhat sort of decent at everything.
Traditionally, I defined backend as server side programming basically anything that is run on the server before it reaches the browser.
Since front-end engineers know JavaScript already, they can just effectively make an abstraction that spits out what they need using Node.js which is technically still in their domain.
I never thought of it like that, but that totally makes sense too, wow. Nice read.
A quick survey of freelancer.com shows recruiters offering $5 to $10 per hour. In India a plumber charges more than that for an hour of work.
>> The impression I get from reading accounts (disclaimer: this is where my words cease to have any authority) is that in India, "software developer" as a career is a household name; it carries at least some status and pays relatively well, and it seems to be a popular choice.

well, you are somewhat close to the reality there. Software engineering is a traditionally well paying profession. This creates a general tendency for students to opt for it. Before you know, there are too many in that profession already and things start getting messed up. We are in that messed up phase now.
Organized crime has its own internal governance, hence "organized". So that's no different.
For a simple review, I wrote up my initial experience with Silvrback, after migrating over a blog from WordPress.

http://jasonlotito.com/over-the-us

I should note that I've been very happy with Silvrback. It's easy to use, fast, and works as expected.
Tell HN: Commercial backup tools might not back up all of your files
At least Backblaze makes no bones about it: https://help.backblaze.com/entries/22087908-How-do-I-exclude-folders-file-types-or-file-sizes-

By default, the client won't back up disk images, virtual machine files, or any file ending in ".exe".
You don't think that changing a senior's diaper or dealing with infected needles is dirty, dangerous work? I submit that the jobs you're mentioning are distinctive because they involve lifting heavy things. The women I knew who worked construction were all forklift drivers.
>"Yes, in a developing country, there is a tendency for people to drift more towards the fields that are considered stable and secure at that point in time. This is nothing new at all."

That's not the interesting thing to notice, is the fact that economics incentives alone have a negative impact in the quality of the professionals.

It is in particular very interesting given the fact that there is a group of successful personalities pushing to people to go to the computer path. Given the examples that might actually hurt the industry.