skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
because employers now have so much easier, cheaper access to above-average software

Yet they consistently don't choose it. Much as in the following case...

All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns, instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve what isn’t working — whether it is eye surgery techniques...

That's an excellent example of another thing that won't happen, mainly because it already doesn't happen; medicine is a field where there are many, many examples of hard-data demonstrating better techniques, well-known, that nonetheless don't spread. Atul Gawande discusses it, amongst other interesting things, in his book "Better"; I namechecked that book mainly because, as well as discussing this, it's quite a fun read and a good starting point for principles that carry across all fields, but it's by no means the only source.
Sydney-based entrepreneur trying to find tech cofounder through song
Why is this cool and clever? It still only encodes 12 bits of data, it is just different to using the normal 12 bits of data.

Is this a more useful subset? I am guessing it is so, since they went to this trouble.
It's less a matter of ability and more a matter of having the time/motivation. If you took a bunch of practicing natural scientists and/or engineers and forced them somehow to enroll in a course teaching Scheme/Clojure/etc., would many of them do well? Almost certainly. If you gave them the choice between a Lisp and something like Julia or MATLAB to use in their everyday work when they need to do some computation? They'll probably choose the later because it's easy and familiar and doesn't have a huge up-front time investment; scientists tend to be very busy people.
I agree with you. I also like to think that we have replaced, several times over, the original "programmers" with smarter and smarter silicon and the result is not fewer programmers, but orders of magnitude more. I think this will happen with other professions. Things which once required years of education and (often physical) practice, say delivering certain kinds of healthcare, will become heavily computer and robot assisted and we'll see some of them pushed from the expensive limited availability hospital to the much more widely available pharmacy -- or even to the shopping mall.
Requires a facebook account? C'mon fellas.
Well, that's kind of how things work now, which is why your physician sometimes has to check with your insurance carrier to see if they'll authorize work. For example, I recently saw a sports medicine doctor for what we feared was a supraspinatus tear. To diagnose that, we needed to order an MRI. My carrier signed off on the imaging, but it turns out that one of the other big carriers will refuse it as a matter of course until an x-ray has been performed.

Now, my doctor has forty years of experience, and if she order an MRI it's because she already knows an x-ray won't return any useful information, and will just waste time, money and her patient's radiation exposure limit. But, statistically speaking, the carrier in question has obviously determined that they'll save money if they force providers to route through x-rays regardless. In other words, my provider's judgement was overridden by some Excel spreadsheet somewhere -- not even a Watson or Big Blue.

Meanwhile, doctors are being forced to handle more data entry functions, something they understandably hate, and which has probably turned more providers against the Affordable Care Act than anything else. (The provisions are, IMHO, unduly onerous even as I understand the anti-fraud rationale behind their introduction, but that's another issue for another time.)

Having said that, given the stringent requirements FDA places on med-tech, I don't anticipate AI providing more than a support role over the next few decades. FDA is always going to want a credentialed human in the critical chain between patient and procedure.
I would argue that a serious memory leak in one of the core functions of such a popular and trending language is news worthy.
I have read a lot of lang. wars and complaints about programming languages... but C# is one of the only languages that I can't remember reading any complaints about. None.

I must conclude, by the usual Stroustrup quote, that no one uses C#. (yes this is tongue in cheek)
The code signature for an app extends to the frameworks it contains. You can't just replace them and still have a valid signature.
idealistic view of the world vs the reality of the world
It's highly unlikely that there is a memory leak.
My weekend project - jQuery Mobile React Example
What you call a misapprehension I would instead call "identifying a delusion." The faux-classlessness of American society is one of the weirder and to my mind deleterious aspects of the American character, in part because I think it feeds into Steinbeck's temporarily-embarrassed-millionaires phenomenon (the rush of actual middle-class people to defend the people who will profit from their defense).

And I don't think it holds true, anyway. I don't have the same problems as someone making $25,000 a year (approximately the 48th percentile as per Wikipedia), though they are recognizable to me in the abstract. I also don't have the same problems as someone making $200K a year and they are utterly foreign.
Any good startup accelerators in China?
I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then write a 3-part book series on the coming flood, the power of water, and the wondrous new water-world awaiting all of us. A bit breathless, a bit over-done, a bit over-cooked, and a bit over-hyped.

But he has a point. We are on the verge of some new golden age. Perhaps a new machine age. I tend to think we're seeing the beginnings of a transition to a machine lifeform-dominated Earth. Probably take 200-400 years to fully play out. People aren't just going to become obsolete -- they're going to become irrelevant and non-existent. Seeing pictures of an old-fashioned plain human like us, in another 400 years, will be as quaint to future man as seeing pictures of neanderthals in a science magazine is to us.

The interesting thing is just how awake the average person is to the amount of change happening. When the Industrial Age happened, there were huge factories, great cities being built, and all sorts of physically giant things to look at and note that yes, something new was happening. With the new age, we're looking at changes in Silicon, machine learning, maybe robotics. There aren't going to be giant robots leveling cities in the near future (thankfully!) or anti-gravity machines taking us to Mars in a few hours (sadly!). Instead we're seeing massive changes, on a tiny scale, about what it means to be human.

This article is for the cheerleaders. HN is for the cheerleaders, like us. But I wonder if the average person is even going to notice.
Tech Regs Are Coming
If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY Times?

A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs:

Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

Then Sebastian Thrun admitted that Udacity had a "lousy product" in this interview:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-u...

Friedman is a cheerleader for employers. Employees are warned that average isn't good enough. One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.
(expanding on my response on Twitter...)

I generally don't find /etc/hosts to be a sustainable answer against DNS hijacking, at least on hostile networks. For one thing, one-off hosts entries can cause you quite a lot of grief if Google chooses to change up what machines they host various services on; it may well also result in degraded performance if they use geoDNS to give you a lower-latency machine based on where you are accessing from.

But, more than that, even though "most" of my applications are SSL, if I know a network to be hostile, I would rather have absolutely none of my traffic passing through them unencrypted. If you have a machine somewhere to run OpenVPN on, that's probably the safest thing to do; I've mine listening on TCP port 443, as well as the standard UDP port 1194.

There are times when /etc/hosts is your best workaround -- such as a network that you generally trust, but which has some filtering that you need to work around. (Work networks often qualify for this.) But in the case of a truly hostile network, OpenVPN is probably your friend.
Can't you just used Indeed.com? I thought every major ATS allows you to submit your job listings to Indeed.com and similar sites.
What are your thoughts (and possible experiences with existing CRMs)?

You might be too big for it, but Seliger + Associates [1] uses Highrise: https://highrisehq.com/ . It's intuitive and easy to use but surprisingly fully featured.

It may or may not be appropriate for your use pattern, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

[1] See www.seliger.com if you're curious; we're grant writing consultants who work primarily for nonprofit and public agencies.
There are also a number of people looking for jobs who simply refuse to use recruiters/headhunters. Most just need to fill a quota. It's very rare to find one who truly wants to find the right job for you.
If this was a MITM attack what would have been the correct route of action? Use a VPN?
I don't get this. Based on my experience, even without framework support, it should be pretty easy to write some code in iOS that loads some code in from a remote location, just by using NSBundle functionality. After all, NSBundle files may include runnable code, in addition to resources. I'm not sure if such apps would get past Apple's tooling / testers though, when submitted to the store.

Is it harder for Apple to check if remote code loading functionality (and other potential security issues) is included in frameworks compared to bundles?
Email already in his post: "Founder of Streak here. Happy to answer questions about the product from the OP or anyone else - reach me directly at aleem at streak." : )
It's really impossible to rate your life numerically in relation to a "best possible life", so in order to give some kind of answer to this vague question, respondents fall back on some quantifiable measure like money.

A separate issue is that the question "How satisfied are you WITH your life?" is not the same as "How satisfied are you IN your life?". It's possible to have high moment-to-moment happiness, but have a negative view of one's life; or vice versa. Daniel Kahnemann explains this in this TED talk (13:30):

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...

He even mentions the Gallup World Poll.
Note that 74.125.228.1 is an IP address for drive.google.com. You'll get a different answer depending on where you are in the world when you issue the query (it will return an IP address for the datacenter nearest you).
Horribly written headline on WSJ's part; one could read it and think Facebook's given up on advertising.
IIRC http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd did in the past, though it no longer appears to. I know I've run into it in _many_ other places but it's been awhile and I no longer remember the various ones. I should also probably note that they were universally _not_ locations which you would generally be hitting programmatically.
They are probably doing this to stop people using DNS tunnelling to bypass sites/blocks/paywalls setup.

Doing this can end up biting you in the butt in a few months time when Google move the service to a different place and you've forgotten to change the IP in hosts.

Certainly works as temporary solution - this is how I test some of my websites before I push them into production via DNS.
I think Code Complete is the kind of book that if you don't already know what's in it it's not going to help you and if you do know what's in it it's not going to help you.

That said, it has a lot of solid advice. It also has some less than solid advice which is more of an opinion.

I would still recommend people read it. I also recommend they read the references. I also recommend they talk with other people, look at their experiences, and try to figure things out for themselves.

Adding another thought here:

Some things have to be learnt through experience. You can read a really great book about swimming but it probably won't make you a good swimmer. So that's one thing.

The other thing is that I found the book trying to be very rigorous about subjects where it's simply impossible to do so. There are so many different ways to approach different problems and things like cost vary hugely between different businesses. Sometimes doing things one way makes sense in a given context and not in another. What we need is for people to develop that understanding rather than simply learn some rules.
Exactly. You don't need a 'router' when you have the filesystem and mod_rewrite.
I decided to learn React and find out if it's adequate for development with jQuery Mobile.

So I converted one of jQuery Mobile's demos to React and created a pull request that was quickly merged.

I like very much the idea of components, and how they are rendered. This demo is static, so it's not a great showcase for React's benefits. Nevertheless, after writing it, I can see that React doesn't conflict with jQuery Mobile and I believe it's a viable alternative for building applications with a clean architecture.
Device for & method of making element appear in shortest network path
The Extra Step: Graphs for Communication versus Exploration
I'm not the OP you are responding to, but:

1) I do think software engineers are in danger of suffering the same fate, just later than some. We won't even be the last profession to go, that'll be comedians probably.

2) People often underestimate the impact of automation by looking at automation as a binary state where the problem comes when you automate away everyone, but that's not a great way to look at it. Partial automation on a quick enough timeline is more than enough to destabilize the economy of a particular industry.

We are a long way from computers replacing all lawyers or doctors or software engineers, but if they can replace just 25% of them by allowing the remaining 75% to be as productive as the entire 100% was previously, that's already a large economic impact. If automation can replace 75% of them, that's a massive world-altering shift, economically.

We really should be worrying about the economic impact of all this automation now, because at least in the USA (where I live) we are a very long way away from (sociopolitically) being able to deal with this quickly approaching new reality of having way more people than are needed for doing what would traditionally be considered "productive" work.
> I generally don't find /etc/hosts to be a sustainable answer against DNS hijacking, at least on hostile networks.

Completely agreed. Unfortunately, this requires preparation in advance.

Thankfully, this was just for a short bus ride - I actually changed it back immediately after loading the Drive homepage.

How much overhead does OpenVPN add? I've used it a bit on reasonably fast networks, but I'm curious if it would be too slow to use here.
aleem at streak
Did you miss my link to the BLS data showing the difference between hiring number and job openings ?

There's plenty of empirical ways to show that unadvertised hiring occurs. Another alternative way would be simply to survey companies and employees and ask them.

The fact that unadvertised recruitment happens doesn't mean that the jobs will be available to anyone who attempts to apply via cold-calling.

A company that receives a strong recommendation for a candidate via someone they trust may well create a new role especially for that person, but obviously such a role wouldn't exist if someone unknown tried to apply speculatively.
My wife's company uses Marketo, though that might be more of an enterprise product. not sure if it's cost effective for a single founder. My wife thinks it is a great product and it integrates well with Salesforce.
The Nuremburg and Tokyo war trials were show trials. The US wanted to have trials, the UK just string the losers up post haste and the Soviet Union, the home of the show trial, was really thrilled.

There's no question some horrible people who did dreadful things were hanged as a result of those trials.

But nn such a context it's impossible to not to have any decision overshadowed as "victor's justice" no matter how seemingly legitimate. And there _was_ ambiguity in some cases. Example: the victor decides that "waging war" is the crime while the general from the losing side is professionally executing his judgement in fighting a battle. Or where the losers were punished for something that the winners also did (e.g. destruction of Dresden: terrible, ineffective in pursuit of the war, and completely understandable in context).

Basically trials, in this context, are solely to assuage the guilt of the victors. They are no more just than simply executing those the victors have decided are guilty.

BTW there was a lot of contemporary discussion on this; this is not an ex post facto opinion.
"why you can't replace programmers"

Oh I'd disagree with that... If you'd like an example, note how "Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system. Its buzzword compliant, being NoSQL, and scales to tens of thousands of records, which despite claims to the contrary is almost always enough for most real world problems. The world of the future is not having a DBA and CRUD developer cooperate to write your shopping list, its one untrained dude with a spreadsheet.

Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by one marketing guy with photoshop. Its already happened. Its not bravado but observation.

Rows and rows of desks of junior accountants replaced by one accountant with quickbooks. Another observation, not bravado.

And what, exactly, are pharmacists doing 99% of the time beyond being a very high item value / high risk vending machine? Realizing my mom worked as a pharm-tech part time when I was a kid, so you're not going to fool me... Very highly priced customer service and team lead and thats about it.

The mechanical steam shovel never quite eliminated the use or sales of hand shovels. Its just that "digging ditches" isn't a viable career path anymore for almost anyone, anymore. Or "manual metal lathe operator" or any number of other tasks. I'm not saying there will never be another accountant hired or dr. or lawyer. Just a whole heck of a lot less of them. At least one, two, maybe three orders of magnitude fewer.

Much like the first industrial revolution... there's people right now, out there, being paid to use a hand shovel... the story is, its now probably hundreds of people right at this moment, not 5% of the population or whatever like in 1850.
If you're building a web application in PHP, then symfony is a huge improvement over naked php files or rolling your own bootstrapped system. Right out of the box it addresses concerns of security, user management, routing, persistence, and myriads of the other basic needs of a web system. Packages for many common components are already built, meaning you can get sophisticated functionality working quickly. It is modular enough that you can include only the components you need.

The built-in templating language, twig, actually provides a number of benefits over bare PHP templating. It addresses security concerns, has a concise and clean syntax, and compiles down to optimised PHP template code, minimising the performance hit.

If you are suggesting that PHP shouldn't be used for web applications, and should only be used for basic templating, I would be interested to know what you consider to be an "appropriate language".
I think in TCP mode, the big pain point is that packet loss on one wrapped session is lethal to your whole connection (i.e., all streams stop if just one stream stops).

In UDP mode, I think you lose only 70-ish bytes per packet, which isn't too bad.

(Another win that you get is roaming: if your local IP keeps changing, perhaps because your bus's cell modem keeps dropping out, then you don't lose your SSH sessions.)
"* offer to work for free (if you can afford it)"

I know there are stories where working for free is a good strategy, but they are vastly outnumbered by stories where not working for free was the best option.

I'd argue against it unless you have a really, really, really good reason to work for a specific organization for free.
What's wrong with gwern articles?
Because some grounding (I don't mean of the ee kind :-) would remove some of the technomystecism in his decision process. At the moment he considers the iphone indistinguishable from magic.
Where are the DuckDuckGo guys with a counterexample when you need them...
>(save Mac, sigh)

Bug 921040 [0] seems to be progressing, even if slowly.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921040
For couples, http://www.howaboutwe.com is actually pretty fun. If you live in SF.
One of the best development books I've read is Thinking Forth [1]. Don't let the Forth aspect put you off. It's full of great design tips and ways of thinking about programming.

[1] http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
VPN. Always VPN. Don't trust the local network. A Digital Ocean droplet is only $5 a month so for most of the readers here there's no excuse for not using a VPN.

Even my home network can't be trusted. Comcast hijacks DNS request to third party DNS servers.
Well, I use it =) C# is a language with a somewhat limited market ("Enterprise" applications running on Windows Servers, and yes, I know about Mono). And in this market, a very strict subset of C# (see: Java) is happily used. I know a lot of people who refrain from using even lambdas and implicit typing, let alone the other "fringe functional stuff", because "they make things complicated".
If anything, in my mind, not using shared libraries is a security issue.

For example, if every application links to a static version of some image loading library, then all of the applications must be patched if there is a vulnerability in that library.

Whereas if they all share the same copy, you patch the library, and they all get fixed.

I'm aware that model works better when the same vendor is providing all of the binaries, but there are cases where it's also appropriate for general ISVs.
New entertainment company NEEDS input on music video
Much of their expenditure goes to the University though, and to my knowledge little of that flows back to the city. The University often winds up sequestering large amounts of wealth even as the city around begins to deteriorate.
Yes. Exactly. This is like saying visual basic does classes.

Sure, it does, but why would you use it like that?
I think you mean very carefully written headline. As much as people mutter about clickbait, the art of headlining is old and subtle, driven by business pressures, technical considerations (eg, the width of a column) and psychology.

The sentence is true, though incomplete. Facebook has many ad programs, and has chosen to shut down one of them. That it also happens to oversell the content through ambiguity is icing.
I've been running the code he posted with ApacheBench and I'm not seeing any issues.
Not sure. New York looks very bad to me.