skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A) parentheticals are aside comments

B) I'm not saying that all outside programmers are inferior. I'm saying that, given a uniformly random sample of Bay Area vs. outside programmer, I would expect the Bay Area programmer to be "better" for some set of objective measures.

If you don't think that, then you also have to disagree with basic market dynamics. Good programmers can earn more money here, and expose themselves to significant upside opportunities -- both social and financial -- which simply cannot be offered in the same quantity elsewhere. So if you show me a programmer who doesn't live in a place where they are exposed to those opportunities, I have to conclude one of only a few options:

1) not a good enough programmer to work at a company where they would be exposed to those opportunities

2) too risk-adverse or pessimistic to believe that they could leverage those opportunities, such that the cost of living here would be outweighed by the potential benefits -- which, if that is what this person believes about themselves, then perhaps #1 also applies

3) extreme aversion to city or suburban living? Or severe miscalculation of the cost-benefit of living here.

Certainly there are some cases where people who don't live here -- the center of the universe as far as technology careers are concerned -- are actually very highly skilled and leveraging those skills in their own communities. John Carmack doesn't live here, nor does Matz.

But I think you have to admit that those are exceptional cases. The average case is that you have an average programmer -- how else do you interpret the decision not to live in a place which affords objectively superior upside scenarios?

I'm not sure if you understand it, but your attitude is a big part of the reason some of us would never, ever move there. I'm sure you find this just peachy, which would also be your own failure.

Yeah I get it and I'm sorry for offending you. But I think there are certainly some realities at play, and one of them is that not all places attract talent equally. Nobody bats an eye if I said "community theater in Peoria does not attract the best acting talent," somehow that's an obvious statement -- of course if one was truly talented they'd have found a more rewarding stage.

Why is the same principle upsetting when applied to your own profession? Talented developers will find their way to the place which best rewards them. The biggest rewards tend to be available in the SF Bay Area. Ergo, to the extent that talent and compensation, opportunity etc are correlated -- the better talent is found here.

Finally, I'd like to apologize on behalf of all the stupid foreigners...

This is an unnecessary reaction. I think you must know what I'm saying here is that the voting seems to have a tendency to indicate popular sentiment, and not thoughtfulness, or insight. Consequently, it tends to punish provocative or controversial statements.
> > Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it.

> These are private busses. Not public ones.

The busses aren't the infrastructure being used.
I'm looking forward to learning more about him in the coming weeks.

I'm glad it's a tech guy.
Aaron was smart to recognize that Dropbox had the first-mover brand recognition among consumers that is hard to overcome and therefore deliberately chose to focus on enterprise deals. This seems to be paying off for Box. For example, as a Stanford student, we all get 30 GB of free Box space associated with our .edu addresses.

However, I wouldn't write off Dropbox. The flipside of this is that no one at Stanford actually use the Box space that the university has seen fit to pay for. Consumer mindshare is a powerful tool. Think of how a few years ago people were saying that the iPhone would never be allowed in the corporate world because it was not designed for the enterprise.

When it comes to enterprise file-syncing, I see Box as a top-down approach and Dropbox as a bottom-up approach. Box has the lead now but it's a perilous one.
More Snowden leaks – and this time Al Qaeda is the surveillance target
This is clearly a slimy attempt to dodge his own company's role in the problems.

He's CEO of a multi-billion dollar tech company, based in San Francisco, with probably more highly-paid employees living in SF than than the companies that run the buses.

If you buy the specious argument that the affordable housing problems are caused by tech companies, and not by NIMBY housing development laws, I'd guess his employees living in SF, by sheer numbers, are doing more to drive up the cost of housing in SF than the others. And let's not forget the the lack of affordable housing is the fundamental issue that the bus protesters are upset about.

EDIT: clarification.
It's almost ridiculous to consider 'programming skills' for a 1-year-old, let alone the presumptive pressure that she should become a programmer, etc.

But, programming in real life is much more about clean organisation, rather than clever algorithms.
Buy her a peg board toy, building blocks, and a cupboard to keep it all tidy, and the constrained creativity and discipline she will practice will apply to almost any field.
There's a hidden assumption in the phrase "zero-sum" which is that the social impact of someone getting 10% of 100 and someone else getting 90% of 100 is the same as that of someone getting 5% of 200 and someone else getting 95% of 200. Peoples' absolute level of consumption isn't zero-sum over time, but peoples' share of total consumption at any given instant is indeed zero-sum. And people respond to the latter much more than to the former.
Another idea. Box goes public, DropBox goes public some months later. Both do well and grow large. Box wins business in the enterprise, DropBox wins in consumer. Everyone wins and are happy ever after.

Until 7 years later when a startup kills both.
I've run a consultancy. They're not making anywhere near the money you likely imagine. There are several major sets of costs to consider.

One set is costs directly related to employing you. Benefits, employer paid taxes, equipment, insurance, office space, a fraction of your manager, and so on. These alone are hefty.

A second set is buffer to pay you when you aren't being utilized. A well-run consulting company might expect 80% utilization, so 20% of the time you're incurring salary plus all the above costs and they are receiving absolutely nothing for it. A more typical consultancy might have even lower utilization rates.

A third set is the costs of customer acquisition and account development. There are expensive staff who do a lot of expensive things solely to get the contracts signed in the first place. And if a consultancy stops attempting to grow, it's at grave risk that a few existing customers will leave for one reason or another, and they'll be left in a terrible spot.

A fourth is the cost of finding somebody like you in the first place. If I'm hiring a junior employee it might be something like $10k direct, plus the time associated with sourcing, vetting, and interviewing candidates. For a senior employee, it could be a lot more than that.

Put all of these factors together, and the profits simply aren't nearly as hefty as you'd imagine.
Google poised to execute long-delayed stock split
Look at how SharesPost and secondMarket have already solved the first problem.

They've solved it for more later-stage, pre-IPO companies. I'm not sure they've solved it for less well-understood companies which have raised Series A or B. I haven't looked deeply into this, so I'm prepared to stand corrected :)
Yes, that would definitely be a viable strategy. It's probably the easiest one, and it's what I would do. In general, using HTTPS for anything related to your bug bounty program is probably good hygiene.

Though even without that, I don't think you need to have been to a lot of key signing parties. The entry point of trust could very well be another organization--not GitHub, not someone at a key signing party. As long as the signature chain points back to an identity you can trust, you're good to go.
SASE over USPS meets all privacy requirements, allows communications to be tailored for each student and uses a proven technology stack to provide robust and reliable delivery regardless of the student's computing platform or internet bandwidth.
> I strongly believe jQuery has created a generation of developers who know the library but not the language

i think you mean "know the library but not the DOM and additional HTML5 APIs" - they are after all just native libraries. ES5/6 would be the "language"
Online Storage Company Box Just Quietly Filed For IPO
Did anyone else think "Moz" was short for Mozilla?
His twitter seems to suggest he really is into keeping up with the latest trends. https://twitter.com/satyanadella The article states there was a 5 month search. I'm glad they are hiring within the ranks.
Linux 3.4+: arbitrary write with CONFIG_X86_X32 (CVE-2014-0038)
Apple’s Q-10 Report Reveals Acquisition Spending Surged to $525 Million
I'm glad I participated in this challenge. It was fun to micro-optimize stuff, and I'm really happy to have been introduced to Go. The last level was a challenge, mostly due to Unix sockets and Goraft bugs and lack of documentation, but I enjoyed the language enough that I went back and redid level3 in Go, taking a top-30 score right at the buzzer. (Or where the buzzer would have been had they ended on time, which they should have.)

My family doesn't appreciate my long hours at the computer, and I haven't caught up on sleep yet, but I'll definitely do this again.
Isn't that a better option, to work where you live?
You usually CAN leave everything at your desk besides your laptop. Just grab your laptop and things will be fine.
Segregation does not help communities

Such a blanket statement certainly bears more nuance. I think some segregation can be effective -- I'd like to hear thoughtful comments about people who have a stake in the matter. Not glib, off-hand retorts from the peanut gallery. Why is that harmful, to prioritize the comments of people who have an incentive to be thoughtful?
> What about a co-working space? Prices range from $400-800/mo depending on space

That is so damn expensive. I used to use one, near the heart of London (Farringdon), and it was £50 a month.
I know you're being facetious but some people actually do think this way. I witnessed a discussion a few days ago where a person took a positive pro-change position regarding something and people literally started saying things like "Why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate our constitution?".

A lot of people aren't willing to stand up for what's right and good and feel that attacking you is an appropriate response when you criticize their feudal overlords. It's really depressing and disheartening.
My Last Post On Blogger
Just living in the US alone is objectively inferior by many criteria.
OpenSSH 6.5 released
Nobody is going to get hired as CEO of an $80 billion a year company with just an MBA. It would be an MBA plus 20-30 years of business experience, and these days it's almost impossible to avoid technology completely. I'm not even sure domain knowledge is important for a CEO of a company that size: once you become a $50 billion plus company, you don't have time to get involved with the details of the business.
Is there a strong correlation between being active on Twitter and being a successful CEO?
No matter how you rationalize this, it's still a loss of 1500 jobs - their replacements financed by the very profit those employees helped generate.
But the buses use far less infrastructure than if each employee drove themselves, or even if they all carpooled.
Boeing paints 747 For Seahawks. Flies "12" flightplan
It's an apt, my own, no roommates. So it's great for getting work done, because there aren't tons of distractions.

But on the other hand, you absolutely do need to be very on top of scheduling activities, and make sure you get out of the house at least once a day. Friends, romantic partner, sports, groups, these things are all key no matter if you work from home or not, but especially if you work from home.
I said I have a difficult time -- not no such developers exist. Yes, I don't expect even a random engineer at mega insurance corp in Iowa to be as good as a random engineer at the same company's office here in SF. But FFS, of course Amazon and MS have top talent.

If you include in your scope some much less exceptional companies, however, I think you'll see that a more useful interpretation of my statement is that the average level of talent in those areas is lower than our average
>what they need is someone to bring the organization to heel behind a universal vision.

Unless that vision is just next quarter's earnings, they can't afford a MBA type who doesn't have a deep understanding of technology.
Not I, but I'm part of their demographic -- http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/2013-in-review/52e9b643...
They are using public bus stops, and allegedly create traffic backups which is also an effect on public infrastructure. To what extent they impact traffic I don't know. I'm not saying whether there is a net gain/loss here, but there is an impact on the roadways.
Apple aggressively pushing to take Arizona sapphire plant live in February
Yahoo email account passwords stolen
AOL employs an extraordinarily generous definition of journalists.
According to this report, 8.1% of Americans commute more than an hour, which I assume is slightly longer than the Google bus ride from SF. 23% of these Americans use public transit. It hardly seems unreasonable to live in SF and work in Mountain View.

edit: forgot the link. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/american_co...
The water would rain down eventually and replenish natural reservoirs. This, of course, further limits where the plant must be located (coastal areas would not be adequate for this)
jQuery is a library where rails is a framework. but I will agree, a lot of developers are likely to use it as a crutch in lieu of fully understanding cost vs benefit in your app. if this is the case, then you very might well need jquery.
Thoughts on writing webapps in Go
You're probably right. I may have been making the mistake of thinking that he was representative of a some large contingent of programmers just because of the "we." Marketing works:)
This is like how Bloomberg would take the subway* once in a while.

*Get driven in his convoy from his house to the subway station.
Without a contract or incorporation papers, there's nothing to dissolve - the business doesn't exist as an entity, it's just a couple of guys doing things and maybe getting paid for it. The money belongs to whoever's bank account it goes into, and the code belongs to whoever wrote it.

If there were incorporation documents, then minority shareholders generally don't have the right to force liquidation, unless they're also creditors and the company is in violation of their credit agreement. But then, since there were no papers, there's no agreement there.

Basically all you've got is two guys who are bitter because their perspectives of work vs. reward are different.
@nokia_chi,
Wow! I'd like to hear your expert opinion on NSN CEO as well. /s
I agree. The NaturalMotion portfolio has lots of really great IP in it. Clumsy Ninja is such a charming character and CSR performs well critically and financially.

In my opinion, take a page from the Arthur Anderson / Phillip Morris playbook and rename the entire company. It will make recruiting easier for them and probably please investors by shedding some of Zynga's negative brand halo.
It's stories like these that always make me pursue my projects independently as far as I can. I've learned my lesson from blurring lines between personal and business...the personal feelings alone can destroy my drive and ambitions.

I know failure...tasted it about 3-4 times. I guess I'm cold hearted, I would've pursued success and burnt the bridge with my friend, if I did all the footwork in the beginning till the end. I'm starting to learn, nice people get stomped on in business.
A better option than working for who you would like to work for?

No, it isn't a better option. If it were a better option, then people would make that decision regardless of the damn buses.
Microsoft really isn't a consumer company: they make all their profit from enterprise software. Ballmer's biggest mistake was trying to convince an elephant to become a mouse. What he left was a mess that needs a lot of cleaning up. It doesn't help that he reorganized the company 6 months ago, effectively preventing his successor from making any substantial changes from the Ballmer way.

Given the number of people that were mentioned as front runners in this CEO search over the last few months, this seems to be a job that nobody outside Microsoft wants. Nadella was always the most likely internal candidate, and it really feels like they're settling on him because everyone external candidate they wanted turned them down.
Amazon Prime Could See $20 To $40 Price Hike
Anything like that is not really fundamentally different from a password, and for the program to work correctly (decrypt itself) it has to collect the password somehow. The outer layer that does this really has no defense other than obfuscation, which is difficult to do because in order to do anything useful you almost always have to interact with the system on which you're running anyway, and those interactions give away what you're doing.

And if you're decrypting a program and doing something that people notice, it's a matter of time before someone is able to capture the decrypted code and work backwards from that.

The decryption routine is a rather obvious place to look; does the routine check if something is decrypted properly before jumping into that code, or does it decrypt, jump, and crash if the key is wrong? If it checks, then that's the ideal place to stop the program, dump the memory, and see what's going on. If it doesn't check, you're going to have malware that's crashing all the time and fairly easy to detect for that reason. If you're trying to do something under the radar, the last thing you want is unstable malware.

So yeah, traditional obfuscation is just a speed bump, and too much of it might make things detectable. The underlying problem is that the software has to DO something useful (read a file, send network packets, etc), and it's extremely hard to hide that on hardware you don't control.

But like any security, depending on the goal, maybe a speed bump is good enough.
I bet one of the leading factors is the number of sites blocking the AWS servers. As a scraping service, the fact that Amazon makes all their public IPs known (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701) is really inconvenient for anyone "crawling" the web. Rackspace also makes their list available, albeit incomplete (http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cloud-site...).

As more websites setup default blocks for all accesses from AWS services, the Moz exit was inevitable.
I can't tell whether you're being a feminazi or just a creep. Either way, stop it.
Yeah, that is precisely what I am criticizing. When you take away the time dimension nothing can change -- stasis is static. Immigration is driving up prices, so the solution is regulation to make the city less appealing economically to non-residents. Anyway -- I'm not equipped for a serious discussion of West-Coast urbanization since I've never even set foot there, but I don't think Benioff is even coherent, he is suggesting more regulation and then civil disobedience in the next breath.
> Really? He thinks that's the solution? And what? Have all those employees drive?

Removing SF shuttle busses, while certainly unpleasant[1], is probably one of the few measures that would exert sufficient pressure on the local governments to improve public transit and actually tackle road congestion.

[1] I used to work in Menlo Park for not-Facebook, and at one point attempted the tri-fecta terri-commute of Bus + Caltrain + local shuttle. It really sucked.
Well, employing thousands of people in high-paying jobs is also a pretty positive impact on society...
Based off the majority of OS related post and comments, I would assume so too but there are a good number of lurkers and users who are non-vocal about their use of Windows. I couldn't find any HN Poll on this matter, but I hope someone who dealt with an HN effect would be kind enough to share their Analytics report on the OS traffic.
I don’t fully understand your problem from what you’ve described, but I think you’d be more likely to get help on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/tour). Post your question from the following page, editing the details as necessary: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?title=HTML5%20animati...
It is simple: People just love being jealous of those who have slightly more than them.

Neighbor Jim buys a car every 4 years, and you buy a car every 6 years? Obviously Jim is an asshole scumbag. Neighbor Sam has a swimming pool, but your kids just have some squirt guns? Don't even get me started on that guy!
Really? He answered his parents' question by providing some content from his book that was very relevant to it. He then says that if you're still interested in knowing more, you could buy/get his book. Would you have wanted him to give it for free? Would you rather have he didn't inform him that a book existed that focused on this problem?....
Most people have hit on the big ones, but I think the most underrated answer is: Comments.

Seriously, comment the hell out of that code where anybody coming in at any time can understand what's happening. Make it so that a technical director can read only the comments and understand the entire system and it's dependencies.
If employees used their own car instead of the shuttle there would probably be more detrimental effects on the traffic.
Beams of sound immerse you in music others can't hear
does benioff live in SF? I always figured him for mor of a woodside kind of guy
It was tongue-in-cheek, though my agenda is to make mobile xmpp as reliable and user-friendly as the proprietary apps.

Can you elaborate your reasons for hoping I'm not serious?
does benioff live in SF? I always figured him for mor of a woodside kind of guy ?
People know that the business they're conducting is damaging society at large, so they build charity in so that they can feel like they're absolved.

Google (or Apple, or Oracle) is damaging society? Must have missed that memo.

Because from where a lot of people stand, the ability to access the world's knowledge and information, communicate with loved ones, and many other tasks, from a handheld device that costs a day's pay for the average worker ... that's not really "damaging society at large" so much as it is giving people an amazing gift.
Amazon Prime Gets Costlier; New Prime Number Needed
Level1 was immensely satisfying and interesting, but the pvp challenge was .. well.. dead. By the time real life let me join others were throwing GPU based miners at the problem and traffic was constantly heavy anyway. So amazing level, the arena type thing was imho not a good idea.

PvP challange dead .. but heavy traffic? Sounds like a contradiction. I think it's a flawed deduction that the arena was a bad idea because it took more than a casual glance at the challange to be competetive. For me, level 1 was definitely the highlight of the CTF. I was one of the few who wrote a GPU miner, and the constant competition of improving my miner vs. the other active participators was extremely exciting.
John Paulson, the investor responsible for the single biggest trade in Wall St. history which netted him $4 billion personally, routinely took the public bus to his office.