skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My first impression was {CRINGE}, to be blunt.

You seem talented-- and you asked people to tear you apart-- so let's see if you mean it. Let me give you about $1,000 in free work.

1. The first thing you need to understand is what you're up against. No one has ever explained the obstacles a consulting company is up against better than the first 52 words in McGraw-Hill's "Man in the chair" ad.

This 1958 ad has repeatedly won in "Best business ad ever" votes. It's here: http://bit.ly/165CAuy

Print that out and put it where you can see it.

2. I had to break out the machete to cut through the jargon. Other than "Bottom line: You'll get more customers and lower your cost per acquisition." this takes work to read. The man in the chair won't read it.

Make it simpler. You're assuming customers know what a funnel is? On what basis?

3. I can't click on anything relating to and see who you are? An "About" Page (or section would be nice, but I need a LinkedIn page at minimum.

4. Same goes for the two people giving you references. I want to click on the photos and go to the LinkedIn pages so I can see who they are.

And I absolutely have to be able to view the but the company website-- not just to see if THEY'RE any good, but to see if YOU are. Your work is there, right? I can see it and be overwhelmed by the quality of your work, can't I?

5. You put the link to your Twitter page and blog (where prospects can read your insights for free) at the BOTTOM of the page? Seriously?

6. I hate Flash, but even Jakob Nielsen has colors other than black and white. A logo would be nice, too.

7. I don't need to have your address and cell number, but can I know what country you're in? A state and city would be even better.

8. People argue about this, but since I have 11 of my 12 points from this, I'll say it: If I don't have any idea of how much you cost, I'll probably pass.

You don't have to put a rate sheet on the page, but it would be nice to know if you charge $5, $50, 5500, $5,000 or $50,000, so I don't waste both of our times.
No. With the current trends in Apple (easiness--, usefulness--, fashion++, lock-in++) it'll be a net negative.
That could be the overarching goal but it makes sense to pilot the technology first so they understand the pitfalls before engaging in a more difficult endeavor.
I didn't define "ready" in terms of itself (unless you're unclear on the literal definition of the word "ready", in which case you'd be better served looking in a dictionary than applying for jobs); I gave an expanded context for the term.

This is not a hard concept here; I would rate it as slightly more complicated than walking and talking at the same time, and slightly less complicated than walking and texting at the same time. So, uh, you probably shouldn't walk and text because you'll hit a tree or fall into a pit. Just some free advice there.

If you're capable of forming memories, you're capable of self-evaluation without external validation, you goofball. "Good in terms of what"? Most people choose "how good [I was] before [I] started studying" and it seems to work pretty okay for them.
The blind leading the blind:

NSA designated the University of Maryland as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research. The University of Maryland was also named an Intelligence Community "Center of Academic Excellence" by the Department of Homeland Security. ... MC2 takes a unique approach in educating the future cybersecurity workforce to serve industry and government needs in Maryland and the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

http://cyber.umd.edu/about
Companies worth less than Whatsapp (eg American Airlines)
Artificial general intelligence is not coming in the next, say, 30 years. And I am a big fan. A quick analogy: note that we can't even build an ant. It will take decades after that accomplishment to build a human level intelligence.
> why would you not hedge your bets?

Because there are actual, high probability problems that we could use the resources to solve. The events you describe having a severity enough to destroy every continent on earth are so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
Am I the only one that gets a nervous feeling about Sequoia boosting WhatsApp like this after Facebook's announcement of a 16B acquisition? I'd call it suspicion of a conflict of interest, but I don't think that description quite fits in this instance.
The tendency of people to troll by acting like a complete moron baffles me. I can't help but think "Congratulations, you've successfully managed to be a moron".
Edit Your To-do Lists
All of these things are something you use an automated formatter for, not regard as some kind of 'modern objc'. I guess people like to focus on pointless stuff like this because it's easier to worry about than whether you should use an eventbus or a delegate - you know, actual hard choices.

Stylistic stuff like this is not something you need to give rules for. Create an automated formatter, run it on your or others source files, and get back to solving real problems.
> Do you Consider Life to be Futile

This presumes that life has its own predefined explanation that all organisms must obey. But:

1. Evolution by natural selection contradicts the idea that life has a predefined explanation, and evolution is one of the most powerful and well-supported of scientific theories.

2. As thinking creatures, we get to use our intelligence to decide for ourselves what our lives mean. This is the personal version of natural selection.

So, on that basis, if you have the idea that life is futile, just come up with a new idea. This intellectual latitude is what separates you from a rock.

> And please don't bring uncertain entities(like God) or concepts.

Wouldn't dream of it. God (religion) is one of the classic traps that makes life seem to have a predefined meaning, one not in our control. On that basis alone it should be rejected by all free thinkers.
Fair enough. 5 years is a long time in the tech world to me. Tons of things change in that time. I'm not a sysadmin, and I'm not against educating people about these tools. I'm also not saying the exact inverse of the original statement (that everybody knows these). What I am saying is that it's a stretch to say they aren't well known. Call it "intermediate linux usage" or something.
if your comment is intented to mean 'foreigners are coming over stealing our jobs', feel free to leave it as it is. Otherwise, you might wanna rephrase what you wrote..
With their $1 subscription per year model,they should recoup their investment in 40 years.
thanks - this is useful. i have heard of something similar as well wherein even a small $ exchange is important to concretize the agreement.
I am very happy with your argument. I will use this argument in the future.
> Startups are picky, large employers are less so. Try Cisco or Intel.

I hope this is sarcasm.
I was speaking informally. To be more specific, I'm talking about the goal of Capital.

(Capital being not a person or an organization, but a different species in the world that is outside of our control. The emergent effects of the existence of capital. Which itself is the result of widespread enforcement of property laws.)
was surprised too to see that google didnt make an offer ,
And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers.

Broadcast spectrum ain't free. If you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in FCC license fees, and millions on mandatory local production (eg news operations) and network content licensing costs, you might look askance at it too. I really think the whole individual aerial thing with Aereo is bullshit.
Yahoo JAPAN Launches Cloud Storage Service Powered by Riak CS
I didn't mean to offend or shame you. If I was right and it was a kind of meanness then you'll hear it many more times throughout your life and you might some day decide it's a pattern you want to pay attention to. If I was wrong then you won't, and this comment will disappear into the wind and that will be that.
Of course. You're born naked and you die naked. The only point to life anyone can possibly argue is one they deem worthy. For me, I felt content at 17. From there I decided the only way I would be happy living longer is if it would mean something at least in the end. How did I define "meaning": decided I had to change the world, for better or worse, as long as something in the world changes by my being around, I'll be content. In other words if I could have not existed and the world ends up in the same place without me, I've failed.

In ten years that might mean having kids, right now it means trying to set myself up so I can focus on making a real difference when I figure out how to make the world a little bit less fucked.

Like I said, I dont think anyone can argue this without first assuming their view is somewhat correct in the first place. All of the above is just my views on this topic. Take it or leave it I'm not really fussed, just thought I would share.
/r/MakeItShutUp – Crowdsourced cures for stupidly programmed devices
$3bn to be given to WhatsApp staff! Lion share goes to the founders but wow!
Good Argument until "This intellectual latitude is what separates you from a rock.
Naturally it's a video, meant for people who don't read and probably don't think, the kind of people who can be persuaded that a world population doubling time of 60 years is no big deal.
Amazing. This is why I asked to be torn up! Thanks for doing that -- lots of useful points there.

Most of those are quick fixes (adding rates, adding location, etc), but obviously I have some work to do on the language (your #2). I'm trying to balance between being specific about what I do and writing in very simple language. I'll keep looking for that golden middle ground.
I have a hard time believing that the density of WhatsApp-capable phones is higher across the developing world (where WhatsApp is popular) than in the US.
Interesting, I forgot about them. It looks like that case was never really resolved legally, though. They lost one injunction in a District Court, and then shut down, so the underlying issues weren't fully litigated (and not considered by higher courts).
Wait a minute. I thought your point was that I was praying on the desperate and taking advantage of people who didn't know what they're worth? I'm glad you changed your tune.

By the way I know plenty of people at startups who tell me they can't find decent engineers when they're offering 30-50% more in salary than I do. And 99% of these startups are NOT building database engines or running massive social networks. Most of them actually have web apps that are on par with the web apps we build for our clients if they are even that sophisticated.

The problem as I see it is that a lot of the management at these startups are deluded about the skill set they need and they lack the intellectual honesty to admit that their startup is not Google (yet). They can't find candidates because they are so in love with the idea of talent, too picky and don't want to invest in employee development. I mean it's not the end of the world if a candidate doesn't have experience with Git or unit testing. This stuff isn't that hard to learn and if your employees have nothing to learn from you they will probably be bored very quickly.

On the flip side all these ads for 6 figure positions and talk about salaries and talent shortages has given a lot of below average, average and good but not great engineers (which make up 99% of the labor pool by the way) the mistaken impression that anybody with a few years experience who can build a crud rails app can make a couple of phone calls and land in a 120k a year job. It's nothing but a mirage. For every 1 engineer who can get one of the $$$ jobs there are 50 who could do a dozen interviews and get no offers.
You're right to an extent, but I don't think "Run your code through a formatter when you're done hacking it together" is a viable, maintainable, or scalable policy. Especially not for enterprise or team based workflows.

Also, #'s 1, 2, 4, and to a certain extent 8 are more questions of design pattern than 'style'.
Yeah, how awful it would be for America if the world's brightest become citizens.
Oh, well, it sounded good at the time. :)

Were you objecting on the basis that the rock has some version of consciousness? The argument has been made and it's interesting, but I thought it was pretty far afield from the present topic.
Actually I didn't say that I don't want Abstract concepts. I don't want concepts which do not proceed by logic .
> people (especially preteens) with an iPod Touch or iPad Mini but not a smartphone/texting plan

If I recall correctly, iOS WhatsApp is iPhone only. It won't run on anything that doesn't have a phone number and can't receive SMS or phone calls (necessary for activating the application).
Information Security Operations for a tier-1 university here. If the university is public, which most are, they require SSN documentation to report to the state as technically your taxes helped pay for that school. This is all tied up in politics and documentation for everything really, but that's just how the politics seem to work. They are also required to file their assessment of your fees and tuition to the IRS via a 1098-T form.

Also you are awarded various small hidden grants on your tuition payments if you've a valid SSN as your taxes (or your future taxes) went towards that school's funding.
Scaling to millions of simultaneous connections (2012) [pdf]
Why would it change it's own goals? That would violate it's current goals, and therefore try to avoid that action.

Can you change yourself to be a sociopath? Would you? Would you make yourself a perfect nihilist?
Some countries use Line rather than WhatsApp
Hook that guy up with some job leads. There's nothing wrong with looking for a better opportunity. Why on earth would you bring it up with anyone. What exactly do you expect to happen by getting involved?
Of course it isn't free, but that's why there are ads on it.
And Reed-Solomon error correction.
"Ruby has a reputation for being slow"

Web services that DO use Ruby today are almost always IO bound. For web services that don't require data crunching CPU bound processes, Ruby as a language is hardly the bottleneck.
GoShip: A simple tool for deploying code to servers
>The argument has been made and it's interesting, but I thought it was pretty far afield from the present topic.

Well your argument was right on Topic.Are you referring to any other topic.

>Were you objecting on the basis that the rock has some version of consciousness?

No i took it personally :)
I thought that this was an article about three.js :P

I got this far (http://imgur.com/MR3lC4U) before realizing I should really get some sleep.
> I can't think of any other service with that kind of engagement.

SMS ?
World's Longest Free WiFi Zone
> A supervolcano would destroy at most a few continents.

Just for perspective, 70,000 years ago a supervolcano eruption in Indonesia with global effects nearly wiped out the human race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory). On the basis of genetic diversity studies, it's estimated that all but somewhere between 3,000 to 10,000 people were killed.

We may think ourselves immune from the consequences of a similar super-eruption today, but for most people in the world, people who aren't rich and who can't create a well-stocked underground shelter, the risk is very high.
Can you point out the fundamental error. Reasoning is always welcome
That's really unfair. I mean Donald Knuth is old too and so are some fairly important figures.

It's unreasonable to dismiss someone's argument based on his age (along with looks, race, etc.). Did you read his arguments? Do they make sense?

Aereo's argument that these are private performances has a counter argument, which Kimball cited. His example was pay-per-view shows in hotels, which are private viewing but definitely public performances.

Even in the NY case when Aereo won there was a dissenting judge who made a reasonable argument as well.
we don't have a single example of an application that can handle a task that it hasn't been specifically trained and tested for

Get up and go look in the bathroom mirror, there's your example. If you're saying that our intelligence/consciousness derives from some secret sauce, then you're essentially making John Searle's Chinese Room argument and it's on you to show what the difference is between sapience and the appearance of sapience.
By this logic, nobody will be able to make money by licensing the public spectrum and using it to deliver ad-supported content. Anyone with an antenna farm like Aereo will be able to capture, store and redistribute those feeds -- and why not modify them to skip commercials too? Anyone with a device containing 300M antennas can claim to be able to intermediate service for all Americans.

This is not, in and of itself, a reason why Aereo is wrong in this case. Plus, I think it's pretty clear that free OTA's days are numbered anyway. But Aereo would, I think, be attempting here to kill its host.
Post Holiday Pickup Tips
You've got that exactly backwards.

For the longest time it was not even known that the mind inhabited the brain. We've only known about the biology of the brain beginning with cell theory and onwards. Yet we have an entire vocabulary relating to mental states receding so far into the distant past that we don't know how far back language predates using language to speak about mental states. When you really think about it neuro-biology is very recent and still nascent, we've been thinking about thinking for a long long time.
Or good spelling!
IMO it's much worse. It's slower, less knowledge-dense and you can't jump around and learn the things you need the way you like. Reading and re-reading is a feature IMO, not a bug, and videos have all the drawbacks of sitting in the classroom without providing any of the benefits (you can't, say, ask the video for clarification).
BNM DFI:DFI
Regardless of how insane deals may seem, you can still only evaluate them based on available facts. If you're going to start speculating about fictional future revenue streams, there's no point to even bothering to contemplate if the price makes sense.
I'm still learning Objective-C but it always bothers me a bit when a controller conforms to many protocols. Are there strategies to manage this (other than #pragma mark)?

I really like point #4. I'd take that further and say that most "keyed access" classes should be wrapped in a more domain-specific wrapper class (thinking of NSUserDefaults, and the like).

With regards to point #8, Apple actually recommends against naming functions starting with get... also, unless they are property getter overrides. (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...)

Thanks for the article.
So then what are the rules they are to play by? "We'll make them up whenever we feel like it!" Certainly, this is a legal problem, but that to me indicates that it is their problem to fix, not Aereo's. If their judgements rest so heavily on the minutea of the tech backing this up, perhaps it is time to rethink these laws on more principled grounds than they have sofar been imagined....
Nicely implemented.

I found it interesting that you used Meteor to build this game -- I initially thought it was a fully client-side Javascript only canvas-based game. Is there any reason for using it considering this app doesn't appear to be using any backend?
> he botched a 2AM code push
to production

I have come to think that pushing code to production when your person is noticeably compromised in some way should be prevented thorough technical means. Perhaps a CAPTCHA is an acceptable solution (which probably should also get more difficult the later the hour).
My points on Modern Objective-C:

- Use MVVM and some method of bindings (e.g. ReactiveCocoa) [0]
- Split up ViewControllers and DataSources [1]
- Split up classes using Categories (I've seen so many blown up AppDelegates)
- Use CocoaPods (this should be a given by now)
- probably much more I forgot about...

oh, and btw: those `@directives` go by the name of `literals`

[0] - http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mvvm+objective-c
[1] - http://www.objc.io/issue-1/
Please no, this is confusing.
That list is restricted to companies at a similar capitalization to "WhatsApp". In contrast, Ford Motor Company is valued at 60 billion (about 3-4 times more than "WhatsApp"). I would suggest quite plainly that the trademark "Ford Motor Company" alone is worth more than the every part of the "WhatsApp" enterprise combined, including whatever technology they may have created, if any.

Obviously the investment banking refugees working at Facebook aren't stupid, and I suspect they're going for the big kill, with other people's money as usual. Maybe "WhatsApp" will be the next big thing. Who cares? If I was writing a check out for 16 billion, it sure wouldn't be for the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.

But...not my money.
on most positions (anything other than research) it is mostly optional to engage on it. and people get proactive because of the bonus.
>WhatsApp is a lot bigger overseas than it is in the US (largely because it's a free alternative to SMS in countries where SMS carries significant charges).

Not nitpicking here, just genuinely curious. What do they charge in US for sms? Here the cheapest package i suppose would be 20,000 SMS per month for $1 per month. I normally use the 1200 SMS per week for 10 cents per week though, as my usage isn't that much.
The ridiculous amount of effort that we have to go through to define private properties (just sheer amount of text around them) makes me miss the pre-property days... I still define iVars the old fashioned way. The whole language would do well to have some syntax sugar added akin to Java's private, public, protected for properties so we could just go

@private NSString dog;

@public NSString cat;

... Oh Wait! We do, it's just that nobody uses it anymore.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869935/objective-c-priva...

Well we have syntax sugar for iVars... I think it's so messy putting some properties in the header and some in the implementation file with a private category - come on we can't have better syntax than that?
Compared to the rest of the tension and abuse on the cable? I think you pretty much can.

Lightning might be interesting but wind is no big deal.
Did you read the article at all? The article is about web app technologies, not Facebook.
> Would you mind going into a little more detail about what each color represents.

It's a simple density plot of an electromagnetic field in which the brighter colors represent constructive interference and dark areas represent destructive interference. The three antennas constructively or destructively interfere, with varying effects at different locations within the field.

I want to say again that the diagram is only an example and uses a frequency much lower than that used by cellular systems, just so the lobes are a reasonable size, and only to give some idea of the principles at work.

> Intuitively, the diagram seems to say that behind (in front of?) each blue dot (antenna) the signal is really strong while on the other side it kinda drops down, only to strengthen again when we hit the middle of the triangle.

Yes, that's true -- the three external lobes happen to be places where the three antennas constructively interfere. One can do this using pencil and paper (as I did when I was a NASA Space Shuttle engineer many years ago, and before there were personal computers), but computers make it much easier to experiment with different configurations.

Here's a different antenna configuration, one that I doubt anyone would want to build -- a circle of antennas, giving circular intensity lobes:

http://i.imgur.com/hK9BZnF.png

Not very useful, but interesting.
-I've heard a lot about ReactiveCocoa recently, but I haven't had a chance to try it. Maybe I should. And maybe I will!

- I'm super guilty of just handling everything in AppDelegate (notifications, URI schemes, etc.) I need to work on this.

- CocoaPods are the greatest