skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I am a rockstar. But I do think I am a decent developer, and I can see that I am getting better with experience. I look around at my colleagues, and see a lot of incompetent people and a few really good people.

Its a shame that after 10 years my salary seems to have peaked, just when I feel I am starting to get good. Problem is no one seems to reward you for being good. They are happy when something works (or appears to). They seem to have no concern that the code will be buggy and unreliable and require constant tweaking. Get something out like that in a week, rather than something solid that takes twice as long.
Feel free to cite the document that shows Microsoft delaying fixes for NSA.
lol, how would you do that Tim? With DRM?
I think there's a major flaw in the argument that "these people could be curing cancer!"

To have any hope of doing something as ambitious as curing cancer you presumably have to have an unusually large amount of interest in the subject. Like enough to devote your entire education and career to. By taking jobs at tech companies they are demonstrating that they don't possess this necessary quality. Few people do.

And as for the healthcare.gov debacle- being smart and a great programmer has absolutely no benefit when it comes to fixing that site. Yes there are likely major technical issues, but the main problems derive from layer upon layer of bureaucracy and policy that any project of that scope entails. I would advise smart young people to stay far, far away from any project of that nature, lest any will you had to do something meaningful will get sucked out of your body fairly quickly.
It is likely that the drone operator was flying by FPV (first-person view), using an onboard camera and transmitter to stream video back to a monitor or goggles.

An operator will usually have two cameras, one that records high-quality video to an onboard SD card, and another camera for streaming FPV.
#pozr – Free Application Hosting: PHP, MySQL, MongoDB
If Googlers were dominating local politics then there wouldn't be a housing shortage. I think that part isn't as true as you think.
1) Life-expectancy in Roman times was very low. 50 is a more appropriate age for your rhetoric.

2) "Serfs" are medieval. And besides, this is an argument about free citizens, so the very concept is irrelevant.

3) The colleges were all independent, spontaneously organised by poor citizens. Anyway, apart from subsidised grain and generalised patronage the Roman ruling classes didn't design social welfare systems akin to anything we would recognise (and again, the comparison is difficult, because the patricians were generally using their own fortunes to win favour with the masses)

4) The colleges insured primarily against the possibility of funeral costs in the event of sudden death - the most important shock financial event the average poor Roman expected to face. There was no effective medical technology in Roman times, but Romans cared a lot about having a good funeral and being remembered.

5) The colleges weren't "available" to anyone unless they paid their way. If you wanted that protection, you paid your membership dues. So yes, if the destitute old free citizen had been prudent and consistently paid their dues before striking bad luck, they would be okay (well, they'd get their nice funeral, but you know what I mean.)

6) Maybe your millions of people making "less than the living wage" (however you define that) should take a leaf out of the book that seems popular to users of this site - looking for ways to improve the value of the services they offer?

7) What is so wrong with the idea of people directly petitioning others for funds to purchase healthcare? Heck, they don't even need to just petition the extremely wealthy. Powerful modern technology allows people to petition the entire world for funds (if they can convince people their cause is worthy.)[1] One of the benefits of living in a more advanced age than 50BC.

8) I feel like you are imagining me wrong. To be clear: I am young, broke, and largely unaccomplished. I have no significant assets beyond my intelligence and my ambition. I have no vested interest to protect. In fact, I am someone who stands to gain the most short-term from these sorts of welfare policies. Hell, I even work for "minimum wage" currently - another thing I would like to see abolished!

I simply want society to reward and encourage people who provide genuine value, and stop forcing productive citizens to subsidise unproductive citizens, without any accountability or metrics for the benefit of their investment, because a) I want to make my way up in the world honestly, by offering true value for trade, and b) because I am concerned about the economic damage caused by pervasive, dysfunctional contemporary policy.

If society got rid of all this terrible policy, the abundance of opportunities from the ensuing economic growth would do more to improve the fortunes of the assiduous in a few years than social welfare has accomplished in decades.

[1] www.kickstarter.com
George Washington was a British commander too, as a Colonel in the British Army.
Could you expand on the memory limitations? I'm not familiar with them.
Codiqa for desktop
Agreed. They need to slow down the speed for longer words. Otherwise, it would be perfect.
I'm a Phantom owner and I'm skeptical about those flying time numbers. I get 15-18 minutes on the drone by itself, but if you add the weight of the gimbal and camera (~0.5lb) the flight time goes down at least 4 mins, AND the gimbal needs power from the drone's battery too. I've heard the Phantom's flying time with the working gimbal is more like 6-8 mins. But if you know what kinda shot you want, that could be more than enough, just get lots of extra batteries (and those have dipped in price, you can grab one for $12).
Youtube search is down
This is resulting in a 500 for me.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=parapente&sm=3
Man I hate the framing on that headline.

I hate silicon valley just as much as anyone else who doesn't live there, and I'd gladly upvote an anti-valley piece; but when an old media outlet blames it on Those Damn Millenials right in the title, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

EDIT:

But that presumes that the talent at older companies is
somehow subpar, less technically proficient, than it is
at their younger counterparts. This seems unlikely if you
look at Cisco’s list of patents.

Ugghhhhh
This title needs re-editing unless I am missing something. The linked article only details a collapsed building, not a bridge. As it stands, reading the title of the submission alone gives the impression that there is a full-fledged terrorist attack underway, which has not yet been shown to be the case.
w/e. i <3 git pull
Was I the only one hoping to see lava hit the drone and take it down?
Edit: Ninja'd by dronehire. Please refer to his answer.

Educated guess here, but the article says it's a GoPro camera, so they probably have to get the drone back alive and download the video from the GoPro.

On the other hand, wireless HD video streaming isn't that hard to do, especially in remote areas like volcanoes where the 2.4GHz band is pretty much all yours. To do better out of line-of-sight it makes sense to use both a fast 2.4GHz radio and a more reliable but slower 433/900 radio and buffer the video on the drone if the 2.4GHz radio drops.

But that isn't going to be as cheap as just strapping a GoPro on one of these Phantoms.
I'd disagree here and replace that with "fufilling business needs" - the highest quality code is meaningless if it doesn't do what your customer wants in the way they want it done.

Good craftsmanship is usually correlated with a good end product, but craftsmanship for its own sake is a hobby, not a career.
Upvoted for honest expression. But you're doing exactly the same thing you're criticising: you haven't kicked the bastards out either, or gotten healthcare sorted because you're too busy chasing sex and thinking about your own life.

In 20 years someone will be writing your post about you!
what game engine or tools are you using?
I was just looking for a system like this. Thanks Waxman!
Secrets of Startup Success
@lessmilk, I love all your games. Great Job.
True, don't know why.
It seems that only the search engine is down

"A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, show them this information"
Norvig: Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax
Fear not. I don't plan on pulling a flappy bird. Although I now kind-of understand what Dong Nguyen might have felt like, even if at a much smaller scale.
Do you make any revenue from it?Or just pure hobby?
AppMethod lets you code native Android, iOS and desktop apps simultaneously
Try the cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xB8946F...
Engine: Phaser [0], a Javascript framework to make 2D games.

Tools: Sublime Text and Photoshop mainly.

[0]: www.phaser.io
I lived close to that area for a while and know people that have moved to North Dakota to work. They're coming right out of high school and immediately making tons of money. A lot of it is wasted on motorcycles, TVs, trucks, alcohol and drugs. The work itself can be very hard, taking a toll on even the youngest and strongest of them. It's put a strain on a lot of marriages as husbands have moved away to work leaving their wives and children behind in communities that can provide decent homes, schools and safety.

It's a difficult situation for me because I know a lot of people that rely on this work to support themselves and their families. Without oil, gas and coal many of these communities would collapse. At the same time, I know the effect this has on the environment and I support us moving towards cleaner, renewable energy sources. I don't have a solution for any of this, just a lot of empathy for everyone involved.
Paper: Scalable Eventually Consistent Counters over Unreliable Networks
The Agile Manifesto is a great starting point, but beyond that I think Agile is too poorly defined; I think the values of the Agile Manifesto are best made concrete in terms of a high level meta-methodological framework in Lean methodologies with (under various names) the PDCA cycle wherein teams have ownership of their own specific processes, strictly follow the processes they define, have clear success metrics, propose process changes from within the team when there is an observed problem with the existing process in meeting desired results, and do empirical tests of the proposed changes using the success metrics.

Outside of this kind of concrete instantiation, "Agile" seems to diverge into, on the one side, a combination of empty buzzwords and arbitrary churn where no one knows who is responsible for what or what standards are because there is no process, or externally-defined prescriptive processes of exactly the sort that the Agile Manifesto was a reaction against.

People over processes has to mean processes are tools that serve the people on the team, not "no process" or "process taken as received wisdom because of respect for the person or institution originating it".
I agree with other posters that it has been the culmination of several things.

Batteries with high energy:weight.

MEMS sensors (thanks, nuclear weapon stewardship programs) http://mems.sandia.gov/

Cheap, open-ish, powerful SoC microprocessors, and the community of hackers (lots of help, and easy tools that lowered the learning curve).

Development of better "linear" circuits like advanced brushless motor controllers and chargers.

Growing robust hobbyist electronics tinkerer marketplace.

Maybe cheap 3D printing too, making prototyping easier/faster/better/more fun.
Extending AllJoyn communication to the cloud
The set of (say) 4 motors consumes much more power than the on-board computers. Brushless controllers these days handle 20 amps at around 5 volts for a total wattage of 400W(!) . The on-board computer power doesn't even count.

Of course, you're right that powerful computers are needed. But it's more about miniaturization for weight purposes.
There is a relevant theory on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
It comes to mind the excellent book "Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT" by T. F. Peterson. Highly recommended (and it does contain the two competing hacks of the link IIRC).
how did you make the sprites and animate them? do you have a tutorial on this?
Indeed. The best code is no code.
Title of this submission: "NYC Bridge Collapses After Explosion"

Title of linked article: "Building Collapses in NYC After Report of Explosion"

Is this a protracted game of telephone, or can people be trained to copy titles instead of making them up?

Copying content from a Web page is trivial -- select, copy, paste. It's the first thing a new user learns about computers -- or it should be.
I don't blame people choosing to work in other business areas rather than putting their efforts in fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc.

Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with millions to spend on lobbying efforts, and a broken legal/patent system that favors those who exploit its many loopholes.

That said, I have great respect for people who devote their time and effort for the greater good.
It should be possible to change the color of the selected letter to indicate where you are on the page. Alternate option could be to position the word on the (current) vertical line to indicate where you are on the whole page. I'd like to believe that if the text is reasonable amount- the transition for either would be gradual.

Hoping the open source fairy sprinkles some dust on this one.
Spurious correlation.

Both pork and beef have been used in English (both American and British) for centuries. Both beef and pork refer to the meat from multiple subspecies while fish and poultry are considered game/sports meats and named for the animal 'bested'. You'll note many old recipes simply say "white fish" to denote cod, herring, haddock, pollock or any number of firm, white-fleshed fish. This custom persists today.
Hmm. Theoretically it seems like lasers should support speeds of terabytes per second, so you should be able to transmit a human mind in minutes to hours (maybe faster with compression), and that should take less energy than sending an actual brain at reasonable speed (rocket equation). If you want more bandwidth, use multiple lasers located close to the solar system, but still far enough that they can be distinguished from another star. At longer distances, use multiple intermediate stars in parallel, like the internet. Or is there some theoretical limit that I'm missing?
Can the Internet solve the mystery of MH370?
I use ghost for my blog (http://kristinn.ghost.io/). I like it very much :) It just feels natural.
A big part of this, I think, has to do with the way the market is structured and the sorts of businesses that are getting rewarded.

Once upon a time, right, engineering was really sensitive to time. We had to wirewrap circuits together, we had to punch cards, and in general we had to plan out what we did. Some thought leaders existed, usually little labs embedded in much larger companies (we all genuflect at Bell Labs, or Xerox PARC, or what have you).

Nowadays the cost of prototyping something is super super low, even if it's hardware.

Now, combine that with the "lean" meme going around, once which basically says (arguably, quite rightly so) that engineering is four or five orders removed from being a successful business.

So, we see a lot of startups going for things which are not Big Ideas--and why should they, because Big Ideas are expensive to develop, because Big Ideas are hard to sell, and because Big Ideas are not profitable.

What does sell well, reliably? Bread and circuses. Communication, and advertising, and search. Any sort of business where you can be technologically lazy and "disrupt" a market. Those are the things being selected for--not Big Ideas.

Why don't you see these bright engineers working on public-sector stuff? Because .gov is insanely high barrier to entry, and in order to break into it you kind of have to assimilate. And it's a culture which is cynical, which isn't "lean" by any stretch, and which cares about tech even less than the next "X for Y with Z".

Public sector stuff invariably has a bunch of egos and bullshit that have to be taken into account to do business, almost all of which is orthogonal to actually solving any problems. So, little surprise that people don't want to work on it. It's a lot of effort, and it doesn't change much, and it'll backslide the very second you turn your back on it--maybe even before.

Medicine, incidentally, is exactly the same way--you've got to coddle a bunch of little snowflakes who are used to getting their way and who are (annoyingly enough) correct with enough frequency that they are considered elders on matters they know nothing about.
There is some definition of practical that says you have enough panels and batteries to meet arbitrary needs. Which is why I thought you should be more specific. I guess in the context of this story (and you asking about low costs) a smaller system could be assumed.
Can Kafka be thought of as a non-hosted version of Kinesis? I thought Kinesis would be a good solution to dump logfile data to for processing and ingestion. Could you explain some technical reasons to use Kafka vs. Kinesis? Thanks.
this is a bit overkill for me, I'm looking to create Html5/Javascript GUI to be used in web browsers.
You forgot to mention CSS. That's a major reason why even non-JS sites render poorly on mobile.
Haha, I think you meant "hide the sausage making".
Surveillance without surveilling
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My first thought as well. I'm pretty sure that was the first CD-ROM we bought for our Mac IIvx.
The Empathy Vaccuum
@Aphyr's "Call me maybe: Kafka"[1] blog post is a great reference for what Kafka is and what distributed guarantees it tries to provide.

[1]: http://aphyr.com/posts/293-call-me-maybe-kafka
MetaPhone: The Sensitivity of Telephone Metadata
It's fun to see these ideas multiply and combine, but experts on reading comprehension seem to think RSVP didn't work even back in the 70s when it was being first tested:

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/not-so-fast-speed-read...

Comprehension was worse than skimming, apparently. I can see this as a thing to flash headlines/latest news to you but anything longer than a sentence or two... not so sure.
It started as a pure hobby with no revenue. But now that my project is getting a lot of attention, I might start making iOS/Android apps, or maybe write ebooks about how to make games.
I'm contracting for a small company that uses by-the-book scrum. I like the idea of it and it allows us to easily see what needs to be done.

But, I feel like the boss is more interested in the methodology than actually finishing our project, which is frustrating. He came from big corporate, went to all the seminars on scrum, and things it's the answer to everything.
Which begs the question: which branch? How do you know what all the others are working on, and if you'll conflict.
I love the way the tutorial is part of the background, seamless!

A colleague of mine made a similar type of game a while ago, this reminded me of that.

http://www.tyasdev.com/MrBandana/
Actively choosing a version control system is a rare decision; the vast majority of the time you have to use whatever the project leader (OSS) / company wants. If a project is on github I can't exactly choose to use svn.

This has led to me using some truly terrible version control systems, of which the worst was Cadence DesignSync. When using this system I wrote a rant detailing it (which is very offtopic for this thread but might be amusing):

- by default, a "checkout" contains symlinks to (non-writable) files, not the files themselves.

- this means that files can change under you. I suppose it saves a bit of disk space.

- want to edit a file? Mandatory locking!

- yes, that's right, mandatory locking is used instead of merges. No built in merging at all.

- In theory that avoids conflicts. In practice, what happens is: people take their own copy of the file, edit it, get the lock, write their edited version in.

- because it's hand-merged or unmerged, we've frequently lost changes and had to reapply them.

- towards the end of the project, finding out that the file you needed was locked by someone in a different timezone who'd gone home was getting really, really infuriating.

- to top it all, it's very, very slow.

This article from 2002 describes someone else having the same experience and building a "just use
Perforce" frontend: http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4153780/Irritation-promp...
I wonder if Inbox Zero is a worthwhile goal.

My inbox is effectively one of my to-do lists. Since I don't cross off everything on my to-do list each day, my inbox usually has a few dozen messages. I have found that when I move an email to a "check later" folder, I never do so.
Youtube down in India for the past 10 minutes
cmd + a, delete?
You can change many aspects of the look of GTK+ with themes. You can probably even make it look nice and flat, in keeping with the latest UI fads.

Personally, I think XFCE looks nice out of the box (in Xubuntu, at least). And what's a better alternative? Unity and GNOME are both way too dumbed down for me, and KDE is both ugly (IMHO) and and quite buggy.
Exactly. Everything that the global smart-phone market pushed the prices down on.
Smartphone Controlled Paper Airplane
the day isn't that far off where robots get set off to do work either hazardous, monotonous, or even just require constant precision, with regards to vehicle operation. As I posted before and I got the book idea from another here, Red Mars has a great amount of imaginative use of robotic vehicles and manufacturing.

Just like with this drone, besides eliminating some safety concerns we eventually will eliminate the other costly part, not having enough time to do all we want. With enough drones there won't be much we cannot do for time, just money will come up to the forefront.
I simply use Photoshop. No real tutorial on this yet, but I plan to write one in the next few weeks.

In the meantime you can read about my process making the sprite for game #6 on my blog: http://blog.lessmilk.com/pixel-art-how-i-made-the-princess-i...
Sure, It's limited to using a maximum of 2GB of memory if I recall correctly, as far as I'm aware it's mainly due to the 32 bit pointers that are used along with the garbage collector.
> Who should I believe?

The answer is obvious -- don't believe any statistics, anywhere, ever. Statistics aren't truths about reality, they are estimates with error bounds. Sometimes the error bounds aren't provided, and when they are provided, sometimes they aren't right. And when they are right, sometimes the thing being measured happens to be the worst outcome predicted by probability, i.e. utterly wrong.

In a basic technical sense, any statistic has a probability that the property it measures arose from chance rather than reality. This means any statistic whatever might arise from randomness rather than reality. It's a question of probability, not truth.