skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the assumptions made by this article is that the user in question is loading your web page with jQuery on a mobile device running on a 4G network. In reality, however, it is unlikely that a user will be on a 4G network. In 2004, the 4G penetration is 25% in North America, and only 3% in Western Europe. [1] It's certainly growing on a yearly basis, but it's still not at the point where you can rely on users having 4G speeds on a mobile device.

The 4G worst-case scenario is still better than the best-case scenario for a 3G network, which is what you'll see with a majority of users. I'd like to see this analysis done with a 3G connection as well, because I suspect the real jQuery tax for a majority of mobile users is over a second.

I do like the point made about latency and the suggestions at the bottom of the article. It's a strong incentive for apps to introduce a real asset pipeline and js and css minifiers.

[1] http://graphics.wsj.com/4g-european-investment/
Free Algorithmically Generated Stock Music
All boats perform poorly when the weather is really rough. The degree to which they can remain seaworthy in inclement weather depends on design decisions.

A hydrofoil design actually does really well in choppy waters, because you elevate the hull out of the waves. The lift generated by the foil happens below the waterline, so you don't feel the surface waves. Just how large a wave you can negotiate with a vessel like this depends on the elevation provided by the foil design and your stomach for hard landings.

All in all, if you were to take the foils off this boat, I'd venture it would handle worse in the same waters as the foiled boat.

Sidenote: Also, FWIW, I didn't downvote you; I dropped you an upvote, because I can see why someone might think this way.
Ah, projects in the R&D lab. I can sympathize with projects being "put on the shelf"

RE 3D world, I'm already working on something similar. Shoot me an email (see HN profile)?
I have done this with a handful of Xbox 360s. Works like a charm! Also makes for some interesting questions from your housemates...
It seems like their answer to this question is "no", but that's hard to understand when I see this quote from the same article:

> But let’s get back to the numbers. Per the data above, a typical user on an average device and network will take ~50ms to download jQuery and another ~250ms to parse it.

An average delay of 300ms is simply unacceptable. I have a hard time believing that 50ms to download jQuery is average, so I assume that the author isn't including round-trip time.

To be fair, this is also from the article:

> And in my opinion, the painfully slow parsing and interpretation of scripts on mobile browsers – particularly older Android ones – is the only compelling reason to prefer tiny JavaScript libraries.

It's the author's opinion that this is the only compelling reason, but it is a VERY compelling reason.
On The Future Of PHP
He's saying it's functionally equivalent. engine + 4 doors + wheels = working car.

I owned a BMW once and you literally could not tinker with the car yourself. The engine was a sealed black box. Kind of like the Nest.
What is the really evil lobbying at play here? Telling a Congresswoman that a company has bad business practices and should be investigated by the FTC? His lobbying allegedly consists of: "organiz[ing] protests, news conferences and letter-writing campaigns." This is evil?
Isn't this the same thing then? You can release a recompiled ARM binary but not the source with which it was built? I think legally they are both derived works. I don't really care about that as I believe it should be allowed for software > 10 y/o, but isn't it technically the same thing and thus not allowed at all?
I get that it can be a bit easier in the eye, but for me this style doesn't work on many levels.

1) You have to scroll a lot, and scrolling means a tiny pause, move to the next point and resume reading; which done regularly becomes distracting.

2) You see the text in pretty tiny amounts. Maybe it's fine for a short and simple blog post like this one, but if it was displaying a complex text in longform this style would make it harder for you to understand it.

3) Finally, from a purely aesthetic and subjective point of view, a text with a very big font, lineheight and short lines looks like a book for children.

I think the optimal the solution is easy, let the user at least choose the font size he prefers. Line-height and width would be great, but just the font size should be enough. Of course, having a good default is very nice, but an opinionated design which gives you no way to tweak it is a nightmare when you feel uncomfortable with it.
Well, WA actually did win, because it was the best.

Whatsapp is like the Ryanair of messaging: no ads, no games, (up to FB acquisition) no data mining, basically: no frills, no hassles.

Compare that with Skype/MSN Messenger, the FB Messenger or basically any other messenger out there: ads, more ads, MORE FUCKING ADS, a PITA to add/find new contacts (Whatsapp just bootstraps with the contact manager of the phone!), oh and did I forget MORE FUCKING SHITLOADS OF ADS? And no way to pay to just get rid of them?
If any of the hedge funds he told about the non-public letter affecting a public company acted on that knowledge then that is insider trading and illegal.

Insider trading is when a person inside the company releases nonpublic information to people who trade on the basis of that information.

Are you asserting that Ackman is an Herbalife insider?
That sounds good for the current situation, but it generalizes badly; for example, let's make the head of KKK the keynote speaker at my event, or make an interview with him the centerpiece. Good event? Maybe not.
Yes, on a BGA the pads are under the IC package. That BGA will be on a PCB close to other ICs which has other packages. Using a hot airgun risks distributing small balls of solder.
Yes, libraries that you may need may not be compatible yet. But it is fair to say that situation is getting better.

Also, here's a great tool that checks if you can use Python 3: https://caniusepython3.com/ .
Plain static obfuscation doesn't really kill off your battery.
The Millennials: A Dire Generation on its Own and Stuck
No one seems to want to discuss the idea that Yahoo! and Facebook were simply adhering to their illegal agreement to not poach talent from each other.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valle...
As far as I can tell, you're answering a question that nobody asked, one something like, "Does exercise burn calories?" We all know that's true. The question was, "Do you have any research to show that exercise is effective in helping people lose weight?"

As a fat guy who has run 15 or 20 races (including a triathlon) at this point and is training for another, my personal experience is that adding exercise doesn't help me lose weight.
I was wondering about that. I can control my Nest with my Revolv hub so there had to be something in place.
Free eBook: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
Air Travel Communications Deserves Better Tech
My point is that to do it as a private citizen is one thing; to do it as a Congressman is quite another. It's all in how he signed his name.
Bicycle Front Derailleurs
Not a Web guy here: why do people use <script src="foo.js" /> instead of just including the code inline in the script tag?

I understand that as a dev you definitely want your JS in separate files for practical reasons, but couldn't you just have separate .js files and have your framework stick them inline "at runtime"?

PS: Is there any talk with HTTP 2.0 of allowing data like images to be somehow "inlined"? It would then be possible to serve up a 21st century website with a single RTT, right
Yeah, I mainly learned from this one, too
Ah, fair enough. I had assumed it was to do with having a few block set in stone and propagated around the network, but it sounds like its more entwined with the 51% question and that sort of stuff...
Perhaps this is why tech companies have so little ambition: a constant stream of new blood ensures some things change (yak shaving), but never anything substantial that requires extensive experience. Instead, everyone just props up the technological status quo for their CRUD website.
4G and 3G often falls back to Edge (or even GPRS with bad latency) in Europe. And with Edge you better make sure your JS file is smaller than 200kb (for a web app), otherwise your mobile user with Edge connection will have to wait some seconds (load time). jQuery itself is already 81kb (compressed).
The ineffectiveness of such organizations, as a class, is legendary.
Where is the problem? The risk was outsourced, so were the investments. When it looks like a worthwhile project, the knowledge get's in-sourced. Don't see the recruitment fail in this particular happening of things.
I travel by train (Amtrak) often, at least twice a month, and I've never experienced the conditions you've mentioned.
Interesting article.

Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay.

Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article.

A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters.

The reason is that often their area of specialization doesn't really help in the role I'm hiring and therefore I wouldn't give them any bump in pay for their extra schooling. On the other side of the table, especially for a Phd, they often expect a bump in pay for their additional schooling so its tough for me to hire someone like that.

EDIT to clarify, I don't reject these people out of hand, infact it helps them get an interview over others, but when it comes to offer time ie salary, I don't give any real value to a masters or Phd. Or put another way, if the salary I'm willing to offer is $125,000 its the same regardless of education.

To be clear, In a fund with 12 people, we have 5 Phd's and one more with a masters, so we do hire well educated people:)

Post grad education might get you interviewed first, but will have almost no bearing at all on if I extend a job offer or not.

The same can be said for what school you went to. MIT education, great I'll put you at the top of the interview pile, but when it comes time to extend an job offer, where you went to school doesn't factor into what we offer at all.

Too far along in their career can also be tough. Often this is due just to salary demands not fitting a junior role.

A new grad has no job they are quitting so they don't need a "bump" in pay to leave. Someone who is well into their career might be a good fit but is making a good salary where they are so they require a sizable pay increase to leave. Given this, it often makes sense to go with the younger candidate whose salary fits the role.

EDIT
To flesh out the senior developer comment a bit more. There are really 3 areas I've had trouble with in the past.

1) The 10 year developer who has 1 year of experience 10 times over. This is just a junior developer who wants the salary of a senior developer.

2) Its harder to find senior developers, regardless of what you pay. As Joel once said the good developers always have jobs, hence his internship program.

3) the hire bar is, umm..., higher for senior developers as they are expected to do more, mentor, design architecture, etc. This means I'm more picky as to who I hire.

Having said that, there are times where experience rules, and in this case you get what you pay for.

NOTE
This post has generated more upvote and downvotes than almost any other post I've written. So half the people agree with me and half disagree?
This is good to hear. I'm leaning more towards using postgres on my next project, but for the sake of science, let me think it out a bit more:

Your average interactive webapp is reasonably query-heavy, some of which is alleviated by reasonable caching.

The performance of the connector comes into play when someone hits an uncached page which requires tens of queries. This matters the most when it drastically affects load time. It's really a shitty experience when a user comes to a page, waits more than a second for the page to load. I do find, though, that a large portion of my query overhead comes from round trip time to the db server, and not intermediate processing.

So I figure for low to medium traffic sites with reasonable caching (and cache priming when needed), this probably won't be a bit hit, like you say.

There is of course the interesting benefit that if you're using a JIT implementation like pypy, then everything within a pure python db adapter is up for auto-optimization. This is interesting because it could effectively provide something close to application-specific hand optimization of the connector, which tends to be a pain in the ass that not many people would bother with.
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Except you completely missed the point where Ackman isn't making any money off this.

> Mr. Ackman has said he will donate any profits he personally earns to charity, calling it “blood money.”

And that's ignoring the fact that we live in a capitalist society. You need money to get things done. If no one stood to make a profit from this the effort wouldn't be nearly as well run. This is the market working at its best (at least in principle), rewarding people who put in lots of effort to reveal information that benefits the public.
I don't know that rockstar companies really say that much about the industry as a whole. I also don't put much stock in that Zuckerberg quote about "hiring as many talented engineers as we can find", unless they define talented as a very high bar, in which case the statement is meaningless. Who wouldn't want to hire as many crazy good programmers as they can?
Maybe you can make a business out of it.
#justsaying
The author is forgetting one thing: under qualified devs (at the time of a FB interview) can also be lucky and learn the job while building and scaling a product which has gotten traction.

Given the numerous applicants they deny, what are the chances that a few of them get lucky? I'm estimating, with my limited math knowledge, that this will be closer to 1 than one may think beforehand.
This post is largely about discrimination and uses Brian Acton as a timely centerpiece. The truth is however more complex (IMHO):

- Culture matters a lot in hiring. By this I mean a Stanford grad is much more likely to hire another Stanford grad in a field of qualified candidates. This isn't simply a form of nepotism as such. Two grads from the same college will share a larger common cultural base;

- The culture the founders bring shapes the organization. Many startups are started by Stanford and MIT grads. It shouldn't surprise you that this biases the makeup of their workforces and what they look for;

- Speaking as someone who has interviewed in the field of programming there are many frauds. I don't even necessarily mean deliberate frauds but there are clearly people who are employed as programmers/engineers who have no business being such. It's astounding how you can stump someone with 5-10 years of experience by asking them to code a simple loop (seriously);

- If people are worried about foreign labour putting downward pressure on wages, the indentured servitude that is the US work visa and immigration system should be the target of your anger. It allows bodyshops to hire people from, say, China and India and pay them a pittance because they know those people can't leave for 8+ years if they ever want a green card.

Make a green card automatic after, say, 6 years on an H1B, even if you change jobs, and a lot of those problems would go away.

As for other fields, I can't speak to those, other than anecdotally a lot of fields seem to have the earning potential of being a waiter in Manhattan.
Come build an API that ships millions of packages
Automate deployment of a Scala/Java service on Elastic Beanstalk with Codeship
LIVR – A Social Network Only Accessible When Drunk
Ask HN: Business Development for Services Companies
I was curious how people who own smaller service companies (ie Web Development shops, etc.) do business development? Currently we rely on referrals for everything which works great, but was interested to see what other methods people are using.
IPhone Air concept
Well, it's really simple

FB's (and Google's and Yahoo's) definition of talent is whoever passes their "quiz show" interview

However, yes, you don't need to know the worse case complexity of shell sort for most tasks, especially at the beginning of a project where load demands are smaller.
Unregulated crowdfunding
The innuendo that interests group and congressman switch their allegiance based on who has paid the most is pretty yucky, but also not Ackman's fault. But no, the general running of a campaign to bring down a terrible company is not a bad thing at all. I was alluding to some other comments here that used the word 'disgusting'.
"Lets be honest..."

Yes, let's. I want Mark Zuckerburg to admit out loud that the reason he can't find qualified engineers is because he's not willing to pay. No more of this "they don't exist" lie.

This, coupled with the Google/Apple/Intel/Adobe/etc. collusion to prevent salary negotiation wars, it's very clear: Silicon Valley companies aren't special anymore. They are now just like every other corporation in America. They're focused on nothing but the bottom dollar. They have their HR departments spewing morale boosting propaganda and they do their damnedest to keep those employees locked in as wage slaves. Free lunches! Games in the break room! Climbing walls! All that shit is designed to keep you in the office, to entice you into working overtime, for free.

When I'm looking at job listings, I look for the tell-tale lie on their websites: If they say something like, "our employees are our greatest asset," I know they doth protest too much. They really treat employees like fungible commodities. Unfortunately, I've let my judgement be blinded too many times and have had to learn the hard way that it is true in every case.
Use a tool that supports "dead code removal". E.g. Google Closure JS compiler with "ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS" flag: https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/compilat...
Very well written article and I can add some context being in the unhired category of engineers.

I graduated from Georgia Tech sometime in the last couple of years with a 3.64 GPA. I know that GPA doesn't mean much but really at Georgia Tech they make you work for it like a dog. I have some projects on GitHub and well I thought companies would come knocking at my door. Boy was I mistaken. So I started applying late into my graduation semester.

I got interviews with Amazon / Google and another Tech giant. I got turned down without an interview from Facebook / Palantir and some other older startups. I did not apply to a lot of companies, and I feel that was the real difference bw me and friends that got offers from all of those companies that I've mentioned above. Past summers I had worked at management consulting companies and ultimately after not getting any offers from Tech companies, I moved back home to Asia. And although I did feel a little crushed at the time, I'm working at a big engineering company back home, and I don't make as much money, I'm learning to like what I do.

Perhaps after a couple of years of nursing my self-esteem, I'll try again. Till then yea it sucks to not fit in. It sucks to not be a culture fit. It sucks to be told that you are not adequate after slogging it out at a supposedly "world class" engineering school. The best reason that I got rejected was because other candidates felt coding was their calling and I didn't seem all that committed. wtf! I'm of Asian descent and well was on a F1 Visa (non-resident/citizen) with a horrible accent. Perhaps there were other factors that resulted in me not being hired because I did make it through the phone screens for some companies, and also because I have other asian friends that did get offers. . But yea atleast it feels good to know that there are PhDs out there that can't get jobs either so it wasn't all me.
Test 1. Phone charged at 8AM. KitKat + Skype + other apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Evernote, 4SQ) + normal usage = Phone dead at 10PM same day.

Test 2. Phone charged at 8AM. KitKat + other apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Evernote, 4SQ) + normal usage = Next day at 8AM, phone at ~ 50%.

Sure, Skype is not causing the issue (it is limited to Android tho).
I wonder what was the successful Kickstarer project from Pyongyang, Democratic People's Republic of Korea?
Kabam Buys Phoenix Age As It Pushes For $650M In 2014 Sales
It's interesting to see the step change when Kickstarter launched in the UK in October 2012
I go overkill on the debugger flags:

-g -g3 -ggdb -gdwarf-4

Being able to debug C-macros has improved my life!

(gdb) info macro Py_TYPE
Defined at Include/object.h:117
included at Include/pytime.h:6
included at Include/Python.h:65
included at Parser/myreadline.c:12
#define Py_TYPE(ob) (((PyObject*)(ob))->ob_type)
We have a company that employs 120 people. The fastest connection that we can get is 4Mbps down/1Mbps up.
Suppose you're standing on the border of Germany and France. You fire a gun on the German side and kill someone on the French side.

In which country should you be tried?
You did not wonder quite enough to google it?

https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/places/pyongyang-kp?ref...
Is this satire? We're talking about $19 billion here.

In either case, your statement is almost completely incorrect.

The WhatsApp founders were turned down before WhatsApp even existed. Therefore, it was not some bold tactical decision on the part of FB. Their technical acumen was up to snuff, so they were rejected based on some other criteria (not necessarily age).
Returning Hierarchical (JSON) Data in a Single (Postgre)SQL Query[2013]
I went with ecobee thermostats (ecobee.com) because it already has a rich API. It doesn't have motion detection like Nest, but it does have a very useful web interface and a decent app for iPhone and Android. Since I work from home and have a stay at home wife with two young children, the motion detection was not a selling point for me. I wanted something a bit more Cisco router and less Apple Airport Extreme. I've been very happy with the 3 that I have in my house. My only complaint (and this is true of all connected thermostats) is that it relies on the company's infrastructure. If ecobee goes out of business, I lose much of the utility of the devices, though they don't turn into bricks.
If the code is inside the script tag, it has to be downloaded with each page. If it's a separate file, it only has to be downloaded once, when the first page is loaded.
I've not experienced this myself. But have you asked them where they got your contact info from? I'd be curious to know because any possibility I can think of (outside of you posting on twitter or your blog, etc) would be extremely questionable.
Welcome to Netscape [1994]
Convert PDF to Excel XLS on Mac OS X
More to the point, these guys probably wouldn't have done anything interesting at all had they been hired by Facebook. They certainly wouldn't have had the freedom and the resources to develop something like WhatsApp.

I interviewed with Google not too long ago and it was clear to me that Google was the place to go work if I wanted to get a paycheck without having any impact on anything at all.
I'm not sure the Fukushima power plant is where you think it is.
Surprise! Double standards, discrimination, illegal practices and plain incompetence in the hiring business. Those self-absorbed tech rock star companies are actually not smarter than the rest.
Europe's Dismal Record on Gender
I've asked them, the person emailing has said they received it from a marketing department. Pushing for more info now.

I'm thinking really hard about this and I can't find anything I've shared that suggests I'm looking for a new payment gateway. Hence the post :)