skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see this kind of sentiment on Hacker News a lot.
I kind of feel like, if you really want to express this thought process, I'd like you to suitably justify that this argument isn't just a smokescreen, disguising your resentment that more people than ever can learn to use and enjoy computers and you're not quite so special anymore.

So you make up this story that what they are doing is not really using computers. It's not the same kind of wonderful magic that you can do. And while you say "Now that we have "a computer in everyone's pocket" we should get our heads out of our asses and show people what a computer really is!"

Well what if that actually happened! what if computer/coding/programming literacy really did become as widespread as reading,writing and arithmetic. There'd be nothing special about you anymore! So you fight the future. you fight the "Fancy UIs" while saying you're not!

Okay maybe none of this applies to YOU specifically. My point is, if you're going to embark along this argument, I think you should really make an effort to prove your true dedication to it. Prove it's not just an expression of a deeper insecurity.
How does it look for other fields?

There is a misunderstanding on how jobs are made. Consider what these look like for history of English majors? STEM is in demand if you look at the areas with predicted job growth.
A commenter that makes 3 comments valued at 300 points isn't valued as much as commenter who makes 2002 posts at an average of 0.5 points each though.
No it's not an exaggeration. Find me a market today where four weeks off and a sub one hour drive to a truly nice rental beachfront single family home is a realistic expectation. Also, the home neighborhood is totally safe and good schools are in walking distance. This is the stuff that really drives the cost of living, not square footage and eggs and ipads per dollar.
Yawn. (I don't have an iPhone by the way)
So here's an idea that's been forming in my head over the last few days - a distributed version of twitter.

The problem with twitter as it currently stands is that it relies on a centralised server (well, servers). That's easy to block, or legally compel to remove content. Imagine instead that every user on twitter had their own "stream" replicated on both their own computer and those of all of their followers. If you choose to follow someone, you get access to their stream either directly from the person themselves, or any of their other followers.

This would partition the system according to popularity. The more followed a person is, the more replicas of their tweet stream available. When someone retweets something, it appears in their own stream, so retweets benefit from this replication. Any tweets that are particularly important and popular would be virtually impossible to suppress.

To prove that tweets had originated from a particular user, every user would have a public/private key pair generated when they first begin using the system, and all tweets would carry an associated cryptographic signature. "Registering" for the system would be a matter of generating an identity using a key pair and a username. Clashes and impersonation of usernames is something I haven't yet thought of a solution to, though usernames would be for display purposes only; the real identity would be the public key.

Replica discovery is another challenge, but there's much in the existing P2P literature and practice (esp bittorrent) that could possibly be of help here.

As far as business models are concerned, Twitter's current one wouldn't work, as it relies on the centralised nature of the system. However it would be possible for developers of individual clients to make money by providing various value-adds, and these could co-exist with open source clients.

Thoughts?

Side note: There seems to be a bug in the comments system where the last paragraph is omitted. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Extra last paragraph
They should have a sub-prize where if you can make an AI that can give a TEDx talk, you get like 1% of the full prize.
3D-printed splint used to help a baby breathe again
In the US you can sell a house quickly if you can list it at an attractive price. I did it once - I had to start a new job far away in a relatively short period of time, so I sold my house in 15 days, including escrow. It probably cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of 6% of the total value.

But to do that you need equity. In a short sale or a foreclosure you're leaving the house without any money, which "up in smoke" seems to describe.
It doesn't enable proprietary extension any more than permissive licensing does - in fact, less so since it comes at a cost. Meanwhile, it also provides some funding for Free Software development. I can't imagine how that would be worse than a permissive license.
Thank you, Google, for being so 'evil'
Find me a market today where four weeks off and a sub one hour drive to a truly nice rental beachfront single family home is a realistic expectation. Also, the home neighborhood is totally safe and good schools are in walking distance.

How about Silicon Valley? Cupertino is safe and has good schools. And it's <1 hr drive to Santa Cruz or Half Moon Bay if you want beaches. Or you could do the other direction, and live in SC and commute to Cupertino (or wherever). Google even runs shuttles if that's your thing. I lived in Santa Cruz for years on a 5-figure salary, and felt quite comfortably well off. Actually I sort of wish it were further from Silicon Valley, because the only bad thing about living in SC was that the rich techies with 6-figure salaries were driving up prices...
Check the link above
This was ultimately a massive bait and switch and I can't believe more people don't find it disgusting. Facebook gave off the impression you would be able to reach people who became your fan on their network.. until they didn't need any more free marketing. Now that everyone is on Facebook, they've decided to focus on the user experience more and leave all the brands who promoted them out in the cold.

It would be one thing if they were charging all along, or made that intention clear. Instead they took all the free marketing and slowly scaled down how many of your fans saw your posts (frog in boiling water?). It's to the point now where I have pages that reach .1% of my fans. Facebook now wants thousands of dollars for just ONE post to reach a significant portion (not even all) of my fan base.

Ultimately, I don't think Facebook had a choice. The user experience, with the amount of pages some people like, would be horrendous. But to spend any time or money to try to build a fan page on Facebook now would be a joke. Anyone currently spending their advertising dollars to buy likes on Facebook is terribly misinformed on the impact it will have (none).

Additionally, it seems many of the major brands I've seen advertising via print, TV, etc. have been only promoting their Twitter accounts now. I have to assume this is a reaction to Facebook burning them and now they are trying to make Twitter a larger threat to Facebook.
I think you're wrong. I have the hardest time finding good engineers, we pay very well, we don't expect anyone to work crazy overtime, etc.

Can we make this more concrete? What sacrifices do you think is being asked of competent developers? What pay do you think they are offered?
> I didn't have kids

> sq-ft

Well this sort of thing is the crux of the matter. If you give a shit about restaurants and ipads, well yes now is better. If the idea of having a handful of grandkids appeals to you, well now is worse.
As long as people are eating, I don't care. People shouldn't have so much power over each other's lives and attitudes.
> we pay very well

How do you know, objectively? Have you tried paying twice (or more) the current market rate, for instance, and binary search for a point where you have enough happy hires and failed? Perhaps the market rate is artificially lowered.
You don't have to do anything quite that complicated. You can just pre-generate an array of Gaussian random samples and do table lookup in the inner loop:

paths = zeros(Float64, M, I)
rands = zeros(Float64, M-1, 1)

for i in 1:I
randn!(rands)
paths[1, i] = st = s0
for j in 2:M
st *= exp(a + b*rands[j-1])
paths[j, i] = st
end
end

That shaves off another 35% percent of runtime on my machine.
> But if the brands, organizations and celebrities that use Pages want to continue to reach Facebook’s 1.23 billion monthly users in the future, they’re going to have to pay up.

The free lunch is over. Next, paid developer apis...
There are some obvious important factors - most importantly the ability to extend my software (or pay others to do so) and to thereby ensure continued interoperability.
I acknowledged that I didn't have kids, but I also made <$50k. I could've paid for kids, and lived quite well doing so, if I had an extra $250k/yr!
The problem isn't that good engineers turn done our offers, it's that very few good engineers come in the door. The ones that have were very happy with their offers.

Edit: Didn't realize you weren't the person I originally replied to. Let's reverse your question. What is the objective basis for the claim that engineers are asked to sacrifice to much for too little pay?
And yet everyone wants to equate the two. Personally I don't even think webdev should count as STEM at all.
What Has Become of Syria's Revolutionaries
> you either need to have separate templates for server side and client side

there exists templating engines that run on both server and client - for example, google closure templates.
Man, no offense, but you sound like someone who has never worked paycheck to paycheck. I'm not endorsing his banking scheme, but I can sympathize with the shityt overdraft fees are.

Also "seem to come in order" is not really good enough when you are down to 5 or 10 dollars left. Also, I have seen many examples of banks processing things out of order to maximize the overdraft fees. Ie. processing larger transactions before smaller ones that occured before them chronologically, so that a number of 4 or 5 dollar purchases would end up each having a $35 overdraft fee.

For 95% of situations it would be much more in the customers interest to just reject the transactions. But the banks make a killing off of exploiting the people who can least afford it (those with almost no money in their account).

edit: downvotes? Anyone care to actually tell me what is downvote worthy in this post? The guy's recommendation to "subtract 1000" from whatever your balance is is totally infeasible for a large portion of the population.
Downplaying emotional abuse as "being mean" is disingenuous.
so which engineer is going to do all that backend stuff? Database upgrade testing? Or sysadmin related tasks? Stuff that customers don't directly see? Coz that bonus calculation scheme is going to net them nothing.
>On the public policy side, there is probably a belief that more STEM professionals will increase the economic competitiveness of the nation, even if there is a surplus.

Except that it doesn't work, and it should be obvious why. There's no reason to bust your ass in college to enter a field the government floods with foreigners. The more people the government imports the less attractive the field looks to domestic students choosing a major.

I can't complain about my treatment as an EE and later a software developer, but knowing what I know now I doubt I would go into anything technical if I were graduating from high school today.
Why Docker Instead of Linux Containers (LXCs)?
Even law enforcement characters were upright:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wL9Li0f1Po
It's also possible for there to be a shortage of qualified workers and a surplus of qualified workers...this is a point that people often miss.

Qualified US workers have this annoying tendency to be unwilling to uproot their life and move to where the jobs are. Foreign workers coming from other countries don't have this issue...they're moving anyways, so they move where the jobs are. And hi-tech jobs cluster in certain areas, usually around one or more universities to supply talent. So you end up with areas that have lots of jobs and not enough qualified applicants and areas with qualified applicants and no jobs.

That's what makes this issue so obnoxious...both sides are right. And that makes it difficult to find a middle ground.
It's sad that the Shalizi review is the first thing people refer to (it's sort of the Huffington Post of reviews).

Do you base this on just this one review, or more generally? I've mostly found his reviews informative and much better researched than most online reviews. They have opinions, but the opinions are more informative to me than "I like this" or "I don't like this". I usually feel that I learn something from the reviews, including finding new books and articles to read because they're cited in the review. That's not exactly something that happens at HuffPo.
Yes, I can believe that is what he is saying. Certain banks/credit cards have relationships with foreign institutions that can cause unexpectedly low fees, given the right circumstances. On top of which, I've found that both Western Union and bank-to-bank transfers, on the whole, are a huge ripoff on both rates and fees--especially for frequent, small volume scenarios.

When I worked in Canada, I used the no-ATM-fee agreement [1] between ScotiaBank and Bank of America to convert USD to CAD and transfer money between the accounts. This involved the rather odd procedure of going to a ScotiaBank ATM, withdrawing a lot of CAD off of the USD in the BofA account, and stuffing the cash right back into the ATM as a deposit on the ScotiaBank account. Any other procedure, including using a teller or trying an online wire transfer, would have been more expensive and inconvenient. The above had no per-transaction fees and only a 3% conversion fee added to the market rate, which is about average compared to credit cards. (Any of Western Union's "instant" options for this kind of transaction require about 9% in fees.)

There are some credit cards with no foreign transaction fees, which is what I would use today if I had to do it again. Using such a card to purchase items in the foreign country, and then paying off the balance with the home country bank, results in "free" currency conversion. That's what GP is referring to.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_ATM_Alliance
> it's that very few good engineers come in the door

I have one possible answer for this issue: Well, no one in the Valley (to best of my knowledge) really advertises that they are going to pay a meaningful multiple of what's considered the market rate to potential employees. So from the potential employee side, it is reasonable to assume that they are going to get paid around the "market rate".

The Valley seems to be at a point where "starting/not starting a startup" is becoming an IQ test (compared to "market rate") financially if you think you are reasonably good at doing stuff, so it is natural that good engineers wouldn't go and apply for a job, because the expectation for compensation is unlikely to be satisfactory anyway (or at least that's what they believe and prevents them from trying).

>And you dodged my questions.

Oh, I am not the OP and I'm not pretending to have the answers. I was genuinely interested in knowing how you measured that you are paying very well, except for the fact that they were competitive with what's considered the "market rate" which is the questionable piece of data here.
Thank you. I looked at other countries' graphs as well. India's [1] make no sense. Distorted sinusoidal wave?!

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
ADDENDUM: made me laugh, gave an up vote for that.
From Wikipedia: "Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Carl Sagan."
I remember reading an article a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure where, but I think it was posted on HN, about democracy over time. While not the same, that's a good proxy for measuring freedom. It said that democracy reached a peak around 2000, and that it's declined a little since then, but much slower than it was increasing before then.

I think this article was either on The Atlantic, The Economist or BBC, if you want to go digging.
The first time you have to say "key" to an end-user, you have lost. Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare.

(And if the solution to key management involves letting a website deal with it, you've just invited re-centralization of the system, since users are going to gravitate to the service everyone else uses, not set up their own server.)
I say deliberately, because it is so specific and so easy to verify. Either the commenter has read the book, in which case such a strong statement could only be confidently made if paired with an extraordinarily bad memory, or the commenter has not read the book (or done a quick search to see if the book contains these references), in which case I consider the lie to be the result of deliberate ignorance.
The arguments for BI that I've read here on HN assert that this isn't a problem, because people who don't want to be working are a net drain on the systems in which they work, and/or they will be replaced by people who want to work a little bit but can't because they will lose disability.

The incentive to continue working even if you receive BI is that BI won't be enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, just enough to meet basic needs and educate oneself.
It looks like a weekly cycle. Maybe some businesses use TOR during weekdays.
There is a lot of crying and worrying about wages on here right now. If you are from CS or SE, you don't have the right to cry about a saturated job market driving down your wages. They are plenty high. If you want people with real problems, look at the graphic design industry. $10/hr can get you your pick of the litter among several applicants who have over 20 years experience in one of the biggest cities in the United States. Then imagine what it must be like for recent college graduates in the field.
From my experience in internet businesses in developing countries, you tend to get quite strong weekly patterns as a lot of people only have access to computers at work, so usage tends to drop on the weekend.
How could that be a "simple mistake"? Either the commenter has read the book, in which case such a lapse in memory is inexcusable in the face of such a strong statement of the book's contents, or the commenter has not read the book or even quickly searched its contents, in which case the lie is the result of deliberate ignorance.

If I claimed that the Lord of the Rings trilogy does not contain a character named "Frodo," would you call that a deliberate lie or a simple mistake?
Shouldn't this be an illegal banking practice?
There are a lot of great insights in this post that most people who talk and write about startups completely overlook. Thanks for bringing reason and logic to HN.
You said you went to a top-tier college. Most of them charge over $40k a year. So that $150k pays for less than your tuition costs. You are worth $150k a year (which means your boss is making $160k, $165k etc. off of you, they hire you to be profitable). So your four years of study were in a sense $600k down the drain in that.

So it will be at least five years before you start to break even. Minus the housing and living costs over that five years.

You spent over $150k and four years ($600k) worth of your time training for this job.

Also remember the market is hot. In 2000/2001 air went out of the bubble. Also in 2008/2009. Right now is the peak of a go-go time like 1998/1999 was. It is not the norm.
Generally, the goal of auto is to create a variable whose purpose is to store a value of the type you have: you called a function, got a constant reference, but to store that you need a concrete value. Generally, the goal of decltype is to compute a type based on other code whose type you don't already know: a simple canonical example is to make a function that does something and transparently returns the result "as if" it were the original code. These are two drastically different use cases and, given the semantics of the various qualifiers, it makes sense to strip them for one and not for the other, lending to two different syntaxes. If you find yourself needing to transparently store the result of an expression, in C++14 you can use "decltype(auto) ;P".
Ported my winning entry of GitHub Gameoff 2012 to iOS (HTML5)
Nice! In case it isn't obvious, randn! takes an existing vector and fills it up with new random normal variates. This allows computing a bunch of random variates at once, which is a little more efficient, without having to allocate a new vector every time through the loop.

Another option would be to generate all M-1xI random numbers ahead of time, but that would be less memory efficient.
> Please remember that your company is more than its product – it’s a group of people surrounded by a community of family, children, neighbors, etc. Whether your goal is world-changing or niche, do your best to take care of those people as professionally as you can. Business is business of course, but don’t rationalize bending the rules just to make a few more bucks.

Do customers care about that? When you search on Google, or buy a Macbook, do you care about the people behind them? I imagine most customers don't.
Who needs a database?
Ahhh! Roman numerals!

©MMXIV
I infer that you are claiming me to be a Wolfram-cultist. This is not the case. I think Wolfram is a smart and accomplished guy who tends to be too prideful and single-minded about his own accomplishments. But I'm also someone who is able to spend 3 minutes searching the Internet to determine the validity of extraordinary claims regarding the content of Wolfram's book.

I don't have to worship a person to think it's inappropriate to use lies to discredit that person. In fact, the more worthy a person is of being discredited, the more important (and elementary) it is to discredit that person using true statements.
What major?
Your argument assumes that improvement is equally easy in both systems, which is not the case. The Python ecosystem has a substantial head start, but Julia makes library development much easier – I would hazzard a 10x factor, but it's really hard to quantify. The result is that developer effort is amplified significantly, making it plausible for the newer system to "catch up" faster than you'd expect.

I don't really like to look at it so competitively, however. Open source is notoriously not a zero-sum game – everyone wins when there are more good options, whether they are in Python or Julia.
If people give me a programming test or assignment before the interview, I usually pass now. I am currently employed and don't have time to waste on a stupid pre-interview screening test. It's also insulting.
I don't know if it's legal or not but I've never seen any guarantee that transactions will be processed in the order they are made. And the people who it happens to aren't the type of people who can afford an attorney anyway.
Also:
"As the Turkish government’s effort to ban use of Twitter continued Friday, the country’s Internet users rushed to install apps such as Hotspot Shield, which had 270,000 downloads from Turkish users within 12 hours, according to David Gorodyansky, the company’s chief executive."

I think Tor's a bit of an overkill. This message sent over Hotspot Shield from Vietnam because of my Facebook addiction (blocked on and off here)
Can you share some tips for new oDesk users? I registered on oDesk for 2 months already and although I'm fairly experienced (10 years), I got zero contact so far. I must miss some important thing to get noticed or contacted.
Eh, I'm not holding my breath on that (though of course I hope I'm wrong). In all the Pono marketing material I've read I've seen almost no reference to (re)mastering; it's all been about chasing the hi-res dragon. Meh.