skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what I am seeing with my FB page. Over a year ago with with fewer likes I was able to reach more people. With almost 18,000 likes, I can barely reach a thousand people now. The funny part is if a post is doing well, FB will suggest you to advertise the post since its getting "higher than usual engagement".
The last sentence of his original comment.
World's first carbon fiber and Kevlar 3D printer [video]
I still remember a story I heard Gerry Sussman tell about Marvin, from when Gerry was a grad student. Gerry was programming a neural net (or something like it; I forget exactly what) and told Marvin he was planning to use a random number generator to initialize the weights in the network "so it won't have any biases". Marvin replied, in his careful, laconic way, "Of course it will have biases. You just won't know what they are."

This comment has never seemed as stunningly insightful to me as it evidently did to Gerry, but it's probably one of those things that is obvious once stated, but not before.

Anyway I'm glad to see Marvin winning this prize.
That's only /b/ though. Based on post numbers this is from /v/, but yeah, anyone can lie.
My point probably wasn't very clear - in a summary of article headlines, this one would be a little ambiguous. It may be intentional, but it doesn't feel like it.
Interesting study.

1. Did they measure short-term happiness vs long-term happiness? The study involved making people feel good for a short period of time and a task whose duration was for a short period of time.

2. Is it enough to make your employee happy right before he starts on a task, even if he is miserable throughout the remaining period? What will be the effects of productivity in such a situation?

3. The paper refers to Erez and Isen (2005): "positive well-being induces subjects to change their allocation of time
towards more interesting tasks, and that, despite this, the subjects retain similar levels of performance
in the less interesting tasks".

Doesn't this mean that a person's state of happiness does not have much of an effect for doing mundane tasks?
For those who don't know, the FQA, unlike the FAQ is well known to be extremely biased and exaggerated. It is not a neutral resource - it was expressly written as a takedown, with exaggeration used to great effect.
I tried that too, but it wasn't any faster – you've already gotten most of the gains to be had by lifting the random number generation out of the innermost loop. So I went with the option that uses less memory.
Ford Transit Custommo model year 2013
"The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him."

Well, it is.
Paramilitary police: Cops or soldiers?
The objective basis that you are offering engineers too little pay is that they are not taking your offers. Unless you don't believe in one of the first things they teach in modern economics - that at a certain value (price), supply will always meet demand.
How did you get from "It's also possible" to "both sides are right"?

Is there actually a shortage of mobile qualified workers in the US? If so, what is your evidence?
Too bad Twitter can't put a server at 140.140.140.140
Which of those wasn't possible in 1995 with a modern Internet connection? I posit that everything you describe would have been entirely possible with a little less polished appearance 15-20 years ago and that there could be real strong value in starting over and keeping things simple.
The thing is, it takes some incredible network effects that require a company at scale or an extremely fat market to generate this kind of money per employee, it's not like most smaller companies are holding back.

At that point, the infrastructure of the company is creating a lot of that value - the same engineer at another company would not generate nearly the same amount of revenue.
Just for kicks, does Twitter have an onion server?
I found the link to Stroustrup's "Learning Standard C++ as a New Language" [edit: from 1998, which explains why I found it kind of familiar to my late 90s run-in with c++...] interesting[2,1]. But then I tried to find out what's the current state of the art for idiomatic, cross-platform text processing (in unicode, probably utf-8) -- and got a little sad.

There's still no way to write a ten(ish) line c++ program that reads and writes text, that works both on the windows console, and under OS X/*bsd and Linux?

(Lets go crazy, say you have to implement a minimal cat, tac (reverses stdin on stdout) -- and also corresponding echo and ohce (I made that up, something that takes string(s) as input, and outputs the characters reversed (ie: "ohce olé there" outputs "ereht élo").

[2][edit] The direct link to Strostrup's paper is:

http://stroustrup.com/new_learning.pdf

code:

http://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/newbie#simple-program

[1]

The FAQ briefly touches on Unicode, but it doesn't seem very helpful (to me):
http://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/cpp11-language-misc
(search page for unicode)

Trying to look for a (simple, generally accepted) solution, I came across:

http://www.utf8everywhere.org/ (If I'm reading this right, it says assume std::string is utf8, but I'm not sure if there are std-lib funtions for doing stuff like getting the index of a glyph, and reversing strings by glyph? And will they work on windows?)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2037765/what-is-the-optim...

Which points to: http://utfcpp.sourceforge.net/ which is the best I'm aware of so far.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8513249/handling-utf-8-in...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/402283/stdwstring-vs-stds...

(Suggest using wstring on Windows and string on Linux -- for simple programs that would effectively mean write to versions, one for each platform ..)
Historically it was legal; I want to say it was banned a couple years back, but I'm not confident about that.
Walmart gives cash back when you return something purchased on a credit card. Not sure what the parameters of this are, but I had it happen once with a ~$300 purchase and it was weird and very "money launder-y"
I presume the point is not what was already built but what was possible: Wikis have existed for a very long time, and nothing about Wikipedia seems difficult to do with very old versions of Netscape.
C++ is an ugly, flawed language. Despite this, it can also genuinely be the best choice for certain applications, and so there is a need for a FAQ such as this one.

But it's not "essential" that any such reference be accompanied by a recitation of the reasons the language sucks (some of them legitimate, even). The FAQ is for people using a tool to make things; the FQA seems primarily used to score points in discussions such as this one.* I think working programmers generally have more use for the former.

* There is also a need for constructive criticism of language design choices, of course, but the FQA predominantly rejects C++'s design premises (such as static compile-time polymorphism and lack of a memory-managed runtime) rather than recognize their utility and suggest better ways to accomplish them (as Mozilla is trying to do with Rust).
NSA infiltrates servers of China telecom giant Huawei: report
I thought of the same thing when reading the OP's question. Wikipedia has a trend chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Trends

And Freedom House's latest report talks about the recent decline (8th straight year):
http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-sees-autho...
in case you haven't watched these videos from Veritasium yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

both videos show why facebook's model is inherently self-destructive and incoherent and will inevitably implode
Can someone fill me in on why IPC is important? I would have thought that most parallelism was either within a process, or across machines.
That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost, take cryptocurrencies for example. Yes you can manage your own keys as an end user for your cryptocurrency holdings, but as you say most end users will prefer to work through a third party that will handle the complexities of key management for them.

The trick is though that there can be an infinite amount of third parties all engaged in competition with each other and the end users just participate in that market like they would any other.

OP's suggestion may well work the same way, certain end users could choose to handle their own key management, and there could be third parties that handle it for those that prefer not to. As long as the space for those third parties is infinite and end users can opt to handle key management themselves, it's still a decentralised solution.
Apple did not pioneer this at all:
http://www.servalproject.org
If the author had a reason for why they didn't like non-monetised free clones, it wasn't clear to me, so I'm going to make up some possible reasons, so there's something substantive to discuss.

Monetised free clones still support the market for game developers (i.e. they can have and pay employees).

Monetised free clones provide a model other for-profit developers to copy, whereas non-monetised clones can destroy a business model without suggesting an alternative one.

Monetised free clones have a motive that he can relate to more, and developers supporting themselves is more worthwhile than whatever motivates developers of non-monetised games.

Monetised free clones can have more resources and incentive for creating good games.

Monetised free clones do not devalue the game as much as non-monetised free clones, as there's still a cost, if not so direct.

Competition from free clones in general harms the original developers, but for-profit clone makers are likely to be harder to persuade to stop, let alone by using moral arguments, so its only worth arguing against people who do it for admiration or because it makes them happy, both of which can be reduced by criticising them publicly.

That's pretty cynical and I've probably got some strawman arguments there, so I don't want to attribute them all directly to the author.
Tonido the awesome Dropbox alternative
I would not recommend that circular buffer idea for quantitative calculations.

Consider averaging n numbers from a buffer that you've filled with m random variates with m < n: the standard deviation of your average will decrease like 1/sqrt(m), not 1/sqrt(n), so you might as well have just averaged the independent random numbers you produced instead of reusing some of them.

Maybe the circular buffer idea would be useful in non-quantitative contexts, though, e.g. for simulating something in a game or a movie, where all you need is the appearance of randomness.
Creator of 'Second Life' wants to look inside your brain with Oculus Rift
I think it is important to avoid using the term STEM and specifically dissect it in the discussions about shortage. Computer Science is a very peculiar part of STEM and not all of the STEM fields face the same challenges.

I think there's a bit of a rhetorical issue with this, though. The dominant narrative is that we have too many people doing soft, fuzzy, weird, useless liberal-arts degrees. Studying things like literature, history, philosophy, political science. What we need is more people doing hard, rigorous, mathematical, technical STEM degrees. Studying things like physics, biology, mathematics, computer science, chemistry.

If you admit that there is no shortage of mathematicians, though, you undermine the whole strategy of "we need more STEM, less liberal arts", because mathematicians are the rhetorical core of STEM: rigorous, technical, mathematical, non-fuzzy. If it turns out mathematicians are about as useful as historians (useful in principle, not directly in a major applied shortage), the whole narrative fails.

To a certain extent I think the whole STEM construction is based fundamentally on trying to hand-wave across this gap: math and physics are prestigious and perceived as hard/rigorous, while computer programming is in demand. The union (not intersection) of these two fields is STEM, which perceives itself as rigorous + hard + in-demand.
You know, you're right - I'm extrapolating too much from the "released in whatever format the masters are in" claim.
The scale seems ok... and the team mate classification. but otherwise the author is full of it.
I don't know how many jobs I've seen out there where they have an incredibly high bar to hire someone, and then it is 99% CRUD work.

Some of the AI jobs at Google, yes, they need good people. Amazon needs some good engineers at the top guiding the creation of EC2 architecture. But most jobs ask for a much higher caliber of people than they actually need.
> Does this architecture have an official name?

the article is describing a "service oriented architecture," i think.
>Why are so many programming jobs (and libraries) in brain-dead languages (such as Java) rather than functional-programming languages (e.g. Scala, Ocaml, Clojure, Haskell)? Because while the Java+IDE environment makes it extremely difficult for an individual engineer to have a 1.5+ impact –there are two cases in recorded history of programmers breaking 2.0 in Java; one is Martin Odersky, who wrote Scala, and the other is Rich Hickey, who wrote Clojure– the state of the tooling makes it possible for the 0.7′s and 0.9′s to get a 0.1- to 0.3-point bump, so long as they stay within their IDEs and don’t have to work with a computer (gasp!) at the (God, no!) command line.

I don't see how anyone with practical experience developing commercial software could write something like this. The tool set simply isn't that important. Plus, the idea Java programmers are afraid of the command line is... well, interesting at best.
The story is in "The Hacker Koan:" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan
I'm a pretty intensive electronics enthusiast. I checked out his site, and skimmed some of the materials.

My impression is that he deliberately designed a fairly mundane circuit using commonplace parts, to show that an esoteric design is unnecessary. So it's a "political" design, if you will.

The impressive thing is that his documentation of design decisions and techniques is pretty exhaustive. I've definitely bookmarked it for a closer read.
I was reading a biography about a couple who built a boat in LA in the late 60s and set off on a tip around the world in 1969. It took them three years to build the boat and save up some money to fund their trip.

The husband was a carpenter and the wife was a bookkeeper.

They had a boat probably worth $10,000 in 1969 dollars and a further $5,000 in cash saved up. I looked that up in the inflation calculator and found out that $5,000 in 1969 dollars is about $30,000 today.

Can you imagine a carpenter and a bookkeeper building up assets of $90k dollars in LA today through a few years fastidiousness and hard work?
2048 World Record: 113,300
> Ultimately, I don't think Facebook had a choice. The user experience, with the amount of pages some people like, would be horrendous.

If someone doesn't like the content from a Page they follow, they should unfollow it: I specifically follow the things I do because I want to see their content... it does not improve the user experience to limit that content; if anything, it destroys the user experience, as the reason I go to Facebook is to see the content from the people and brands I like: showing me less of the stuff I like leaves me disappointed and unsatisfied.
I agree this is mostly a PR article, but it does remind me that I often think only in terms of the USA. When the world adds 1bn new smart phone users, it's going to be an INCREDIBLE improvement to their life and before the first thing they'll do is figure out how to message their friends. Messaging will be THE first thing all new smart phone users do. If it's not SMS, what is it?
Can you elaborate a bit on why it would be important for an iPhone app to be able to work offline? Is it just because you want it to be fast, or is there some other reason?
Yup, I did the same thing in China by withdrawing RMB from my bank account at Bank of America at a China Construction Bank ATM and immediately depositing it in my local account. Zero fees and good exchange rate.

The only annoying part was that the amount I needed to pay my initial rent + security deposit was more than my daily withdrawal limit, so I had to transfer up to the limit three days in a row to get enough money in there to start.
All this means is that you'll see more dumb ads for Coke and Sony and no posts from your friend's small fitness blog or charity.

Which means Facebook will become increasingly cold and impersonal, like any other corporate entity.
Interesting, I see geometric patterns when I rub my eyes real hard, always wondered what caused it.
How much faster is Java 8?
Textbooks Prices: Out of Control
This article is a few months old: January 15th, 2014.
How quickly does your company reply back to good/bad resumes? As an engineer who was recently looking for a job, I found that companies just aren't very organized when it comes to looking for new hires.
Java can finally join strings
re: cell phone bills, have you thought about getting a raspberry-pi or a larger server running asterisk with chan_dongle, and using a prepaid sim card at each country as your "gsm gateway"(1)?

(1) http://blog.carrier-connect.com/raspberry-gsm-gateway/
It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get around the firewalls. My friend came to me asking how the kids were getting around the firewall, but my explanation was over his head.
It's a good question. I love to read people's responds here and kudos to all who have shared their experience.
Answering to your question, I work as an employee. I enjoy working in a company because there are trainings, financial support to get IT certification and the salary is not bad. Also the company's dream which is to make IT more secure is pretty much similar to my dream. So if you end up working as an employee, better be in a company that has the same dream as yours.
I thought basically the same thing when I heard about it, but from a different angle: what would happen to VC investments if NPM imploded? Some stability for these companies is valuable.

I'm not sure of some of the implications of this article though; open source and money are not inextricably connected. While open source may be a loss leader in some cases, it does not need to be. All of what we now consider open source descends from a time when it was considered radical to think it was possible to make money from open source.
Could just be a run of bad luck or not enough advertising on their part. Supply can't meet demand if supply doesn't know demand exists.
I'll add another link: https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/.

Not the same, but nevertheless a great source of music. I lost the count of how many times I was hearing a song and though "wow, I NEED this", going immediately to modarchive searching for it.
It always seemed fairly clear to me that the whole "like us on Facebook" thing was Facebook treating businesses as sharecroppers, harnessing their marketing effort, with no promise of allowing them to keep the eventual rewards. Unfortunately, it seems like many businesses bought into it because there weren't any very good alternative for a non-technical organization to keep in touch with their customers (except maybe Twitter).
The real issue here is creating an algorithm that optimizes what you like best: friend content, page content, and/or games/apps/etc. I would guess the majority of the population has higher engagement with friend content then page content, which is why their algorithms show pages less and less. Not necessarily a malicious "bait and switch" (because that implies forethought, which I am highly skeptical was the case if you worked in a tech company in the valley for more than 3 months) but rather not providing the best solution for an algorithmic news feed.
people not smart enough to avoid overdrafts

Remember that historically, banks have processed transactions in whatever order is most likely to produce an overdraft, even if the same set of transactions, processed in chronological order, would not produce an overdraft. Also note that the complaint is not that he overdrafted, but that he can't turn off the overdraft "protection" that charges him a fee -- he'd rather just have the transaction declined, and can't get his bank to do that.
great point, and we could do a lot better on this front. We do a lot of recruiting and typically find good people rather than waiting for them to apply to a posting. We're/I'm very active in the local dev community, meetups, conferences, etc.
All Android devices vulnerable to privilege escalation
Ideal? Not at all.

All it's doing is driving down the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook, because the only things that can afford to throw bad money after bad money to reach users are massive corporations.
This is not a technical problem. It is a human problem, and humans don't act like you want them to. There would emerge a handful of large, popular, simple, easy-to-use central sites. A rogue regime can block them just as easily as it just blocked Twitter.

When it takes hours, days, or weeks for new moles to pop up, and they necessarily stay up, Whack-A-Mole is easy. And as sites keep getting whacked, people will lose the motivation to move on to yet another new site, learn its quirks, and rebuild their network.

Twitter is a powerful tool of dissent precisely because everyone uses it. It's not limited to the technically sophisticated and/or motivated activists. Activists need access to regular people, and they won't have it on a network that's painful and annoying to use.
The course description seemed vague to me that's why I asked if anyone knew specifics. "This course explores the various tools and techniques commonly used by Linux programmers, system administrators and end users to achieve their day-to-day work in a Linux environment." Various tools and techniques could be bash, sed, awk or it could be anything else in the vast capabilities of a linux system.
This is a great lesson for many start-ups that worry when a competitor comes along, or somebody 'copies' their idea. Your competitors also end up spending money educating your potentil customers.

I wouldn't be a coffee drinker today if it weren't for Starbucks, and will still go to one of their stores, if their is nothing else around. However, I'll seek out unique coffee houses when I travel to get more of an authentic local flare, rather than the now ho-hum Starbucks experience.

I also think local coffee houses can continue to learn from their competitor/Starbucks, and start-ups can do the same. Your product has to be at least as good as Starbucks in order to get my repeat business. Often, the local mom and pop shops just don't reach that fairly mediocre bar.
I see so many references to Marvin Minsky in the texts and books I read. Glad to see him recognized like this!
I think we pay very well because when we do find a good person, we offer them enough to get them unless there is some non monetary reason they went with another company. We do not have a problem with people turning down offers, we have a problem with finding enough good people.

Another interesting wrinkle to this is the fact that hiring someone at a high salary is a big gamble. How confident can you really be after interviewing someone?
For 95% of what people want this for, CSS tables would probably work just as well ("display: table" ). The main advantage of this seems to be the "minmax" ability, and some rethinking of the api, since CSS tables are semantically based on HTML tables.