skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is more a description of Google+ as the author sees it rather than what "killed" it or what could save it. I do agree with the general point that it seems to be a place for geeks, but that could be because the author / myself are geeks and we hang out around other geeks. hardly reassuring "evidence".
Before "lean" was cool
Can The Lix 3D Printing Pen Actually Work?
Quite a complex issue, this is a good talk about it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f6geiVdwpk
Absolutely yes. But of course it depends.

Making sure to stay in the drivers seat instead of selling out to a big company was the first step.

Of course, if corruption is rampant everywhere this is much harder.

Also setting targets and staying true to them seems to be important. Today the target is not to use anything from their oil fortune except the interest. This is something they seem to fight about every year but the majority seems to say no to the party idea every time.
I love the concept.

This could be improved by using multiple reading level tests and averaging the results,

Kind of like this guy does with his open source project:

https://readability-score.com/
Looks like all the promo codes have been redeemed at this point. Any others available?

Curious if you used the Spritz (http://www.spritzinc.com/developers/) API for this or something else? I'm able to do the 700 wpm they have on their website - look forward to trying something faster.
Except that analysis only holds when you assume participants are honest, or there are no derivatives. What stops me from making a massively stupid bet, and then rigging the market to diverge from reality?
You can become a millionaire CEO if you are intelligent with at least a 10-20% success rate. Get 5 years work experience, ace the GMAT, go to a top 5 MBA, do consulting at 250-500k/year for 10 years for a company like Bain or McKinsey, then get hired as CFO of one of the companies you work for, 5 years later get promoted to CEO.

Even if you don't make CEO, you can get to several multiples of an engineer's salary with a 100% success rate with this plan. Let's face it, a software engineer is far from a top tier occupation, and for good reason. You can hire very high quality people with 10 years of experience in eastern Europe for $30/hour.
Yeah, and unlike Facebook, Google was surprisingly bad at "real names". There were tons of stories about the people who either couldn't sing up - or even worse - got their accounts suspended and thus lost access to their email - because their name wasn't real enough for Google's taste.
It's also where Template Haskell shines.
You don't want to pay the ton of money it will take to have that question answered by a court. Change the name - it's demoralizing and embarrassing, but way way cheaper than trademark litigation.
He does provide some evidence, although I'm not sure how much like statistics it is. Here:

"Last week, the company parted ways with Vic Gundotra, a talented executive who led Google+ through a thick fog of expectations. The company is also reported to be reassigning team members and sub-products (possibly Hangouts) to other business units. "

He acknowledges that for some things like tech discussion G+ is doing fine. The argument is that, organizationally, Google itself is pivoting away from G+.
What about consulting? Inventing a new framework (e.g. Rails), what about writing books on languages, design and the rest?

If you are really good in programming these days you can achieve more than ever before. But if you really like programming that much, then making money isn't your highest priority.

The fact that are way better payed jobs, it's a reality (lawyers, investment bankers). If you are in it for the money then you might want to consider another career (e.g. investment banking).
But they weren't always. The major laptop players used to be IBM, Toshiba, Dell. Apple came in with more expensive laptops and killed them.
The problem is with something like twitter, you don't know how valuable it's going to be for you until start using it for a length of time. I'd probably be hesitant to pay even $5 for it if I though I might only tweet once or twice. Of course I'd be willing to pay more if it became a valuable social or business tool but I have no way of knowing.
It's a fun and interesting idea, but it's loading about one time in three for me. When it does, it frequently crashes, resets, or simply won't let me move. The rest of the time it's various asset loading errors and other problems. I know the HN hug of death is hard to avoid, but there are a lot of other bugs going here also.
My daughter was born the same month I was working a major internal investigation. The company was under threat of getting delisted, and we were told that if we were awake, we had to be working. I didn't sleep for a couple of months, but we're all alive. You make it work.
Steve actually makes a pretty good case for the dynamic and problems facing G+. I think he buries one problem, that for many people, G+ marked a major turn in perception of the company. Just as Microsoft long ago became the software you had to use rather than the software you chose to use, Google has become the Internet company you have to use, and G+ the social network it forced you into. And the fact that this happened under the watch of a former Microsoft executive is possibly not entirely coincidental.

The bigger problem, and one that's hitting pretty much all the social sites lately, is the post-Snowden era and the realization that large, centralized stores of pervasive personal information facilitating what Bruce Schneier calls "bulk surveillance" may not be a good thing. It's hitting all the social sites now, and even Zuck's trying to change his tune at F8

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russi...

http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-at-facebook-f...

(though I don't think he'll succeed: http://redd.it/24h6or).

There's a lot else going on -- many mis-steps along the G+ pathway (Real Names, #nymwars, the War on Words, the YouTube Anschluss, total failure to grasp community dynamics, and more.

And I also say, entirely without irony, that there's been a great exchange going on at Steve's G+ post on this topic, including most of what I've touched on here, and a word or 2000 from yours, truly:

https://plus.google.com/+SteveFaktor/posts/Lj3NBBUV8pa,

Also, for those who're inclined to think Steve's inherently biased, Mike Elgan
, who's ... let's just say, unabashed adoration of G+ usually leaves me short of appetite, in his most recent TWiT podcast questions Google's participation and engagement numbers, and comments on the immense unpopularity of the forced YouTube / G+ integration, as well as the toes crushed by Vic during his tenure with the company.

https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGNtepAbNY&feature=youtu.be...
By the article's definition, neurosurgery is a blue collar trade as well.
I would not pay for Twitter because I am already paying for it.

Remember the saying "if you are getting it for free, you are the product"?

Twitter get's my time and data, adverts are displayed to me and I get to use the service.
Prose, a content editor for GitHub
The new MacBooks boot in 1 second.

I'll take that any day over extra storage I don't need.
It's certainly not a mathematical function. That being said, to even write 4 = x ^ (x ^ x ^ x ^ ...) is a bit misleading. The function diverges for y not in the range of e^-1 < y < e. I think that's a bit simpler and elegant way to look at it. A proof can be found on page 240: http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22... (pdf)
just took a quick look at your site, are you using D3 for the charting?
That already happened. The biggest computer manufacturer (Apple) doesn't sell a machine without an SSD.
Seems more like a realization of the human life cycle. Personally I was so happy to get a programming job out of college and a good pay. After a number of years of good performance and promotions I'm eventually a senior engineer about to jump to principal engineer.

But that's when it hits you. You're still in your 20's... is that all you're ever going to be? Hey, the six figs is great, and you're on track to retire earlier than most, but was that it? Is that why you kicked butt in school for ~20 years, to write [insert field] code to make someone else rich?

It's a tough realization to make, but for most anyone, in most any industry, they'll get to the same place. Then you get to decide if you want to (1) make achieving as high a level as success as possible you're life's mission or (2) live a good life and let work simply be the source of your sustainable from M-F. In the end, we're all going to be worm food, so do something that matters to you in the time you've got left.
Programming itself may be a bit of a dead end, where you can quickly hit the glass ceiling; but if you get involved in other important parts of software production like design, specification, requirements gathering, support, sales and marketing then then the domain knowledge that you can gain can lead you onto many other things.

Technologists who also have a lot of domain knowledge are gold dust to many companies because they can straddle the world of business and IT and help bring the two sides together to develop better solutions. Much of the business of computing still baffles a lot of very intelligent people, so if you can act as the translator between these to sides then you can definitely broaden your horizons.

The thing is as well, that you may not have to give up programming entirely. I've managed to lead IT projects, and then once they were delivered go back to working on programming again.
I've also found a vastly superior experience, for both reading and posting, on reddit.
The Visas go to whoever has the skills required by the particular economy, the country of origin is less important.

Visas for gap-year type travellers are less common and usually very time limited.
This is plain wrong.

Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have parallel tracks for programmers and managers. You can progress all the way up to Senior VP equivalent as an engineer with no management duties. These roles include compensation equivalent to traditional CEO level roles.

Eg. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/02/28/meet-jeff-rot...
World History Maps and Timelines
Get Ready for Regulators to Peer Into Your Portfolio
Multiprocessing supports "managed objects", shared across multiple processes -- example: http://johntellsall.blogspot.com/2014/05/code-multiprocessin...

I'm unsure of the performance ramifications vs using concurrent.futures
Why don't non-china mapping companies have a table of these offsets and simply apply them everywhere (well, maybe except chinese IP adresses) ?

It seems a tiny amount of work compared to, say, gathering the actual street data itself; and it would be an useful thing to make this data available to the public like openstreetmap data.
I use it for photos because it's amazing. I can upload RAWs and they turn out at least as well as I can do them by hand, plus the auto-awesome thing makes great extras (the pano's are pretty great).

Increasingly following experts and communities like I do on twitter and reddit. For some topics it's becoming the best place.
A less cynical explanation for the same data: a great manager helps many people to be more productive. A great manager of managers help many more people to be more productive. Management scales much more than individual contribution.
If you're a manager your biggest asset is relationships with developers and with peers across the organization. Those assets can't be replaced at all - it takes time to build trust, and trust is completely non-fungible between people. I've seen departments just decimated (worse, actually...decimate means "to kill 10%", and in this case over 50% of leads & senior engineers left) because a well-respected manager left.
I drink a cola called Blah Cola. It doesn't mean that Blah Cola isn't dead. In a literal sense of the word it isn't; but for practical purposes, Blah Cola is dead compared to Coca Cola and Google+ is dead compared to Facebook.
Ya I think you're right, the float needs to be as thin as possible, otherwise most of it will be underwater and not affected when the surface rises. So a 1 MW float would have a volume of about 4 million m3, which is 2 km on a side if it's 1 m thick. It's probably better to just find large bays and install low head turbines. Kinda fun to do the math though!
I think the app.net guys have been trying to differentiate themselves from being "Yet Another Twitter Clone", but that's how I first found out about them.
I've had good success using Celery to parallelize tasks/jobs in python.

www.celeryproject.org

Also, it has a very nice concept called canvas that allows you to chain/combine the data/results of different tasks together.

It also allows you to switch out different implementations of the communication infrastructure that Celery uses to communicate and dish-out tasks.
> But the part in brackets is the same as the whole

Can someone explain what this means?
Yes, https://alpha.app.net/
I find the phrase "Tits up" simultaneously offensive and hilarious. Thinking of saying it in front of my mother tilts me more towards offensive, but I still smile...
But here's the thing, people that know the most about getting stuff for free also automate the hell out of it. If you've got a usenet account, you've probably got the following setup:

- https://couchpota.to/
- http://sickbeard.com/
- https://github.com/rembo10/headphones

People auto-download the latest episode of a tv show throughout the season, albums, etc.
So the logic goes, consider x^x^x^...=2. We have an infinite tower of x's. Now, suppose we group all but the first x as so: x^(x^x^x^..)=2. The number of x's in the parenthesis is still infinite (infinity minus 1 is still infinity). We already know by hypothesis that x^x^x^...=2. So we can substitute this in for the term in parenthesis since they are both an infinite tower of x's and get: x^2=2.
FWIW, I've got an interesting name and FB insisted I send them a copy of my driver's license to open and account. Funny thing, since there are thousands of FB user's with that name. G+ didn't give me any such problem. So, "real name" isn't that much of a problem on G+, especially given the number of cats that have accounts.
I'm not sure how much there is to discuss unless you want to challenge all of the proofs at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999.
Or just use a better language. One is that is actually compiled and fast?
There's also
http://thedailywtf.com/
Not useless, just not deserving of more pay than the engineers. Same goes for the executives.
Quick point:

There is no way you can ever open source G+ because G+ is not a single software that you can git/hg clone

Interestingly, reddit's source is online, and I actually managed to make my first (very, very trivial) change to it, issued a pull request, and now I'm officially a reddit contributor.

Given that I've spent a lot of time critiquing G+ and extensively modifying its layout via CSS (2000+ lines worth), I find this ... a notable contrast.
> What I find surprising is that the recruiter still wants me to interview even after I explained who and what I am.

Did you tell him that you're a psychopath? My point is that if a recruiter reaches out to you, it probably means your online identity matches their criteria for potential candidate. Now this criteria can be as simple as oh neat he uses haskell to I'm impressed by his contributions to project X, Y, Z. So unless you tell him something that is completely contradictory to his superficial impression of you there's no reason he should tell you NOT to interview with the company.

Also, I feel like whatever reason the recruiter decided to contact you (Github / nice linkedin profile) has very little to do with the companies hiring bar. It's a terrible proxy for measuring how a company hires. It's at best an indication of the technologies you'll potentially be working with. For example, if you only have java listed chances are you prob. would have never gotten that phone call. You should try it as an experiment.

Want to know where the bar actually is? Go for an interview. Of course, what they mean by interview is usually 1-2 rounds of phone interviews. So in essence you're still pretty far from being seriously considered as a candidate.
whoosh

Edit: I thought the original "blue collar" remark was sarcastic. Am I wrong?
This is a pretty distant perspective. It's like saying 'you can become a millionaire startup founder if you are intelligent. Go to MIT, Get a job at a young tech company. Get Funded by YC. Sell the company to your former employer.'

Obviously, it's not impossible to become a millionaire CEO. People do it. There The requisite work, skill, risk, talent and luck just isn't comparable to 'become a programmer.'

Becoming a programmer requires one to learn to program, at university or some other way and get a job programming which isn't to hard if you can program. At neither step are you competing to get through gatekeepers and bottlenecks in a most-will-fail situation.

You easy steps to becoming a CEO require you to go through several of these competitive bottlenecks. In any case my point was just to point out how silly it is to say 'most programmers don't become millionaire CEOs, it's a dead end job.'
Good advice! I still code at night, picking up some visible UX stuff that wouldn't make it on the road map otherwise. That way, we never have a week where it doesn't APPEAR that the product has gotten better just because whatever was on the road map wasn't visible or is taking more than a week. Seems to help relations with customers/investors/non-technical parts of the team and I enjoy it.
Another way to say it is as a game theory:
2 programers, if one becomes a manager it is an advantage.

I agree that pay starts well (but its earned), but in a real world scenario, programming is relatively tough work with limited upside, relatively. I agree w/ OP.
1) the glowing plant project isn't doing that great. There have been scant technical updates to their blog, despite the promises of their founders, and they've quietly pushed the delivery date from April to July.

2) the ability to print large quantities of DNA for a given patient is not really going to be necessary. For the most part any "biologic" drug that might need to be personalized is most likely going to be 99% common "boilerplate" plus 1% or less "personalization". For example, antibodies, which have a massive common region plus a small amount of variable region that is an 'adapter' to whatever you're going to use the antibody for. We are well, well within the ability to synthesize this amount of DNA at an affordable cost, and have been for a while. Not to mention that you'll still be giving 'the same drug' to more than one person, that's because human variation is not that high (especially everywhere except for africa due to population bottlenecks in human migration).

3) The point about the netflix model is an interesting one.
One of my high school friends finds my Arduino obsession ridiculous because he learned all about soldering and electronics st the high school he attended before transferring to mine. Our poor school district could barely afford welding, small gas engines, and basic Windows and Office (document/spreadsheet/presentation program basic use) classes.

Understanding how these work is one thing, and that used to be enough to be worth employing. Today, you have to have a passion for using that knowledge to solve problems.
The TWTR and FB earning's calls in the last few weeks have shown how their growth rates continue to collapse. Where are the X is dying articles for them? TWTR's price is down by nearly 50% and below the IPO price, is it dying? Then again, since G+ doesn't have to publish numbers, we cannot compare apple to apples.
Thanks for expanding on my point. I would also add that it's not just about the act of self-selection, but the way the communities are viewed in themselves.

Exactly the same qualities are described in very different terms, e.g. a tight knit community which upholds their traditions and values in the face of modernity, vs inbred, ignorant bigots.

The main difference between my viewpoint and others who make similar arguments, is that I'm not saying this is an actual contradiction. There are many differences in context which mean that the two cannot be directly compared. However, there is what I would call a discrepancy. The author of this piece never made a logical argument, that what is good for White communities isn't good for others. He simply painted a picture, which many people might find compelling. If I can expose this discrepancy, people might find these narratives less compelling.
Except it's more like if several hundred million other people and I drink "Blah Cola." Even if Google Plus only has 10% of the active users of Facebook - fuck, even 5%, even 1% - that's still millions of people who are using it actively. So yeah - "dead."

Note: There's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off brands of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name. And it's not because nobody buys them.
> Of course, that is kind of like contrasting watching a DJ that selects mp3 tracks vs someone who can adeptly spin vinyl.

The selection process is the same. But there are various 'cheats' mp3 DJs can use which vinyl DJs can't whilst mixing. A lot of MP3 mixing hardware now comes with auto-beatmatch functionality. I see this being used quite a bit. It tends to sound pretty soulless, because there's no 'liveness' to it, it's very mechanical. Another is looping the bars at the end of a track to make it easier to mix, with vinyl if you run out of time you just get silence!

Still, the main thing is playing the right music in the right order, if you can make it from one track to another without f*cking up then you'll have 95% of the room on your side. The other 5% will the trainspotters that take everything far too seriously anyway.
>they should be a choice, not the only choice.

They are a choice. The author even mentioned Bitbucket. The fact that Github has become the dominant player doesn't make it not a choice. There is no one preventing a competitor from emerging and working to compete with Github (the same way Git emerged and enabled Github to exist in the first place). Being frustrated that people default to Github doesn't mean the choice to use something else doesn't exist. It does, most people have just decided not to.
I think MBA is best way.
For myself that convinced me immediately to kill my own "real name" account. I replaced it a few days later with a pseudonymous one (before pseudonymity was explicitly OK'd by Google many, many months later).

I agree fully that that one misstep put Google's home-turf advantage with the technorati early adoptors and poisoned the well. I don't think the company or platform ever recovered.

In conjunction with other moves by the company (culminated with forced YouTube-G+ integration which I've termed the Anschluss) cost me all faith and trust in the company. To the extent I can minimize my exposure to and use of it, I do.
These hard drives are enterprise targeted and, I assume, rather expensive. Microsoft was selling Surface Pros with 32 GB not long ago, with over half occupied by Windows.
Git wasn't the first version control system. It won because people liked it best. If something better emerges (by better, I don't mean slightly better, but something where value_over_Github > switching_cost, which is often missed when people discuss what is "better" than the current leader), it will replace it
I like the game its ideas but why are you still actively developing and encouraging others to develop in Flash? I don't want to come over as offensive, but it is a dead platform. Uncertain what the LD-jury judges on, but they should incorporate technology stack in the final results. In your case, you would get a few points off for using Flash.