skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally agree with the op, but there is are few things unmentioned.

Not everyone lives in the US, meaning not everyone knows that you can simply build a product, get money for it, and have it grow. I learned this at a Hackathon. I attended a mini seedcamp because of a Hackathon, and they made sure none of the attendee judges would steal anything.

Yes, there are bad VCs, but for example in Germany, you grow up learning that you will never do well unless you get your degree in the university and then go work for Airbus, Intel, you name it. In fact most of my co-students went that exact path and they were utterly surprised when I told them I wasn't a student worker anywhere, but an experienced engineer helping startups grow their companies.

Long story short, Hackathons can be empowering. They can get you great jobs, startups, co-founders, etc. And yes 48 hours of coding is not good. But you never code 48 hours. It won't even be close to 48 hours, and chances are even if you have something nice at the end of it you might have to ditch it and rewrite from scratch.

Not dismissing any of the points, merely amending. He's right on almost every regard imho.
This is only true for those rare positions (senior/upper management) that offer such equity grants, or if you lucked into one of those one-in-a-million rocketship growth companies. I've been in the tech industry as an engineer and lower/middle manager for 15+ years and equity has never ended up making up even a tiny fraction of my compensation. Often it ends up being worthless (underwater options). I suspect my situation is the more common one.
I don't see how depressive realism refutes the various correlations and observations in OP...?

> So basically the research is suggesting that unbiased thinkers tend to be more pessimistic and depressed than people who irrationally distort the world into being better than it actually is. What a bummer.

How is that wrong? Suppose you looked at lottery winners and successful entrepreneurs; no doubt they are optimistic and risk-seeking. Does that mean optimism and risk-seeking and playing the lottery would make everyone better off...?
>They canned Star Fox 2 even though it was finished and used much of our code in Star Fox 64 without paying us a penny.

There is a somewhat happy ending to this tragic story for Star Fox fans: A nearly complete prototype of Star Fox 2 was stolen (!) from a trade show in the mid-90s, and later dumped and released on the internet. The beta is somewhat buggy and in Japanese, but dedicated romhackers produced a patch that fixed most of the bugs and translated all of the text into English. Obviously I can't link the ROM, but if you can find it on your own, the patch is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2

http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=starfox2

It's a very ambitious sequel and worth checking out. It's something of a strategy game/arcade flight sim hybrid: You start the game looking at a map of the Lylat system, but instead of it being a glorified stage select, there are also various enemy units positioned on it. These units move in real time, both as you navigate the map and as you are undergoing a mission. So, there are situations where you might need to complete a mission quickly in order to defend your home planet from missiles, or the Star Wolf mercenaries might attack you in the middle of trying to do so, and so on, adding a layer of depth to the game.

http://agtp.romhack.net/images/projects/starfox2/9.png

The other interesting part is that the entire game is in "all range mode" (as it was called in Star Fox 64), so you are never "on rails" and can always navigate wherever you want throughout a level. This is particularly interesting in space stages, where you can have Star Wars-esque dogfights in completely unoriented 3D space.

It's just a damn shame that Nintendo never bothered releasing it, either back in the day or in modern times as a VC download.
I think people underrate how much this benefits apple. While I'm sure there are people with different experiences, apple in general, and in my experience, don't sell shit products and stand behind what they sell. With a full motherboard changeout available at a local apple store if necessary. Contrast to hp: we had a hp laptop w/ a next business day in-home warranty that nonetheless spent a week or more in hp's repair shops on two occasions. I've also gotten new power bricks outside of warranty basically by asking nicely at the local apple store. It may be because I do spend a lot of money on apple gear, but I used to do that w/ dell and dell never gave a shit.

The brand I'm most surprised about is sears. They used to make great appliances and stand behind them until the private equity thieves fucked that all up. My partner runs a medium-sized apartment building; the owner is happy to pay for quality, and if sears cost less on the 10-15 year time frame they'd buy it. But sears is the same cheap crap, so they just buy whatever is close to cheapest at home depot.

When brands throw away their brand name and turn into the same cheap shit, you can't blame consumers for shopping just on price.
>> "If everyone wanders around the tables, then no-one will get anything done. That is not productive at all."

Your taking his comment to the extreme. I know what he means, he means a Hackathon were people can converse and come up with ideas together is a better Hackathon than say one that forces close-knit groups to ignore everyone else in a bid to 'win' the competition.
Is it another search engine?
Isn't it the @gruber v2 column from the page? It looks to have no false negative, but many false positives. The only one which does perfect on the tested set is Diego Perini's https://gist.github.com/dperini/729294
It used to give you 1000 results (100 pages). Then it changed because 'nobody' goes to those last pages and it's very expensive to keep those big sets. Then it dropped to 300 or so. Then it became 'some random number between 20 and 300 depending on invisible factors'. Pretty rare to see a resultset with more than 200 pages. Even 'webcams' (of which there are 10's of millions of pages) gives only 323 results.
I would be interested in hearing your views on the insurance automation challenge and how to solve it. @InnovationPaul
> I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles

They aren't. Have you looked at the CRT questions? There's nothing tricky about them, the challenge is simply actually checking your answer. And if it's 'just' a word puzzle, why is the correlation with IQ so low? And why does this sort of rationality inversely correlate with screwing your life up in various ways (see the research discussed in my comment in OP)? That's an odd thing for an 'awkward word puzzle' to do.

> The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism.

You know that was the very first criticism leveled against Kahneman & Tversky's conjunction fallacy results and they long ago showed that other wordings gave the fallacy too?
I think the "cool kids" part of this is somewhat rhetorical. The whole point of the slides is basically what are the deficiencies of Erlang, and how can we fix them. The results are fairly interesting although not entirely surprising.

It's also worth considering that these questions were asked of Erlang users, so it's the communities opinion of itself. I as an outsider would say my biggest issue with Erlang is that it's a highly event driven system and I don't like event based systems. Events are basically a more opaque form of GOTO and thus suffer the same criticisms. Events are sometimes the simplest way to model something, but as a general paradigm to solve all problems they really suck and do terrible things to your program architecture.
Everything is better with Bluetoo…^W Git
Codebase support would be great! Being able to update DNS by a simple git change would be awesome.
"Unfortunately, the interview skills required to get into the top tech companies is biased against older software engineers"

Maybe that's a good thing. A "top tier company" will squash you like a flea if they don't need you or if profits need to be boosted for stockholders and heads need to be cut.

For sure any company can do this. But my feeling, observing business over many years, is that a company that is extremely attractive to job seekers has less to loose by doing so. They will always have talent lining up at the doors wanting to work there no matter how tight the labor market is later on.
You can set deploy keys on repo's
I came across this paper a few months back and really enjoyed it. It was one of the things that inspired me to begin working on a new project I have going [0]. It really does a great job at explaining how Monoidal Categories can be used to tie together concepts from these various fields of study.

I was not in 100% agreement with the conclusions in the Computation section of the paper (if I remember correctly -- I need to review the paper in its entirety again) but it was still very enlightening! :)

[0] https://github.com/JKhawaja/BraidOS
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend approaching the U.S. embassy with this kind of situation. You're far better approaching a Canadian food bank or other social aid organization if things get dire.
A Programming Book for Babies and Toddlers by Christina Bastos
Using 6 as a prefix for ipv6 might be a bad idea.

The DNS Specification (RFC2181[1]) states:

>The DNS itself places only one restriction on the particular labels that can be used to identify resource records. That one restriction relates to the length of the label and the full name. The length of any one label is limited to between 1 and 63 octets. A full domain name is limited to 255 octets (including the separators). The zero length full name is defined as representing the root of the DNS tree, and is typically written and displayed as ".". Those restrictions aside, __any binary string whatever can be used as the label of any resource record.__

>Implementations of the DNS protocols must not place any restrictions on the labels that can be used. In particular, DNS servers must not refuse to serve a zone because it contains labels that might not be acceptable to some DNS client programs.

As an example these are all valid domains

6.4424.cn, 6www.4424.cn, 6662.cn

But Separating the prefix and domain with a space would already fix the issue.

[1]: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2181
I think there's a giant difference between a spec competition of the type that you describe, where architects are invited to create proposals for a company headquarters, and a hackathon of the type that PayPal's BattleHack is.

Generally speaking, most hackathons now don't try to make intellectual property claims on entrants' work. I'm sure some still do, but that's just a bad idea for everyone involved, and I do agree with you that those should be avoided. Whether or not VC's are interested in the pitches is really up to the teams involved - they're certainly not obligated to take VC's money.

24 hour hackathons are completely different from spec-work - you're in a room with other developers, the scope of the work is limited to just 24 hours, and the best use of them is simply to stretch your legs as a developer.

To go back to the writer's ideal hackathon, BattleHack has multiple companies involved, along with PayPal, although PayPal is the main sponsor. You can sleep or not sleep at BattleHack - I slept during both BattleHack Austin and the BattleHack world finals when I attended last year. Every hackathon I've ever been to has been relatively friendly when it comes to helping others, even with prizes on the line.

You can have hackathons without big prizes (for instance, most civic hackathons), or even without coding competitions/pitches (for instance, Hacker Olympics).

Disclaimer: I won BattleHack Austin last year, went to the BattleHack world finals to compete there, and won several vendor prizes at each. I've also competed and mentored in many other hackathons.
PHP-FPM vs. Node.js – The REAL Performance Battle
"Most of the things you describe are deep, but also very narrow and domain-specific; frequently it is also very company-specific. Such knowledge is far less transferable than one might imagine."

Agreed. It is the quickest way to become a 10x employee but unfortunately your current company won't give you a substantial raise for knowing their product and domain well and it is not transferable to other workplaces.
Perl/CGI is never a good thing.

You might get better response with using perl in fastcgi mode, and using nginx rather than apache.
The first one I'm not sure, it looks like a valid FQDN (equivalent to www.foo.bar, where the trailing dot is implicit). The second one I guess it has to do with punycode and internaltional URI encoding?
> At best this lets you conclude that a URL could be valid. Is that really useful?

It's useful to find and linkify URLs in text (e.g. in your HN comments, how do you think HN makes http://foo.com into a link?)
There is one very important point that I didn't see in the article, nor the comments. By not advertising in search, incumbents would make it less expensive for newcomers to put their offer in front of the incumbent's customers. This can be very risky.
I went down the wrong path for a long time, and like the frog I did not notice I got burned.

My advice is to be honest, with your self, your co founders, employees and customers. Tell them you cannot meet the deadlines and stop working so much.

No one is angry when you move the deadline up front, only when you do not tell anyone you cannot meet it.

And remember that if they matter they wont mind and if they mind they dont matter.
Thanks for simplifying!
One is not likely to get to the same place in life as that CEO. You can stop the sentence there. The rest of your statement makes you sound judgmental against job-hopping.

Capital distribution in the US is a Paretian/long tail distribution. It is statistically very unlikely for anyone, regardless of their actions, to get to the same place in life as that CEO if they are from anywhere in the bottom 90%.

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1077681/thumbs/o-INCOME-DISTRIBUTI...
Then it could be $250 or $300/h, and you could drop a client.
I don't know. Ask them.
Also IPv6 URLs, like http://[1080:0:0:0:8:800:200C:417A]/index.html

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2732.txt
The danger here is that technology is increasingly giving us nearly cost-free methods (e.g. leveraging machine learning/ big data instead of human supervisors) to oppressively optimize profitability at the expense of human happiness.

While employers might always desire greater productivity out of their workers, the ability to finely track productivity by simple metrics gives them new leverage over workers, who have little recourse. While many jobs people do are inherently not fun, when a grocery bagger's job depends on scans per hour [0], the human element is drained.

There are also implicit costs that such metrics impose. "Scans per hour" creates a perverse incentive to ignore or feign ignorance at customer requests, call center quotas for conversions encourages lying to customers, etc.

[0] http://gawker.com/true-stories-from-wal-mart-workers-i-am-no...
Jack Warner got there first, basically: http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-10/entertainment/ca-378_...
I have been in that situation and I don't know the reason you ended up there, you can get many options of housing with friends and work online but I would like to send you some money for food so while you figure it out you always have a hot meal.
> You’re going to be useless in the technology world if you can’t edit a file remotely, which will you will be in a terminal for, and which you will be using Vim for.

Whenever I really need to edit a file remotely, there is nano.
Just the id didn't work, but adding "chrome-extension://fpienblnmnnlojdcknfmeicdefhafako" seems to work. Thanks.
How to Get Your SIGGRAPH Paper Rejected (1993) [pdf]
Are you aware that if you live in a city, you can vote? If a city where to impose 30% sales tax, I can't imagine any supporter on the council or whatever form of local government that city has would last past the next election. People would also be checking local laws for recall elections as well.

ps -- and if you can't be arsed to vote, then don't bitch about the results
What specifically do you find not-so-easy about running Theano (or rather, a NN library built on top of Theano) on GPUs?
Sounds like you urgently need a "Corporate Mission Statement" or help from an experienced project manager. There are surely some very experienced people on HN. Hopefully things work out for you, keep us updated sir.

I cannot give you any first hand advice, because I've not been in any situation like that, so please take anything I write with a grain of salt. Just good intentions here, because I really feel you man.. it's very though to stand your man, when you feel or know that everything depends on you.

Instead of making you the single point of failure in the structure, the vision you have should not hinder you from ever reaching that vision. I think you need to focus on what is exactly the thing your clients really want and that requires talking with clients 1 on 1, making a few a/b test and communicating the core values to your team. Why spend 4hours on design, when your client really just wants a login-system that works (for example).

You have really great employees, but talking about an exit would subconsciously demotivate everyone, even those with the best intents. I don't know and cannot give you any first hand experience, but whatever you do, take at least 1-2days off-work to think about the goals you want to reach with your team. They should finish whatever is left and stop hand-holding each other in order to push everyone else to work as hard as they do. A successful company is not only about hard work, but good organization and execution of ideas. This could feel like either an iron-man like marathon or cool vacation, depending on how you manage and motivate people.

You've pointed it out correctly, you're at a crossing, which could result in success for the company or burning out yourself and your employees, depending on how things are managed. Your gut feeling was right and asking others for help is surely the right way.

Update:
You should check one of the many good articles written by Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/love.html (How to do what you love)
Foods to avoid with bronchitis
This is useful for anyone using videogrep.
Working on a big/long running project end to end. If you jump ship after a year you won't really understand the impact of a lot of the decisions you made months ago.

Most companies wont let you make any high risk or big impact decisions in your first year of employment with them (regardless of whether you get hired at a junior or senior or tech lead level).

Experience in solving the more difficult problems that require expertise with the companies particular stack and internal architecture.

And many more. There are ways to mitigate these problems but few do.
The only thing you have to do to hit $100 an hour in e.g. Python programming, which you appear to do, is to stop taking gigs which pay less than $100 per hour. People express disbelief at this, and it is headdesk inducing to me.

For general Python contracting work, go to people who already employ Python programmers, demonstrate competence, and then ask if they are hiring or know anyone who is. This can be virtually or in meatspace, at meetups and whatnot.

For getting work which is more than just being an interchangeable body who can ship a web app in Python, you'll want to find businesses which have problems which are amenable to solutions with computer programs, and then sell them that you're the right person to do that. I've gone over this many times on HN -- use hn.algolia.com and search for [patio11 consulting] or [patio11 prospecting].

(n.b. You should also shutter the business which sells fully functional prototypes for $3k, because that is not sustainable. Good clients know this, so if you're using that business for lead gen, you're selecting for pathological clients. You're also proposing to do project management for projects for the worst freelancers and the worst clients, at a fee of 8% on $3k, which is an even worse idea than delivering those engagements yourself.)
This critique appears to be projecting its author's desire for a solution to the EHR compatibility problem on to Apple. I haven't seen anything from Apple indicating that HealthKit is the answer to this problem.

HealthKit provides a way for iOS devices to integrate health-related device data for use by the iOS device owner, no more, no less.
"I tell the folks I mentor to think of themselves as professional athletes with a 15, maybe 20 year career."

what terrible advice! Please stop "mentoring"

"Young developers should save 50% of their after tax income." I wonder how long it's been since you were young. While saving early is likely a good idea, it's also the time that student loans, young families, buying houses etc are all huge costs that very likely making saving much impossible. It's also a time to have fun, travel, enjoy life.

I've been a software developer for 27 years and have encountered none of the "incredibly cruel" discriminations you suggest. It's definitely true and I see this often that many as they age don't bother to stay current, they get stuck in old ways and don't want to keep up to date. But for those that do, those that stay at the forefront of their field there's no discrimination. You just have to be better than the rest, whether you're 20 or 50.

please please stop telling people this nonsense.
It's not their problem. Possibly people would just not leave if too many left already since with waiting in the queue they could not make it back on time.

Btw, I think we had startups like this already. Is it the same one with some more sexy domain or something different?
> So, moral of the story is that even the latest and greatest of PHP world falls behind node.js

Curious why you wouldn't be using Hack + HHVM then?
Nowadays hackathons are really not hackathon. You might have a vision of hackers coming together building things for the sake of building things. No, nowadays hackathon has been corrupted by VC to see what ideas to invest in.

I've gone through one where the winner was a team with a nice powerpoint presentation but with very little function built, while other teams much further along lost out, against the stated evaluation criteria of building software for the competition. Of course the judges were all VC looking for ideas. They should have called it an idea fest instead.

Hackathons are a waste of time for developers and hackers. You are better off doing a project with friends for fun, and see what stick afterward.
Why are these taxes ridiculous, unless you don't support the idea of taxation at all? Lots of economic activity gets taxed, and fundamentally, if we want to have nice things (roads, utilities, public education, police, court system, etc) someone has to pay for them. It's more than reasonable to want businesses -- which use many of the above, and crucially rely on eg good public schools to get parents to live and work near the business -- to chip in.

That said, saying a 3.6% tax makes a software business uneconomical is pretty silly. If that makes the difference between profitability and unprofitability either the business was mostly investing profits internally into growth or was nearly uneconomical anyway. It mostly sounds to me like bitching that the owners may have to settle for Hawaii instead of St Barts this year.
Removing a child from the custody of a parent who was not financially prepared to raise the child is not punishment.
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