skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody can stay on the top during his whole life. Technology marches very fast and as we get older it's hard to keep up and compete with younger, more motivated brains. Everybody should expect that.

This guy should think about all the people that did not even have any skill or talent in IT in the first place. Or people that are not just very smart. They manage to live anyway. They get by. My advice is to do what you enjoy and not compare yourself with others. If that means your value on the employment market is low, so be it. Let programming be a hobby, not a job.
Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin
I've been watching Orange is the new Black lately, and the Con-Air scene was pretty similar to their description. Sounds like it's true that you really don't want to use the bathroom there, doubly so if you're a girl. And that they really don't want to take your cuffs off for any reason. And the guards all act like everybody there is planning to pull a Con-Air movie style hijacking, and so will not tell you anything or talk in any way that isn't strictly required.
Not necessarily, maybe I just like yelling at people. I needn't believe anything false for that to be true.
How is your English business buying ads from an English sales team in an English office any different from my Luxembourg/Sweden example? It seems identical to me.

I'm from south of Manchester, for what it's worth. And I think British politicians need to drop this issue as it's way beyond taking the piss by now. Tax avoidance isn't even a thing. It means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. Tax evasion is a thing, that's pretty well spelled out by law, but avoidance just means someone legally paying less tax than the speaker would like them to. Your assertion that 50% to 38% is "probably fine with most people" is in the same area: it's an entirely arbitrary set of numbers. I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't think that's fine, however, it doesn't matter because there's no moral obligation to pay more tax than necessary. Governments are not charities, the British government especially so!
The suburb of the future is here
They might do so someday, but it has been explained time and again why this is not a very effective strategy: it will hit a relatively small number of people, it will be in an enclosed area so media access and thus graphic coverage will be limited, and airports are uniquely well-provisioned with emergency services because of the non-negligible risk of plane crashes, which will limit the impact. So the 'return on risk' for the terrorist is relatively low - it would scare people and put them off flying for a bit, but it wouldn't be an epic disaster.

Realistically it would be hard to kill more than 25-50 people, and the media coverage would consist of footage of ambulances, sober-faced people in uniform, and crying friends and relatives. Look at the history of conflicts where bombings were common, like Northern Ireland, and you notice that crowds don't necessarily mean mass casualties. The most deadly bomb set off during the Irish troubles was at an outdoor market in a town called Omagh, and killed 29 people - but that was a car bomb. Also, in a terrestrial bombing there are also tales of heroism as people help each other, emergency services turn up to help, and so on, which dilutes the sense of horror and helplessness. You could see that with the Boston bombing last year, which was ultimately more effective in drawing people together than it was in terrorizing them.

A plane blowing or otherwise falling out of the sky is a much bigger deal, because it will almost certainly mean the death of everyone on board, plus it has the potential to cause considerable destruction on the ground. Even excluding terrorism, there was high awareness of the Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic and of course the Malaysian Airlines plane that mysteriously vanished earlier this year. In a terrestrial bombing, you might be unlucky and die, but you might also be lucky and suffer only superficial injuries, or be able to make it to safety, or whatever. In an aerial disaster you and everyone else are basically helpless because if the initial disaster doesn't kill you the fall will. Situations involving helplessness and inevitability are a great deal more frightening to people in general, more so when multiplied by a large number of people.
By itself, quit rate is a meaningless statistic.

They should lump it into two groups.

1. People who quit and find a new job within 1-2 months.

2. People who quit and don't find a new job within 1-2 months.

Then, you can find out what % of people are quitting because they found a better job. It's even better if you can split (1) up into people who quit for a higher-paying job.
Does this have any practical applications, or is it just a (very cool!) art project?
This one I agree with, but telco is basically an oligopoly anyway (created by a necesitty).

There needs to be a regulation, because it's not a free market. You cannot just created a new operator because everything is licensed.
It depends on your "bullet-time" model whether it's red-shifted or not. Much "bullet-time" is explicitly just a special effect, i.e., the idea is that the action is still occurring in real time but we're having it slowed down so we can see it, understand it, and enjoy it. In that case we are simply shooting the scene with a high-FPS camera. "Technically" we should indeed get a dimmer scene, just as real high-speed cameras do, but it's not that unrealistic that it's compensated for, again, just as in real life when the Mythbusters go to a high-speed camera shot they've already compensated for that.

If you have a "real" time slow-down, exactly what happens depends on your model, especially where the photons cross whereever the effect is occurring. It is true that one model could be that a photon crossing into the effect keeps the same "real" Hertz, in which case you'd see it red-shifted. However, since in the end the entire idea of such sharply-localized time variance without a corresponding gravity field is complete nonsense, the truth is that no matter how you slice it the result is gibberish, so it's just as sensible to let the field "keep" the old photon's frequency too.

However, I'd point out that "real" time slowing in the movies is fairly unusual. Mostly it's the first kind. There's a number of sci-fi books with a variety of "real" time slowing effects, though.
First day CompSci 101: 'The language you will work with professionally hasn't been released yet so we are learning this" I wouldn't worry about it. I work with developers in their late 40s who started out learning Fortran in the 1980s.
I expected to hear a lot of shouting over the radio.
How fondly I remember these types of discussions at the HFT company I worked for.

"We're not doing anything illegal.", they'd say. "The law allows for this."

I've learned that as soon as a company says something like that, they're doing something ethically shady.

Like applying for government funding when replacing whole datacenters full of slow, old, energy-slurping HP servers. How old? 6 months old.

"But these new machines are much more eco-friendly than the ones we're currently running. So we're entitled to government funding for replacing all those bad bad units with more eco-friendly units!"

After replacing those machines with more energy-efficient (and faster!) machines, we'd make more money in a day than most of us will make in a lifetime.

The 6 month old machines got scrap-heaped. With money that the Government was supposed to have spend on ecologically sound business cases.

We weren't doing anything illegal. But it sure felt like it.
The Python Paradox[1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
A few things you may not know about the command key and javascript events
Alright, so open up the battery, keep half the cells so the laptop works fine and replace the other half with PETN.
If you say so, but from the outside this would be indistinguishable. Someone could attack with heavy artillery while shouting 'death to satan' because they like pretending to be a Satanist while not believing anything false.

How would we know the difference?
I wish it was dynamic [1]. So it could cater to everyone.

If you're a beginner and just want to see the top 10 most high quality, popular Go packages, you'd move a slider nearly all the way to the left until only top 10 packages remain.

On the other hand, if you have an obscure need (say, generate random First Names, Last Names, ZIP codes, etc.) and you're willing to look through as many packages as possible, you'd adjust that slider all the way to the right until all included Go packages are listed, and hopefully find https://github.com/Pallinder/go-randomdata#go-randomdata under Awesome Go -> Testing -> Random Data Generation or some other sub-sub-sub-topic.

[1] A simple demo of such "level of detail" visualization that I played around with, an explanation of how I could send an email with the press of a button: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8554242/available-for-2-...
>The Supreme Court said the ACA could not force the states to take the (federally funded) Medicaid expansion

The medicaid expansion is only fully federally funded for the first 3 years. It goes down to 90% by 2020 (Edit: I originally wrote 2014), and could very easily be pushed below that later on--Republican governors used that as an excuse not to expand.

I think they could have passed a bill that either allowed people making below the poverty level to use the exchanges with subsidies or they could have fully funded the medicaid expansion. I really don't think adding a small fractional increase in total cost would have killed the bill.
Racket really is awesome. I used the Racket web server for a small project once (that never got finished), and it's just so pleasant to work with!
Right, but they also have their own internal Paxos service to manage distributed transactions, and they have thousands of engineers and thus can deal with the increased complexity.

As I said in my original comment:

> That seems like an awfully big hurdle to overcome for a new application, especially if you're a startup that needs to focus on delivering customer value as quickly as possible.

I'm really curious to hear if/how others are able to leverage the benefits of microservices yet avoid the perceived complexity that goes along with it.

Edit: I was reminded that Pat Helland (from Amazon) wrote a famous paper "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions" which gives some great guidelines on how to build an SOA that avoids reliance on distributed transactions: http://www-db.cs.wisc.edu/cidr/cidr2007/papers/cidr07p15.pdf

I still think this is clearly quite a bit more complex and harder to develop than i.e. a single Rails app, so I'm still very curious to hear when this approach starts making sense.
First of all, you might not have noticed, but I said that breaking backward compatibility [...] is a sign of incompetence. format=flowed was invented specifically because it doesn't break backward compatibility. And that is why it is good. That it might also meet the definition of "works for most users" is somewhat incidental. As you might also not have noticed, I didn't claim that something working for most users was bad, it just isn't sufficient.

Then, your "for the tiny portion of unmaintained email software" mostly says something about how little you know about email software. You might be surprised, but there is a lot of email software out there that is very actively maintained and that has many active users that still expects and produces 78-column hard-wrapped plaintext bodies. It tends to be some of the most mature and powerful email software as well. Plus, there is not just "old" email software, but also old emails. My general expectation of good software is that my data stays readable without any deterioration, and I think many people with many million emails think the same.

Removing presentation from content is completely orthogonal to staying backward compatible to an existing distributed system. That might be an oversight of the original design, but that's water under the bridge, we'll have to work with what we have.

Incidentally, I also think that removing presentation from content is a bad idea for most uses of email, as it makes things hugely more complex without any real benefit that would be worth the additional effort (both in the implementation and for the user), at least when it goes beyond reflowable paragraphs as provided by format=flowed, that seems simple enough to me. As I said elsewhere in this thread, just because TeX and DTP are a good idea for the layout of books, doesn't mean a pencil is the wrong tool for a shopping list. Contrary to what you claim, it's not really all that fundamental a principle - it's a methodology software engineers should be aware of, including its dis- and advantages, and that has huge benefits when you need to maintain(!) tons of similar or particularly large, regular, documents, but emails mostly just don't fall into that category, so the additional effort is mostly counterproductive.
I'm 20 and I've felt the same way. I just returned from a semester abroad and effectively took a 6 month break from all coding following my 7 years of continuous interest. When I came back to the states to start my summer programming job a few weeks ago, I was hit with a feeling of emptiness and mild depression. The reasons for this are likely tied up in my reverse-culture-shock, and the fact that I spent a majority of my time in India socializing and exploring. I came back to my home, to a job I was really looking forward to, and didn't find programming to be very fun.

To find traveling enjoyable and purposeful, you have to become a bit of an extrovert. My days were filled with interesting sights, sounds, smells, and people. I felt happy to have learned a bit more about the "real" world around me. Then I came home to a desk job, where I unenthusiastically wired up programming logic to produce results. A few days ago I realized the obvious reason why I was feeling down. I had planned my summer around my work, and I wasn't enjoying my work, because I was still searching for external reward. To enjoy programming again, I would have to dig deep and remember why I loved programming in the first place, and promote the introvert was suppressing in myself.

I told myself to forget that I'm working on a product that might not improve the lives of tons of people, or that my code might be obsolete by the end of the summer, or that outsiders find it hard to relate to stories of my progress at work. Instead I allowed myself to enjoy building cool stuff that would be mostly divorced from the physical world. It's worked pretty well for me so far. Reward is relative, nobody can tell you that you should find less reward in designing fascinating and complex sand castles in your mind than more normative tasks like socializing.

The takeaway I'm going for here is that if you're feeling burnt out, it might be because your motivations for programming have been messed up by social pressures since you started.
You should be worried.

You are joining a pop culture that measures, judges, and hires people by how much they know about the current pop culture. Worse yet, everyone who tries to escape this conformity appears to just switch to a different conformity (OOP programmers switching to FP. Emacs users switching to SublimeText. Javascript people switching to Go. Programmers switching to Entrepreneurism. Etc.).

- Choose what not to learn (while being outwardly supportive of endless learning).

- Learn your excuse list for not understanding things now, and sit quietly while energetic people try to "convert" you.

- Choose what you actually want. (Many people are successful in unseen ways, and you never hear about them.)

- Know that you won't get it right the first time, but you will develop a feel for what to pay attention to after a few times around the hype cycle.

And, as always, keep learning.
This is essentially what I ended up doing. I used to talk about an architecture where each component would be a standalone REST api and that together all these components would talk to each other to other standalone components with it's own REST api.

I'm really glad that there's a word for this, I bet in a few years we will see this become the new buzzword and see it in job requirements.

I really like the microservices architecture because it just feels efficient.
I've tried many hn mobile redesigns and have settled with http://hn.premii.com and use it every single day!
I've seen a lot of "redesigns" of HN, but that is by far my favorite of them all.
The post talks about synchronous communication increasing temporal coupling.

There's nothing in sending a request and getting a response that's increasing coupling in a traditional sense, and often there's no much of an alternative anyway, if you want donuts, you'll have to request donuts, and then receive donuts.

While I dislike shoving HTTP everywhere for many reasons (reminds me of XML abuse), HTTP is not synchronous, nor asynchronous. It's a protocol sent over a socket. Synchronicity is not the domain of HTTP at all. It's up to the application how it does it.

Additionally, the response can always be a blank acknowledgement of the received request. There are very few cases where you just want to go forward blindly without even receiving an ACK about your request at some level (or alternatively, an error), because sometimes things fail.
The Spanish Costeja case shows that's not true [1]. The information ordered to be unlisted was true.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Gonz%C3%A1lez
It takes catastrophic levels of disease (think: Smallpox introduction into the entirely susceptible North and South American populations) to sufficiently weaken a culture to the point of conquerability.

Consider the number of European nations in the middle ages fully capable of going to war with high endemic disease levels, or indeed lasting on the field while there were ongoing epidemics in their armies.
The "indicating what parts of their programs are costing the most" made me think of the color scheme when working in cython: white (C-fast), yellow (slow).
http://docs.cython.org/src/quickstart/cythonize.html#determi...

of course it doesn't tell you anything about the speed of the C code, but I find the line coloring to be a nice UI for showing computational cost.
The secrecy is ridiculous. The bombers and bombmakers already know what's going on. The TSA is just keeping innocent travelers in the dark.
In the rental market, Craigslist may be undisruptable
"Choose what not to learn (while being outwardly supportive of endless learning)."

So that's why I didn't hear back from the (initially enthusiastic) Google recruiter.

(edit): I re-read the email thread and I think I was being unfair in the previous iteration of this comment. "See randomness" and all that.
Actually reduced cognitive ability (lack of sleep) makes the simplest of tasks more entertaining, it's a large part of the reason they give amphetamine analogues to those who are not challenged by school, and why you'll find that those that are passionate about the the long hours of sorting through trash to commit identity fraud also high on meth.

Another great example of how people don't realize how cognitively impaired they are is hypoxia, just look at how passionate the guy becomes trying to put square shapes in square holes, so passionate he believes he no longer needs an oxygen mask to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpLi67NdD4w
Did they make an iOS app as well? This looks just like my HN iOS app. Love it.
If I get it right, Ed is concerned about specialization. He misses the days when he was a generalist.

Well, I've been consistently "forced" to generalize my skills for the last 9 years and I have similar concerns.

Now that I'm looking for another company, it seems I'm not specialized enough for like nobody. And while I know for sure my value is – let's say – 9 / 10 where 10 is the likes of Jeff Atwood, John Resig, and so on, it seems prospect employers value me 5 / 10 because I lack specialization.

I am a generalist (from sysadmin all the way up to frontend development and copywriting), but I have my own specialization: HTML, CSS, Web Accessibility. But my specialization seems to be not enough important for most dev teams today.

[Edit: rephrased a bit, for clarity.]
You had to do far more than just change your privacy policy and this was for more than some trivial site with 200 pages or so.

Try implementing it across a global 500 publisher with maybe 60+ major internet property's many of which are built from 3 or 4 CMS's over a decade and it quickly adds up.

Just finding all the pages on a large site to apply the changes to is a non trivial problem.
I worked 20-25hrs / weeks for about 2 years as a consultant but then, probably against my better judgement, joined a company in March doing the standard 37+hrs. I'm unhappy, unfocused and RescueTime tells me that my efficiency has dropped about 20%.

After only a few months, I'm going back to consulting with a 20-25hr week. If you haven't tried it, you probably don't realise the universally positive effects it will have.
I think the author vastly over-estimates what it takes to be a proficient technologist. He can figure things out. That's all you need to have a job/career in tech. Because technology is hard enough that the vast majority of people just won't want to do it. Everything else is just stuff that makes that job/career easier and more fulfilling.
> midi-file signatures

Seriously?! Is this a thing? Please tell me that was hyperbole.
Relax. A lot of those technologies will be dead. And you should be intimidated by angular and ember. They have the smell of Enterprise Java for me.

Learn paradigms and principles. If you know what to do, you will be able to find the tools to do it.

Its a bit like cooking - the cookbooks for the peasants give recipes. The ones for the chefs give mechanics and techniques.

So learn pointers, functional programming, asynchronous operations and few more important paradigms, learn how to keep a code base tidy and organized and just ignore the foam on the water that is the hot new tech. You will be able to learn it in a week when need arises.
That's often not practical. Say you're a shop front.

If you have a goods purchase service and a goods delivery service, you want to reserve the good (limited quantity) and reserve a time slot for transport (limited number of deliveries a day) before you charge the customer, and make the "commit".

And if you'd merge two separate companies into one uber-service, you've just created more problems than you've solved.
Are you familiar with the adage that the longer something has been around, the longer it will likely continue to be around? Also known as the Lindy effect.

Anyway my point is that C++ has been around for 40 years (and a dominant language for 30 of those), so it will likely be around longer than anything that surfaced in the last 6 years. Plus, mode new things are just refinements or variations on a theme, so you hardly need to learn them, just keep abreast of what's interesting about them.
Hedging with “I think” unnecessarily weakens the presentation of an idea. If you actually believe it, why wouldn’t you present it as fact? Then if some evidence comes along to disprove you, you change your mind.
I feel somewhat petty for this complaint as the content is good, but I found that link almost unreadable. It felt like someone awkwardly shouting random words in sentence, having every other word wrapped in <strong></strong>.

If anyone else finds this, here's a quick thing to paste into the developer console to make it more readable (the content is worth it):

var jq = document.createElement('script');
jq.src = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js";
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(jq);
$("strong").each(function(i,e) {$(e).replaceWith($("<span>" + e.innerHTML + "</span>"))})
These kind of HN redesigns pop up every other day. What makes this better than the rest?