skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ironically only one of my friends has gone that far on the last count. He is an attorney and very persistent, and many of these companies do claim to clean up all his data when he writes letters with the proper legal wording to signal they need to take it seriously. It is time consuming, but these letters paid off. Only one of the scummy German screenscraper sights did not comply, and ignored him. I cannot find him anywhere if not for the email address he sent me years later, and no other mention of life exists.
Great programmers move up the chain as well. If your skills are not being valued by your company as it is setup in a way that it needs only average engineers, you can move on and create your own company now.

If you are a great engineer, then you are a walking capital by yourself.

If somebody with an idea, and no skills, hires you, then it probably needs at least 300-500k (even for a smallish prototype) to make it happen. If you are a full stack engineer, and pair up with a buddy, you can make it happen, with a lot less. If you are a great engineer, you are the capital!
That's great! Did you do any advertising to get it going? How long has it been around?
Follr Community Feature #3
Ask HN: Stuff you want but doesn't exist?
I've been thinking a lot lately and I've not been able to come up with ANY ideas for a new app that want to be my first published app at the App Store. So, I've decided to ask HN, what are your thoughts ? What apps/websites/ideas/stuff you really want to make life better for you ?

P.S. I've come up with a few myself:

1. A nice and beautiful(flat) Calculator app

2. A better Assistant(Better than Siri, atleast :P)

3. A better alarm clock. (One that's capable of waking ME up)

EDIT: I am asking for software, unlike quite a few people who wanted hardware stuff to exist, sure, that was great, but please, restrict yourself to software for future ideas, hackers!
Because enterprises are infinitely complex and diverse and there will never be a single piece of software that can run all the businesses in the world with a couple configuration setting tweaks.
For hobbyists you mean? Most people buy based on features and I think it would be very difficult to compete on user-facing features.
I know exactly what you mean. The Combray part was hard to dig into, but full of enough psychological insight to make me want to continue. Then the long, brutal debasement of Swann, such an inspiring character, was intensely painful, sometimes enough to make me squirm in my seat, but with a conclusion so unexpected, peculiar, and profound, I was hooked.
Back during my training, I used to do practically all of my coding in Perl. I loved it.
Then I stumbled upon Python and Ruby, and I did not look back for a long time. When I did, I realized how much I disliked Perl's type system (or lack thereof). I sort of drifted around for a while between Python, Ruby, and Lua (although I do not really like Lua as a stand-alone scripting language, it totally rocks as an embedded scripting/extension language).

About 15 months ago, I started working as a sysadmin at a smallish (~100 people) engineering company, and I re-discovered Perl. I am not sure I would like to implement any largish piece of software in Perl, but as a scripting language for system administration, it still rules. Especially on Windows, which still feels like a downright hostile environment for programming.
I concur. It seems like it's missing loads of history. Remember when MySpace was the juggernaut with a huge network of people? Then practically overnight they became a joke. Same with Alta Vista, and a million other companies.
Kind of a cheap shot, don't you think? Standards and browser adoption are two completely different things. It will be years before anyone tries using ES6 features in JavaScript and expects most browsers to understand them.
So where is the line on the governments position?

If you use AWS, is all the data (S3, EC2 filesystems, RDS data+backups, etc.) now a business record of Amazon?

What about renting dedicated servers at your local datacenter? You're basically renting bare hardware at that point, but the hard drives are still technically owned by the datacenter. Is the data on those hard drives business records of the datacenter?

Not being able separate the owner of the hardware and the owner of the data on the hardware seems like it would have a ton of modern consequences.

EDIT: Here's a fun thought experiment. Say I bought a license to analyze some music dataset from a record label. That license requires that can't share the music data with anyone. When I upload the dataset to S3 to run my Elastic Map Reduce script on it, did I just violate my license because that data is now a business record of Amazon?
Mathematically,is he saying that because the limit of a function tends to zero,it will actually be equal to zero?
Not what I meant. Ideally a user would submit their resume to test where hiring managers might looks when they submit their own resume to them via the hiring company's own process. In that case, the test vs. actual behavior will differ.
Why on Earth are you hosting it at GoDaddy? Throw up a Linode or something.
That.

Of course there's an underlying BS premise that "in that wonderful future humanity would be freed from the burden of non-essential programming work, and would move on to higher level problem solving" -- but in real life they could not care less if humanity actually moves forward or just rich companies have to pay less while millions suffer and fall from middle class.
They referenced Clojure. Mori is just Clojure's data structures.
Dustin Curtis has some ideas: http://dcurt.is/the-future
That's neat, generally I like physical books better but that really shows the potential of ebooks. I've been working on something similar for the JavaScript/browser APIs (http://www.javascripture.com) since I learn a lot better when running code myself.
Ain't No Rest for the Wicked
I agree that Gerstenzang is premature. But it'll happen eventually. If it doesn't happen by making programming easy it will happen by flooding the industry with enough competent programmers to have the same effect (depressed wages, high unemployment, etc). See: non-software engineering occupations (excepting doctors, who have managed to turn the risks inherent in their profession into a legally mandated union).
I'm calling nonsense on Omaha costing more than Tokyo.
> A company will come out with a new car model simply by snapping design-legos together.

They'll use a combination of A/B testing and genetic algorithms to reach an equilibrium between what customers want and what physics will allow.
For higher than 30 minutes you really want to look into planes instead of quadcopters. Running 4/6/8 heavy duty motors forces battery life to be an issue.

A plane has significantly less than that which lets them go for longer.
Nice concept, i've always wanted something like this, but here in south america and I suppose everywhere in the world, unless you speak the local language, for a tourist is pretty hard to avoid these traps and get to hang out with the locals.

Maybe the app will take the wikipedia route and let the people share their tours.
He's a fantastic author. You picked the right time to read that too, a sequel is coming out in August that continues the story. His Rifters series is well worth reading too.
I barely market them except for a lot of ASO lessons, keywords, iterations on the icons and screenshots. Got a few good media mentions but nothing I chased down. All the app review blogs, forum posts, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. that I've spent so much time on? When I look at my PHG affiliate sales stats now, I can see that they're a tiny fraction of sales.

The best marketing I do is cross-app links. So each app has a "more apps" list. I get 80-140% conversion when people visit the app store from those links. (140% because they purchase more than one app in the affiliate window time.) I also have a free version of one app that's useful on it's own but then steers people to purchase other apps with some in-house ads. (I don't run ads for any other apps except mine.)
Huh? The term "API" is commonly applied to HTTP endpoints intended to be consumed by other programs, aka "web services".
> The mode of DANE which I, personally, find to be the most intriguing, is one which specifies which CA should have issued a certificate. This is amazingly awesome, because as it stands today, the entire CA trust model is only as strong as the weakest CA in the global trust store.

Hear hear. Today's root-store trust model is bad, and we need an upgrade.
I think the problem is that people can't live there anymore.
For anyone interested, DuckDuckGo is hiring Perl engineers... https://duck.co/help/company/hiring
They also are legally required to collect donor information for donations above $1,000 [1]. Mostly this is to ensure that nonprofits aren't playing weird games with funneling money around, e.g. being registered as a 501(c)(3) charity but actually being funded mainly by one person who also controls the board/spending.

Maybe they can rework the donation flow so it allows anonymous donations below that limit? But if that has the effect of making large donations seem different/weird/complicated, it might be counterproductive: you have to get a lot of extra $5 donations to make up for a single lost $10,000 donation. I'm no UI/flow expert though so maybe there's a good way of doing it. There are basically three cases that would need to be worked in: 1) above $1,000, information is mandatory; 2) between $250 and $1,000, information is not mandatory but must be entered if the donor is American and wants a receipt that would enable them to deduct it; 3) below $250, receipts aren't necessary for tax deduction so donor information isn't needed at all.

[1] More precisely, they're required to report all donors who gave more than $5,000 cumulatively in a given year (or possibly a higher threshold for very large organizations), which requires keeping a running sum of per-donor totals. Except that as a concession to ease of recordkeeping, individual donations below $1,000 do not need to be included in the total, and therefore I believe (?) could be accepted anonymously. Or so I read the IRS's guidelines, but IANACPA; see Form 990 Schedule B or your local accountant specializing in nonprofit law for details.
How to Retain Your Startup's Best Employees
I disagree slightly about working at a services company like McKinsey. Much of what he writes is true, of course. However, life is about trade-offs and one of the benefits of a services company is broad exposure to many clients facing many problems. This CAN prove valuable later, for those who wish to strike out on their own by building a useful product or service.
The implications of this are pretty interesting. People will only use software that solves actual problems they have. Software development is now more accessible to more people because of all these frameworks and tools. It only follows that the people most familiar with actual problems will be able to create the most used software, and those people aren't necessarily going to be software engineers by trade. The question "How long before we have a billion-dollar acquisition offer for a one-engineer startup?" is crazy, but likely not too far in the future, but even more interestingly, "How long before we have a billion-dollar acquisition offer for a zero-engineer startup?" might not be that far off either.
Yup! And Naptha and Ocrad.js are both authored by antimatter15.
I'm sure they are just hiding the fees in the exchange rate. Which could be much more than 1% or whatever they were charging.
Brainwaves can predict audience reaction for television programming
My wife and I used an app similar to this on our honeymoon in Hawaii. We had the option of paying $300 for a guided tour, or paying $5 for an app and going our own pace. The app made that day one of the highlights of the trip.
Made an Android Snapchat client called SnapHack. It allowed you to download Snaps and send pictures from your Gallery, pretty much the only features people would want to add to Snapchat.

Powered it with an IAP to add 'My Story' support and small banner ads at the bottom of the screen. The app got about 2,500-3,500 downloads a day up to a total of 165,000 downloads. When searching for 'Snapchat' on Google play it was the 2nd or 3rd result. IAP brought in about $25 a day (after 30% removed) and the ads peaked at about $70 a day, so total was between $90 and $100 a day when things were good.

Didn't last long though, took a while to get to that daily amount and Google/Snapchat removed it from the store after the 3rd month of availability. So total was a few thousand. Still a very, very good result but not full-time income.

Side note: Java library that I made for interacting with Snapchat API hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/hatboysam/SnapHack). Contributions are welcome and it supports even all of the new Snapchat features like messaging. Feel free to recreate SnapHack!
Isn't this library probably cloning?
Human-equivalent AI has always been 30 years out . . . 20 years if you don't know the field. :-)
You should also add "Visa" field. E.g. any american can live in Europe up to 3 months, but in Thailand it's just 1 m.

I lived in Bangkok for about a year, thought I love that city, now their visa policy got stupid, and I would't recommend to settle there for long period (>3 months).
Use DataDog, StatsD and the StrongLoop API to Monitor your Node.js applications
That's why it's now called Golang.

I really wish RLang had picked up, because searching for solutions to R problems is a headache.
Perl is on the sure way to become the COBOL of the scripting world. I'm saying this as one who invested years into learning and applying Perl everywhere I could. But seriously, it's a done deal now. Move on.

Yes, there are still companies with large Perl code-bases. Large Perl code-bases need a lot of maintenance (sigh). So Perl programmers will be in some demand for a few years at the least. Hence the analogy to COBOL.
I wish there was a library that allowed you to input expected data (ex: we expect to see zeros 20% more often then the letter O), then the interpreter could compare against that fact and determine the likelihood of it being each letter. As it stands for most libraries that I'm aware of, you just have to get the data and run your own tests to see whether it should be an O or a zero.
The author makes some good observations but I feel he is undervaluing post-foundation engineering skills.

Sometimes the reason why certain companies end up with so many engineers due to the lack of those so-called "10x engineers" -- specifically, those who know how to build robust, scalable systems while coordinating with the needs of product development.

I know some of the engineers who have worked for those lean, highly scaled shops and I know for a fact that they know their shit extremely well - and they've poured hundreds of hours into carefully scaling their infrastructure. They could not be replaced by your average full-stack engineer off the street as they'd immediately be in over their head and would have to spend the next few years learning all the hard-won knowledge of the more experienced engineer.
StumbleUpon is down
Gerstenzang is watching the latest complexification of small shops into huge industries and projecting it onto the entire field. This is very silly reasoning and it ignores history.

Transported back in time, he could say the same thing watching the small, passionate computer shops of the 1970s becoming huge organizations as customer money and investment capital flow in, as more engineers are hired, as efficiencies and industry-wide standardization set in. He could say that the emergence of low-skill labor in the mature industry was the end of engineering, that there was nothing more to do.

But there will always be a new layer to this game. Once the previous layer has walked its arc from hobbyist to small shops to huge industries and maturity, there emerges a ragtag group that takes advantage of the new environment.

Gerstenzang does identify and appreciate this crucial factor, he just seems to view it as an endpoint and not a beginning.

Of course, an AI that can do real, human-level engineering might throw my own entire line of reasoning out of the window.
The article makes the error of assuming that a 10x engineer is 10x because he has arcane knowledge about the intricacies of low level programming. This may be true for some layers of development. In my experience, for application programming, this isn't the "10x skill".

10x engineers are the guys that can grasp the complexities of large systems, enabling them to change them with minimal effort. When prompted with the need to implement a new use case, they understand the whole system or most of the system and thus they can plot the minimal change path to achieve the new functionality. They don't code faster. They code less, leveraging work that is already done.

If you have fewer engineers working on a system, because of better abstraction layers, then you only need the 10x guys. These are the ones that can drive the powerful machines.

What we are witnessing isn't the demise of the 10x engineer. It's the demise of the code monkey.
A billion dollars for a one engineer social media company? Certainly possible, but then you'd have to ask yourself what you are paying for. Perhaps it's not just (or even mostly) the engineering; in which case I'd say the author slightly misses the mark here.

This is certainly not to say that I believe more engineers/engineering == better product or more value, far from it. Only that devaluation of skill and experience suggests that the problem being addressed might not be primarily focused on engineering tasks. And that perhaps the gargantuan sums we see being paid for some small collection of companies are calculated somewhat differently than we might be used to.

Even if I'm wrong about that, heralding the death of the highly skilled engineer is more than a little premature either way. I tend to think that problems will continue to present themselves to challenge our best tools, regardless of how much engineer quality of life improves. If that's not happening in social media (which I highly, highly doubt), then that can probably be considered a separate issue entirely.
When I was in college in the mid-late 90s, my Software Engineer professor said that "In 5 years, programmers won't exist. With the revolution of Object Oriented Programming, creating software will be a matter of plugging blocks together".

Right.
You can avoid the signature when hashing.
Software >publishing< business :-)
So you can use the Clojurescript/Om/Reagent/React model without Clojurescript, nice for people who don't want or can't jump into Clojurescript right now.
InfoWorld Review: OpenShift shines for developers and ops
Did you do any "marketing" or publicize the books in anyway? Tips for anyone planning to write a book?
When my Xerox Story was hit last year (http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...) I got about 200k hits in two days, at peaks reaching about 10k per hour. All numbers are from google analytics so real values might be higher. Also, it's not only hn, consider also the follow-ups (in my case, shortly after hn, the front pages of slashdot and reddit hit me as well).
Blog Rebuild: A Fresh Start
Telling people how they should feel about other peoples' deaths is generally not going to get you anywhere. People feel what they feel.
github link given later - may be report bug there, or just send a pull request : https://github.com/marijnh/Eloquent-JavaScript
I love how all the top comments here are all devs in denial about this, but it's an inevitability that programming "becomes legos". Don't become the old men guys!

As said in the article and below, many products will still require very high-level engineers building without "legos", but the basic webapp kind of stuff probably will be full commodity able to be built by anyone with the motivation to see it through.
I think it's a bit odd thinking of programming languages as a career option. I work at what's one of the biggest if not the biggest single employer of Perl programmers (Booking.com), and we don't specifically hire people with prior Perl experience. We hire people with relevant programming experience and bring them up to speed on Perl.

Anecdotally we've hired people who've had years of Perl experience who haven't done all that well, and people who've had no prior Perl experience who've just picked it up on the job and been very productive contributors within days or weeks.

The unstated assumption with articles like these is that you'd be losing out if you don't get experience with the "winning" platform, but in my opinion a much better way to become a good programmer is to get experience with a wide selection of toolsets and programming languages. Even if none of those toolsets are widely used commercially.

Having said that if you're interested in Perl as a career choice we're always hiring :)
Very entertaining
Why is the paper book delayed until november? also the paper book says it has 400 pages, does the paper book has more content?
This article is grossly oversimplifying and conflating things. All the examples cited are skewing the results to fit the agenda the author wants to promote. Specifically, the functionality, audience, and valuation are creating insane $$$-to-engineer ratios, that the author then tries to claim is the future of the industry.

Functionally, imgur is not very complex. Its an order or 2 of magnitude less complex than say, another "software is eating the world" business like a web-based CRM app. That's not to discredit imgur or Instragram. They are great achievements and successful apps. But it doesn't and shouldn't take dozens and dozens of engineers to make those.

The potential audiences for the examples are, essentially, the world. These apps can gain use very rapidly, and it can disappear just as fast. 1 person can make Flappy birds and the entire world can use it. The people to audience ratio here is huge compared to say, a SaaS invoicing product.

Imgur doesn't have a monetization strategy like, say, a SaaS product like a web CRM, or even something as simple as a WordPress backup SaaS product. Instragram had no business model. How much is it worth? This is where the crazy audience ratio comes in and messed up the results some more by effecting valuation. These valuations are not based on real revenue numbers. They are based on the wish and dream of extracting value from eyeballs. I'm sure they are worth something, but taking a Series A or Series B valuation and extrapolating is murky.

So, low functionality apps, with a huge potential audience, and a completely made up valuation number. Of course you are going to get $10B to 10 engineers ratios. That doesn't mean this is a trend in the industry, let alone business/enterprise software.
This book contains some of the best writing I've seen since beginning my study of CS.

And you might at least use correct punctuation when critiquing someone else's writing.
In terms of studying, I am half way in Case Study Research, Contextual design and Constructing Grounded Theory.
In terms of leisure, I just finished enders games, and fault in our stars, and I will begin physics of the impossible and the future of the mind
Looks like I'm riding the wrong train, screw learning C++/Scala, Big Data and NoSQL database, looks like engineering is gonna be commoditized.

Not this time, I'm gonna get on the new train early this time! I'm gonna pivot to learn SEO, A/B testing, social media marketing and lean startup principles on how to manage coders to build startup's on the backs of free open source software hosted on Github donated by hobbyists!