skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not about being in denial. It's that this argument has been brought up with every advance in the last 40 years.

In the early '70s it was "Programming in C will allow anyone to program and commoditize the industry!".

In the later '70s it was "Object-oriented programming allows modules to be created that snap together like legos, commoditizing the industry!".

In the '80s-90s it was "Scripting languages like ruby and python are so simple, it's almost like writing real english! It's so simple you won't even need a programmer."

In the early '00s it was "Scratch and other visual programming languages will create a platform that everyone can understand! You can learn it yourself, you don't need a developer."

Now, it's "Libraries and tooling are getting so great, what used to take 100 engineers now takes 5. In a few years, it will take zero!"

--

That obviously isn't proof that this time is the same as the others. However, this article gives no evidence that I can see why this simplification and removal of inefficiencies is any different than the others.
Prototype Lightfield Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses
Jarvis is not a human being. Can we save that name for when true general AI comes up? : /
Very nice, does anyone know if they'll ever accept anything other than bitcoin? Altcoins like NXT etc?
Because Fedora is a great development platform -- and is used much more than you would think.

And it's backed by Red Hat -- which caters to the server market first and foremost. This seems a natural fit.
> "even when "acceptable ads" is not selected. You can't block them using Element Hiding Helper."

Is this true? After disabling the non-obtrusive ads, I don't see any ads anywhere. Can you give an example of an ad bypassing this feature entirely?
Uranium isn't really that radioactive. U-235 has a half life on the order of 10^9 years. It is only when uranium is brought together into supercritical lumps that it becomes a problem from a radiation point of view. However, it is also a toxic heavy metal, like lead, and that is a problem. That hasn't stopped militaries firing lumps of it around warzones the world over.
Stop making blaming statements and fork the project if you don't like what they did or are doing. Stop guessing at what they might do with the project - you aren't them and you don't know. Listing reasons like 'the URL would change' is just a rationalization to stop you from doing what you already know is the right thing. Clearly there was already discontent with the host and the community of maintainers. Time for a fresh start!
Gender biased, much?

Given the low overall enrollment, it wouldn't surprise me if the ones who "bother" to join the CS program are more driven and intrinsically motivated than the average. Given that drive and intrinsic motivation are likely highly correlated with excellence within their peer group, it seems well within reason that a minority group overall would be over-represented in the elite set.
Has liquidity ever been a problem for you with Bitcoin investments? I would imagine limited supply and short term spikes could result in filling currency trade orders at lower prices. In other words, it's not clear if you can always depend on selling at face value.
Velocity Foundry is open
I can't say I expect a book about writing computer code to be Hemingway. What's the point of this criticism? The writing is clear, concise, and does exactly what it's intended to do.

Additionally, your last line has the worst punctuation of all time.
AMD was too long depended on melting PC market. Good that they're trying in other niches.

BTW, they are planning to come back into HEDT in 2016.
Interestingly, it seems to prevent BIP 0070 from working properly, although the payment went through fine.
It's impossible to really compete head-on. It's ridiculously expensive and even if your processors are better people will still buy Intel because of brand and relationships. AMD wants to swim in a pond which doesn't have Intel in it, and I don't blame them.
You're the second commenter to say that the answer to me having doubts if we can even in principle have an anonymous instant-tranfer network is: "yes, you just have to drop the instant part" ;)
GitHub Pages now runs Jekyll 2.2.0
The software equivalent to doing your own plumbing has been here since the mid-90s: build your homepage with Geocities.
I see a lot of 3s and 4s, which according to the key means "High Potential to Be Among the Best in the World" and "Currently Among the Best in the World". Maybe I'm just ignorant or jealous, but I have a hard time believing that all those young people could already be called "among the best in the world" in any field, at least not without serious evidence to back that up.

But I think the problem is mostly that the scale from 1 to 4 makes it seem that 2 or 3 is the average, which it's obviously not judging from the description. I think that causes people to greatly inflate the ratings. Also the aim seems to reach 10 which must skew the distribution upwards some more.

Is this type of ranking new or is it just the first time I encounter it? I ask because there is an other story mentioning "10x" in the frontpage right now, I don't know if the two are related however.
"Idea Man" by Paul Allen

A historical autobiography of Mr. Allen (cofounder of Microsoft). The first half about Traf-O-Data, Basic and founding Microsoft is especially interesting.
I'd guess this library clones on modification, but I was talking about cloning the object on every function call.
You're "always hiring", but your interviews are remarkably short on actually writing any code and if someone asks too much about your approach to maintaining software quality (in light of your cowboy-coder reputation) you'll question whether they're "pragmatic" enough to work there and lose interest. Which I guess was probably things working out for the best, but Amsterdam was a fun city. Perhaps I'll find another employer there someday. Looking at London and Berlin in the meantime. :P
These hidden fees would only apply if you choose to receive fiat settlements (which I wouldn't).
Wait.

Are you telling me that, wherever you're based (I assume the US) you can just wait until you earn $2000 and then start worrying about taxes?
I guess I don't, or if I do, I don't know it yet.
You mean IOW a blog?
Nice, I like the grid presentation. Looks Bootstrap responsive table? What are you using for the column sort?
I was thinking Red Hat, but I suppose that's not out yet for ARM64.
I think the tools are not simpler as being simplist, but easier to use, maybe by having clearer objectives and design than it's predecessor.
Also, it was not long ago that put a web system was hardm with lot's of workaround or using not specialized tools for the job. Today is clearer what one need to create and support such system online.
The set of companies that benefit from taxpayer-funded research is enormous, and it does not follow from membership in that set that a company "doesn't give a shit about the Constitution or human rights".

You didn't answer my question.
One additional plus for Chiang Mai is that you can reach the rest of SE Asia quite easily without having to live in a huge hub city like Bangkok. I have flown from CM into China, to Singapore, Hong Kong, BKK of course, and all over. Getting from the CM Airport to wherever you are staying is soooo easy compared to the long journey from Swampy (as some call BKK).
Best Places for STEM Graduates
There are a number of issues with this system:

1. The people providing the reviews are other students. How qualified are university students to decide if someone has the potential to be best in the world at anything? That classification is both highly subjective and would generally be expected to require some expert-level knowledge of the field the person is being judged in (which an undergraduate student is unlikely to have).
2. The students only seem to come from a small collection of schools, which unfairly disadvantages skilled students from schools not on the list.
3. The site entirely lacks filtering options, so I am unable to see the top people in the algorithms category, for instance. Furthermore, the listing order seems to be completely static, obscuring students who do not happen to get top placement.

In essence, this is a selection of students from select universities, chosen as the "best" through dubious methods, and then displayed in a static order that greatly advantages some of them over others.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-go...

> download torrents, seed data,

I'm not sure that part of your idea is good.

The random crawler is what I had in mind but I doubt I'd implement it simply because I don't have a need to use Tor beyond curiosity.
Square Bets Big on Next-Gen Credit Card Tech
Anyone listen to the "Travel Like A Boss" podcast? It's done by a guy living in Chang Mai Thailand. He mainly interviews dropship entrepreneurs. It's crazy because they are making $1500/month running these crappy little niche dropshipping stores but living like someone making $10000/month or more in San Francisco. They have maid service, live in full service buildings with rooftop pools, eat out all the time. It's crazy how cheap things are over there.
From everyone at Gyft, I’d like to thank you for being a part of this incredible journey

Nice nod to the meme: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
"too lazy or too stupid to take the trivial steps required to get around one"

Or maybe he just doesn't want to? You know, on principle? Even skirting the paywall, you're boosting the WSJ's viewership stats which in turn, helps them sell more advertising/contributes to their "value".
Yes, an indicator of ease of renting would be great - lease lengths and bureaucracy.
Anyone's. I used to run it for awhile, its mostly been semi-targeted corporate ads.
Researchers Make Even Weak Passwords Virtually Uncrackable
Yea...and it has gotten easier. I'd bet the average level of software dev (writ large) today is lower than 20 years ago because it's getting easier. (Though I'd bet there's probably more great devs today ever because the pool of devs itself is growing and becoming more accessible)

Sure, having MS Word doesn't make you a novelist, but Wordpress + plug-ins can let you make your own pretty high-quality news site with very little technical knowledge - that's real improvement.

I'd say to just give it time.

My company is doing this to another set of engineers in the mechanical / manufacturing space, so I hear these types of complaints all the time.
Absolutely. I love that it's so low threshold, you just have to do it and it doesn't take any extra time, such as going to the gym. It's also a lot of fun.

This doesn't seem too off-topic, we're just discussing alternatives to the topic in question. : )
This is pretty darn interesting. I've definitely noticed there's a clear split between the interesting, longer, sort of more profound messages 'from space' and the flood of 1-word test or joke messages. Any thoughts on this - is it even a problem?
That's not what the title says.
Why would they bother? The transaction rate (in USD/time) is microscopic in altcoins.
User driven content on something like this seems like it would pretty quickly lead to routes popping up which lead the users to the author's "not a tourist-trap" restaurant or store.
Check out CocoaConf (http://cocoaconf.com). They travel around the country and provide many technical talks. I was at their DC one in March and found it very educational.
Don't test methods. Test behaviour that stands behind them. Unit in "unit testing" stands for behaviour not method/function. Private methods are private because they should not be exposed outside, never. Changing internal implementation of module should not crash test suite.
This is an example of a CRUD app that can be created with the Oracle APEX framework. Very little custom code to create this. Much of the UI and CRUD logic is visually composed. Comments?
It's allowed in a few states in the US.

Last time I went to California I saw one up close, that was pretty neat (though I don't know if it was driving itself at the time)!
>Wouldn't they just want to grow fast and big enough to get a return and move on?

Why wouldn't the gambler leave the table after making a modest gain?
In 2010, 18% of graduating CS & Information Science students were female. You can't even get your numbers right.

This is actually a shocking state of affairs, given that in 1985 this number was 37%. That blatantly suggests (to me at least) that there's no gender-related skill differential in this field, and instead women are being discouraged for other reasons.
You would probably double your revenue if you just displayed images of cards above the input line. You could even make it something you could disable in preferences, but I'm pretty confident that the improvement in the screenshots, etc. would help sales quite a bit.
Just thinking back to when I was in college, I would not trust the college version of myself of my opinion of the absolute strengths of others. For relative strengths, maybe, but even then, I was heavily biased by my peer group, so you would need to make sure you have a well-connected rating graph and do some kind of spectral ranking. Definitely wondering about the methodology here.
Yammer co-founder launches enterprise productivity app Nama
Dropbox and CSA STAR: Furthering our commitment to security
Ebooks, once created, are a sunk cost...not an ongoing one so maximizing gross revenue works in everyone's favor.

What you're missing is that, from the author's point of view, ebooks are not interchangeable. A unit of my sales is not usefully interchangeable with a unit of Scalzi's. To Amazon we're fungible produce, but to us we're suppliers of bespoke one-of-a-kind products. The Amazon move squeezes those of us who are able to sell at a higher price point -- like me (current lead title priced at $12.99 on Amazon and selling jolly well; and at £7.99 in the UK, and doing well there, too).

Amazon's proposed $9.99 guillotine on pricing would basically impose a 30% cut in my income if sales volume of my titles remains static. And I haven't seen any evidence that the price elasticity of demand for novels by Charles Stross will respond to crude pricing signals the way that aggregate demands for all books will do across the board.
>WhatsApp was able to scale to so many users while keeping the engineering team small precisely because they hired great engineers who wrote an extremely efficient system in Erlang. They heavily tuned their architecture and build efficient paradigms which kept developer productivity & performance from degrading as their user base grew. [1] Commodity engineers don't write that sort of code.

The problem is they did it with only a few (16?) "great engineers". That's the premise of the article -- our world today might need 100,000 great engineers to solve great problems. Tomorrow 1000 might be enough.

As for the "near great" they would too be less needed, and commodity engineers would be the equivalent of burger flipers.

>Yes, the tooling has improved dramatically. A 10x engineer of yesteryear might actually be a 100x engineer today. But if you give a bad engineer modern tools, it just allow.

The first yes, the second not really. A bad engineer can get enormously more done with modern tools than he could 10 or 30 years ago. Essentially a bad engineer today can build stuff that took high level senior engineers to build -- and do it in less time too. It might be a little crude, but it will work.

E.g a bad engineer can automate a workflow that would have taken expert engineers, custom software and several man-years to do 20 years ago, and can do it in a day.

And because it's so abstracted, building something like that needs little influence from his skills, so his "badness" doesn't show up much.
PHP 6.0 will be PHP 7
Yeah okay, torrents aside, the idea is to generate random bursts of data transmission and you can do that easily.
How are you going to ensure that you're legally compliant with "only $X per-year per-person" unless you keep track of who's making every Bitcoin donation to you?

If you don't do that you could trivially go over the limit by just donating >$X over multiple Bitcoin transactions.
Back when I was a physicists every two bit crank used to go on about how ideas were more important than knowledge.

Now I'm hearing the same in programming. And it's just as wrong here. Picking the right algorithm and stack means the difference between a website that can handle 2,000 people and one that can handle 2,000,000. How many websites start off with a bad idea, get popular and then need to hire hundreds of engineers to put ban aid after band aid on a fundamentally terrible idea?

Facebook and google have both had to spend millions of man hours to fix the fact they were optimized for millions of users and billions of web pages and now have to deal with x1000 times those. And the only reason why they were that prepared in the first place was because extraordinary people wrote them. The average developer who bangs out a half thought out colour by numbers website would be lucky to have it not crash before it reaches a thousand users a day.
My bad searching abilities :) Didn't really mean it must be cheap per se. I actually backed Ubuntu Edge. One thing I realized is that adding "cheap" to your search phrase will show up more hacker-type attempts to install Linux on Android devices.
There have been some suggestions to add more about visas... the true nomad really should be getting that information as directly as possible and not relying on a website like this, however helpful and handy it is.
We use Amazon S3/Cloudfront. You could use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert the videos into various formats as well, but we use Encoding.com for that purpose.
Given that you oddly brought up ycombinator's habits (which accounts for approximately 0% of the workforce), you seem to be emotionally invested in this idea.

But as someone who works remotely, and who works with a large number of people who work remotely a good portion of the time, and an increasing number who work remotely the vast majority of the time, I will say that you are simply wrong. I mean, completely wrong. Even staid old corporations like banks and insurance companies are introducing multiple days of working at home policies for all level of employees. This is not some strange new thing, it is simply happening.
The practitioner software I saw was built in dBASE III or dBASE III+.
I don't understand the distinction. If the UK is allowing tests of driverless cars, it must be allowing them on the roads, and of course "in January" means "starts in January", what else would it mean
Your math doesn't even make sense. 10% of the enrollees should result in 10% of the top 5%, aka 10% of the entire list. Never mind whether your numbers are even correct.
It's a very interesting concept too, I haven't played anything like it before.
> As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people.

It was for the most part an interesting article. I doubt, however, that software development will ever become a low-skill domain. It will perhaps become more like carpentry -- a medium where people across a range of ability will be able to work in. Some are master carpenters, and some are content to make a bird feeder, and the barriers to doing the latter are low.
There are always greater problems. Still don't have my flying car.
Using Firefox on Windows 8:

neomsg.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
> the people who have jobs picking winning companies

Remember, capital has TWO strategies for earning money:

1. Investing in new ideas, hoping they yield a positive ROI

2. Collecting dividends on ideas that have already panned out

#1 might conceivably be replaced by algorithms, but I doubt it (has HFT eaten Wall St?). #2 is inherent in our economic system and will never become obsolete.
The American Room
While your numbers "5 out of 100" and "5 out of 1000" are way off, there are disproportionately many girls on this list.

I would expect to see around 20% of girls.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files...

Which makes me question the quality of the list.
oh, ok. Thanks for the update!
tl;dr: Modern nuclear warheads should not go off by accident, even in (almost) any conceivable accident.

Modern warhead design has the idea of the "strong link" and "weak link". The strong link is a critical part of the detonation path, and is not ordinarily in place. It can only be put in place by arming the warhead, or by a severe accident. But any accident severe enough to put the strong link in place should be more than enough to destroy the weak link, which is also a critical part of the detonation path.

A warhead accident could still leave an awful lot of radioactive contamination, of course...
Demand for engineers is increasing much more rapidly than non-software engineering occupations. Soon every company will need an software engineer of some sort.
I'm surprised they don't monetize this, I think it's really neat, especially selling the solution for private use.
No offense taken :) Yes, it is legal. In Hawaii the condo buildings are setup to be ran as vacation rentals. Some people do live in them, but most are rentals. The building are more similar to a hotel in that they have a front desk, luggage carts, and things like that.
A user on Reddit checked out the exchange rate spread between them and Coinbase and found was about $1. That is about 0.17% at the current prices. An incredible deal by any measure.
One girl had a 5 in communication. Who even knows what that means.
AKA "My Geocities Page Of Folks I Heard Were Awesomesauce"?
The problem with the article's conclusion (and title) is that they don't stop with 100,000 -> 1,000 engineers.

"Tomorrow, that billion-dollar startup acquisition might not need an engineer at all."

The article's claim is not that startups are going to keep having smaller and smaller teams of higher-value engineers, they're saying that they're going to have zero engineers. Which I don't see at all from the evidence provided.
Just checked some of them Squares & Dots for now looks best of them.
On the rapture and worry of going full-time
Two common Perl problems:

People think Perl 6 is merely an incremental change of Perl 5

People thing pre-MOOSE pre-ModernPerl is the same as post MOOSE post ModernPerl because they're both Perl 5.

One problem with the article is thinking "a" language is your career. That's just weird.
I think the core of the argument is that most software problems are becoming easier, which means the talents of the very best just aren't applicable or especially useful.

If something is easy enough, anybody can do it, and do it nearly as well and as fast as the best. For example, nobody can flip burgers 10x faster than average. Maybe 2x, but not 10x.

If something is difficult, then many people won't be able to do it at all. Most of the rest may only be able to do it very slowly and with great difficulty. The very best will make it look easy, even though it's not.

When something becomes 10 times easier, that doesn't mean the best become 10 times better or faster at it. They may become a little faster, but the real gains are at the low end: The average and worst performers become significantly better. Further, many people who just can't do the thing become able to accomplish it.
Gmail is not the only cloud. Does Apple datamine icloud.com or me.com emails? The fact that the email may exist on multiple servers around the world (aka, cloud) doesn't per se mean the company is abusing the customer's trust.
Could you, please, add option to
change temperature view to Celsius
and integrate option to recalculate $ to
several major currencies?
Are you telling me that a banker does not have the capabilities to access a rented lock-box? That only the renter has that key? What then happens if a renter dies and that key is missing?