skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had this vision 5 years ago, for sort of an operating system for social apps. Where a regular user could build their own app by just installing some plugins, dropping a chatroom and some other components on a page, paying a developer to wire them up, and paying a designer to design the theme. And there would be a marketplace of components built by more experienced developers.

So 5 years ago I started my first open source platform, http://phponpie.com

Since then it's come a long way, and it turned into a real platform: http://platform.qbix.com

Like mobile apps, social apps require an operating system that solves common problems in a standard way:

* User signup and secure auth, login
* Should work with emails, mobile #, facebook
* Accessible from desktop, tablets, mobile
* Contacts integration / friendlists
* Real time collaboration from any device
* Offline notifications via fb, sms, app notifications etc.
* Access control and privacy - as expressive as possible
* Native apps on iPhone and iOS via Cordova
* Invitations and one-click account creation
* Encourage best practices for scaling, web standards etc.
* Installer to upgrade apps and plugin versions cleanly

etc etc.

All that stuff should have standard solutions which you can override. The apps and plugins should all interoperate.

And finally, since I really care about decentralization, it would be cool if this whole operating system could be as decentralized as Wordpress is for blogs, as opposed to say facebook. That would also solve all the scaling problems that facebook and other centralized social networks have.

That last part - decentralizing the social network - took the most effort, as I had to solve problems of security, identity, privacy, as well as app and plugin versioning and signing across a distributed network. Just like iOS is for mobile apps, and Bitcoin is for distributed contract apps, the Q Platform is if you want a social layer for your app, from user accounts to everything else, without having to write it from scratch.

Yeah, so that's what I built. Link to the open source: http://github.com/EGreg/Q
This has awesome potential for orchestration tools, but I hope it's taken up as a separate tool -- I wouldn't want to pre-bake all of my networking into a Dockerfile, it would be best to have it done independently.
Show HN: My first game, available on the Google Play Store for free
Plot twist: the dentist built the app using MICROSOFT ACCESS! And everybody loves it and nobody cares!
Which is exactly why everyone calls it "Golang". If you never refer to it as "Golang", any search for which your content might be a reasonable result is going to lose itself in all the other uses of the word "Go". It annoyed me to see it called "Go", as it does whenever I see a tool choose an extremely commonly used or ambiguous word for it's name.
> 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's one thing to know that capital secretly delights over the commoditization of labor. It's quite another to watch a16z gush so openly about a future where we can be tossed aside.
As far as I'm concerned, for comments, you either have a form for screen name and email, or you use Disqus. Facebook comments is not a good alternative. Other alternatives do not yet have as wide adoption as I would like.
That's a bit optimistic. Their sales team alone is bigger than that. Companies aren't just engineers.
An end to our relationship with Yahoo
Icebergs acquired by Pinterest
I'm failing to follow the logic here. The initial point is that "The potential impact of the lone software engineer is soaring". However, the author then takes that to mean that engineers will be less valuable in the future?

This analogy seems apt to me, and I think it makes the logical leap more obvious:

Fifty years ago, if you wanted to design a new model of car, you had to get plywood and clay, and work hundreds of hours of to get even the most basic model completed. Now, you can open up a CAD program and begin making real decisions immediately. What previously took a large team to build, a single designer can now do. (The analogous logical leap to what the OP seems to be saying is) Soon, we won't need designers at all! A company will come out with a new car model simply by snapping design-legos together.

In reality, removing inefficiency made designers more valuable. If you were the best car designer 50 years ago, you had to spend a significant amount of time molding clay. Today, you spend almost all of your time creatively finding solutions to problems. I see the value of individual engineers increasing significantly as we remove cruft in the creation process.
Less overhead, more productive, yet still the same pay...
We have been building them from scratch ;-) Much more fun that way and you learn more. 3DRobotics/Pixhawk is where it's at for the hacker minded with good support. If you really want to get in the nity gritty get into MultiWii but expect to be tuning a lot and you give up good GPS support.

30 - 60min Flight times are doable depending on your setup but at that point your payload is almost all battery. Keep in mind weight begets weight.

The Phantom is a toy.
Uniformity isn't so great for people who want to differentiate their products. (Not saying that they should want to differentiate their products visually, but they almost certainly do want this).
That's pretty funny, because my girlfriend's sister asked me last year if I would develop her million-dollar-idea: an app that creates personalized books for kids.
Sold or he just gave away? There was actually money involved?
The quality of HN comments has risen substantially.
Give me a means to host this on my site so that I don't share my users' data and browsing habits with you, and I've got a couple places I'll be happy set it up. For example, a similar drop-in chunk of code and script to host locally, along with a cron that I run once daily to fetch the day's updates.
Wow, congratulations! This would be great around Christmas time in parts of the world where it doesn't snow - S/SE Asia in particular where people have a surprising fondness for Christmas.
I enjoyed listening to the author of Open Molar on Floss Weekly:

https://www.openmolar.com/
Will DANE make CAs obsolete?
In August 2013 I released a very simple web app called Space Email - where users send out messages and read messages others have sent, totally anonymously. It had too much volume for what was built on a very poorly designed backend, and with no reporting/flagging system it had to be taken down. This past June I re-launched it on a better platform. This time users could pay a dollar or more to sign up for an account where they get a few extra nifty features.

The first week I made $1200, the last month I made around $450. Things have been slowing down with some personal things going on, so it's been mostly passive as of late. When I launched I had some real speed issues and a lot of optimizing to do, which was incredibly nervewracking as it's my first web app built on PHP and the first project I did that uses a database.

edit: forgot the link: http://space.galaxybuster.net/
One summer in high school I decided to read In Search of Lost Time before school started up again.

I only made my way through Swann's Way (the first of seven books in the series), but I'm so glad I did. I think it was probably the toughest piece of literature I'd ever read, but one of the most rewarding by far.
In terms of studying, I'm revisiting Topics In Algebra and starting on SICP.

In terms of leisure, I'm starting on A Mote In God's Eye (Niven/Pournelle).
This has always been the case. Software people in the 70s and 80s already had the distinction between "systems" and "application" programmers -- the former understood to be concerned with making the pipes and plumbing, vs. the applications guys concerned with the end users. Applications have always been like legos.

I work as a systems developer but often do consulting projects as an application developer, and it's a totally different mindset. Writing software for end users, I rarely even remotely think about CS, algorithms, pointers, recursion, numerical stability, memory allocators, etc, whereas I do care intimately about the tools I'm using, much like I suspect a carpenter cares about what drill he's got. On the other end of the spectrum, I can hardly go a day writing traditional "systems" software without considering things like what data structure MongoDB/Postgres uses to hold indices, and gigantic, complex consensus problems (distributed systems, e.g. how DNS behaves).

I hope we start to treat these two endeavors differently because they require totally different mindsets and education. A typical app developer need know no more about how OSes work, than a plumber needs to understand the metallurgy used to make pipes.
> you probably need to remain constantly connected and moving data through Tor 24/7

I guess this is why they recommend running a (non-exit) relay – at the very least it increases the cost of figuring out when you're using Tor yourself.
The Lego approach has been the holy grail of software development at least back into the 80's with OOP. Yet it still requires programmers who know about data structures, algorithms, etc. to write software. Even if they're just cobbling together libraries, there is still a lot of additional functionality required--not just 'glue' code.

All we have now are improvements in efficiency (great, mind you), with operational improvements like IaaS and development improvements with the great OSS that we have now. It will require a sea change in the field of comp sci. to achieve Lego-like orders of magnitude improvements.
Wayland cuts out a lot of the legacy cruft that X11 has accumulated over the decades, and is inherently much simpler; resource overhead is expected to be much lower on Wayland-based systems.

It might not be less painful in terms of getting it to work, but it would be less painful in terms of getting it to work in a resource-constrained system like an ARM-powered smartphone.
I am friends with some of the folks putting this together. Now that that's out of the way...

I am excited about the conference because I think the human factor is often missing from software development, and one of the hardest skill-sets to learn.

In an era where frameworks and libraries are ubiquitous, understanding and developing the right products and experiences is going to be increasingly important. A conference that focuses on these "timeless" skills is much more attractive to me personally than any one that is focused on a particular technology.

Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
It seems this claim has been made forever. COBOL was supposed to make programmers unnecessary. So were rules engines. And code generators and an endless list of other technologies.
I created a website where you can pay per character using bitcoin: http://bitcoinmegaphone.com

On average it generates around $1 per day (in Bitcoin, of course :-)
Would you prefer an iframe embed? I have that planned.
Just finished reading Hugh Howey's "Dust". The Wool, Shift, and Dust series from Hugh Howey are great dystopic sci-fi. Picked up The Signal and the Noise from Nate Silver as my next book.
Flash Boys is a little strange. It's presented as David vs. Goliath, but "the little guy" is J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Which is not to say there's nothing that could be done to improve our financial infrastructure, or no problems relating to anything deserving the HFT label - there's plenty of both.
1. The OP gives no indication (AFAICT) that he is judgement proof as an individual. Incorporation to avoid liability is thus plausible, though obviously he would have to balance the likelihood of his getting sued against the hassle of incorporating. Additionally, as a non-lawyer, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to try incorporating _after_ gaining assets from the venture: it seems like a recipe for trouble if he had to go to court.

2. Holding off on a trademark would be fine, though finding a unique name _should_ (IMHO) be done at the start, and at that point I'm not seeing a big reason not to trademark.

3. The stuff on patents makes no sense (at least to me) in this context.

That said, I claim no particular expertise on this topic.
Replace "software engineer" with "person building a product" in that first quote.

The value of engineering skills as they are defined today is falling, but the value of a single person with an idea and the drive to implement it is soaring.
> The same software foundation (open source software, development tools like Github, infrastructure as a service provided by the likes of Digital Ocean, and more) that allowed Whatsapp and Imgur to scale, means that experience and skill writing software become less important.

The author focuses a lot on ease of scaling, but the bigger challenge has always been building applications (experiences) that need scale. If you build it, they will not come.
And soon they will argue that your mail is not your mail, and subject to legal protection, when it is in any USPS facility because it is government assets until it touches your mailbox.

Granted, they already track all metadata without opening it (if you believe that). This is attrocious. I come from a family of attorneys and I have told them I lost all respect for the system in which they operate, and Jeffersonian calls to refresh the tree of liberty have started to seem very real and urgent these days.

In short, fuck these animals. I hope they choke.
You can easily copy our code and do this: https://github.com/nicksergeant/humanitybox.
Let's compare writing software to writing English. (Writing is kinda an individual sport) Almost everyone can write a short story in English, but the 10x writers really really stand out. Writing isn't a perfect analogy - we generally think of programming as a skill (right and wrong, boolean, either you can or can't) and writing as an art (shades of gray, non-boolean skill).

The assumption is that more people being able to make things with code would make the 10x engineer less valuable - but I think it makes them more valuable. In a noisy world - only the truly great can stand out. And to really make our future great, we are going to need a lot more than CRUD web apps.

I could be wrong - but I don't think this is as cut and dry as the author claims.
I was going to suggest the same feature: healthcare and more generally public services are a very important factor when deciding to settle somewhere. Too bad most of these websites seem to think cost of living is the #1 factor.
It is totally legal to refuse to rent to people with low credit scores, so that's an option too. Just keep the standard consistent no matter who your applicant is and have a standard criteria to keep everything both fair and legal.

You probably can also charge a larger than average security deposit to weed out the people with cashflow problems. Most states have a cap on amount of security deposit collected, I know here it is twice the monthly rent if under 60. Otherwise the cap is one month's rent.

Here's the rub: You usually gotta have a great place to rent that attract such tenants.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a landlord but I am considering becoming one. Yes, I FULLY know the risks, my parents were landlords for over a decade. So I know exactly what NOT to do as they only made pennies. My grandparents are also landlords and make plenty of money on their rental properties, so I have a positive model as well as a negative one. :)
Teams are not getting smaller. The original Macintosh team was not much larger than the teams he mentions and probably had much more technological impact.

The web has been around for a quarter century now and still rather trivial websites that mostly could be replaced by tools sell for some $50k. Because even those basic tools we had 25 years to build are not there yet.

Software engineering is actually becoming proper engineering, at least in Europe where much of it is focused more on industry. Crashes are mostly unacceptable now. Embedded software is sometimes formally proved.

Finally, as everyone who actually develops software knows, we need to cut many needed features to ship in time. Think how incredibly long it still takes to implement what you can imagine: It takes many months. This is a good indication of how far we are actually from combining things in a lego-like fashion, from making dreams come true quickly because it is so easy.
The same is also true of packages, if you're packaging correctly and work in a sane environment. It's also a lot easier for devops to manage, because they then only have to apply access control, logging, resource management, and other integration requirements to the main OS image, instead of to every Docker image produced for deployment.
Search HN - you'll find at least one discussion between someone who's very positive and someone who's rather negative.
>If you have an appointment to meet us at our office, it’s at the address below. But please don’t just show up.

Did you make an appointment?
Just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's a bubble.

Remember the outrage at Instagram's billion-dollar valuation? Looks pretty cheap now. Same thing with Facebook, Netflix, Uber. Snapchat's simple idea is every bit as transformative as the simple ideas behind these companies.

Here's what smartypants bubble-callers were saying in 2004 about Google before their $2.7 billion IPO[0], also built on a pretty simple but world-changing idea:

"Pent-up demand for hot tech stocks is driving Googlemania."

"There are serious questions about Google's long-term viability"

"Word has it that Microsoft will feature an immensely powerful search engine in the next generation of Windows, due out by 2006."

"Taking down Google with better search is in [Microsoft's] strike zone."

"Google stands a good chance of becoming not the next Microsoft, but the next Netscape."

"It's tough to see why many Windows users would even bother with Google."

"Yahoo! has the advantage of being able to cull demographic data from its millions of subscribers and match them with advertisers."

"Google relies on ads for 96 percent of its revenue making it a one-trick pony vulnerable to the swings of the market."

Any of this sound familiar?

[0] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/bubble-bath
If Microsoft was serious about this, they'd also offer end-to-end encryption for their e-mails (open source protocol, otherwise they shouldn't bother).

But because they aren't doing this, it just shows they are more concerned about not losing business overseas than "fighting for your e-mail".
Fantastic!

Out of curiosity does anyone know of a similar service for Google Cloud Storage? Really bums me out that they don't break out bandwidth per bucket.
Actually I stand corrected. You'd need an API key with GiveForward. I could see if they'd let me host the day's campaigns at an API endpoint for custom solutions.
This tool is mainly used to carry out the reconnaissance of the digital footprints. An organization can use this tool to know if any sensitive information is revealed in their digital footprints for example if a "Server" banner in http response reveals "Apache 2.2.15" then the web server might be prone to multiple vulnerabilities. Hence the organization can take defensive measures to secure its infrastructure. If the same task is carried out by the cyber criminal they can use this information to exploit the infrastructure. I hope that I have answered your question.
The arguments are flawed and taken very lightly.

One could argue the exact opposite: Engineers are needed now more than ever. A skilled engineer (what does this even mean in a context so wide?!) can run a website like PinBoard, serving millions of users, from the a jungle in Thailand, on a crappy 56k using a 250 USD ChromeBook.

Of course it's possible but how many people do actually manage to do it successfully?

And while having AWS, Github and you-name-it makes this possible (scaling was the big issue apparently), AWS and Github can not be run by a lonely engineer, you need an army of them.
This article is wildly off base, particularly when you look at the examples the article cites.

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. (Does he think commodity coders know Erlang? Really!?) They heavily tuned their architecture and built efficient paradigms which kept developer productivity & performance from degrading as their user base grew. [1] Commodity engineers don't write that sort of code.

Yes, we increasingly have tools which allow mediocre coders to get stuff done. (For example, Ruby on Rails.) But the inevitable byproduct of letting mediocre coders loose on a stack they only partially understand is a mess of spaghetti code which takes even more developers to maintain. This is already what you see with non-tech corporations who employ dozens/hundreds of developers to maintain Drupal/RoR/Java apps which are significantly simpler in scale & complexity than WhatsApp or Instagram. If you want to use tools well, you need to hire people who understand the tools.

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 allows them to fail faster.

I might be able to build a house with legos, but I expect to be spending a lot more time repairing it than if I'd just hired a carpenter in the first place.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...
I think the change is purely additive.

Great engineering is no less valuable than it once was, but pure "idea guys" can do stuff now that they couldn't do before.
> Microsoft believes you own emails stored in the cloud, and that they have the same privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail

But do they, really?

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26677607
Core Data Editor
Quite a few people have taken advantage of it, but less than you might think. It brings in some extra traffic, and the occasional new paying customer, so overall it does what it's supposed to.

For the most part, the people who request the Cheap Bastard Plan don't have much in the way of traffic, so it's not particularly expensive to service them. Every once in a while I'll get a request from somebody who's a bit "cheap"'er than normal, asking for an upgrade after posting a comment to an online forum or blog entry, or even just a tweet. But for the most part people tend to have nice things to say about the product, and proceed to say them.
Do you mind to mention the VPS hosting company? (you mentioned it is cheap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8039666)
It's still vulnerable to passive analysis as the other guy noted since if you control the ISP for the end-user you have some idea how much data is being pumped through an encrypted connection. [e.g. Is it just staying alive or pulling 50mb/s?]
I agree.

Specific skills (e.g. working with a certain framework) will go in and out of style, but problem solving will always be in demand.

Also, maybe I'm naive, but I just don't see the software-as-legos future as feasible. There will always be the need for customization and ever-more-advanced functionality.
Just looking at the architecture of the airport compared with Charles de Gaulle, Oslo Airport and Shanghai Airport you can see that they all try to get a large surface for their terminals to make space for a lot of aircraft. The BER airport terminal buildings are built in a square, with little obvious room for expansion. I guess they could build in that square which looks like it has nothing in it, but a new and separate terminal building cluster is not optimal either. No, in combination with the fire gas thing it seems like this is the PHP of airports - bad design all around.