skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This rings so true. Last April, I had a chance to chat with an engineer at an (explosively growing) early stage B2C startup. He gave a talk about "data science", so I walked up to him afterwards and asked him if he considered himself to be a data scientist and did anything that's remotely like statistical inference.

He said, "nah, most of what I do is collecting a lot of data and just segmenting them in a bunch of ways. Pivot tables go really far as far as product insights are concerned."

Then, he added, "that whole data science thing in my talk...that was to grab attention."

I am NOT saying statistics and machine learning is useless. They are tremendously useful. But chances are good that it pays a lot more early on to collect a lot of data and ask basic questions from different perspectives.
How to drive growth through customer support
This post is making the completely wrong conclusion.

The reason companies like Instagram, Imgur, etc are able to service large #s of users with 7 engineers is mainly because computers and tools are a lot CHEAPER than they used to be, not simpler.

Cheaper. Less expensive. This allows small teams to build really huge things because generally small teams don't have much money (because if they did, they'd have a bigger team!), and the fact that stuff is cheap allows them to build it in the first place. Open source = free. Computers, bandwidth = a lot cheaper than they were 5/10 years ago.

Snapchat couldn't have existed 10 years ago because it would have cost 100x what it costs today. In fact, things are so cheap these companies can overspend and run their service on AWS or Heroku because the price of computing doesn't matter as much [1].

Programming is just as complicated as it was before. In fact, anything where you have a team of 5+ people working on the same thing for years is going to be complicated whether it is software, legos, or plumbing. As tools get simpler, the product will compensate by becoming more complicated (which is why we are seeing more awesome software these days), and thus the level of complexity will be roughy the same.

Today I could build a product as a one-person team that would have been competitive 5/10 years ago, but today the bar is much higher, and of course it will continue to get higher as we software and the trade of building software improves.

1: Though companies like StackOverflow still build their own metal and because of that run their sites incredibly efficiently on a cost basis
I have two problems with this:

1) Even if we are able to remove all of the inessential complexity of the problem (ceremony and routine drudgery,) we cannot automate the essential complexity. For crud apps, the essential complexity is very low. However, for many apps there is intrinsic complexity to the problem and how it relates to the domain. You might argue that what this leads to is a vast array of cheap specialty modules that can be plugged together. Well, the complexity is then in understanding the impacts of the modules and their interrelationships. The 10x engineers aren't 10x because they can set up logging or automated deployment, they are 10x because they can instantly cut through multiple layers of abstraction to see how their interactions lead to an emergent behavior that is different from the spec (for example.)

2.) Unfortunately, machines (and networks) are not fast enough to compensate for an unconsidered approach to information retrieval and propagation and this is not going to be helped by a "legos" approach to building software. This might be helped by a different set of tools (view-first rendering driving parallel backend requests..) but that brings up its own set of challenges.
Programming talent and skills do not translated into business talent and skills. And vice versa. It does not even translate into an idea doable by just two guys that can sell well and is not easily doable by other two guys. How many such products does exist?
I don't agree.

If you spend a few years at university (I have two degrees), you learn things like sorts, automata, proofs, and calculus.

On the other hand, most of the junk I deal with day-to-day as a working software developer turns more on my knowledge of tools like Chef/IntelliJ, software libraries (the stdlib of various languages, the Java/.NET BCLs), build systems, git/github, and how to do a proper code review.

For most stuff today, I would highly prefer the person with more tools experience. Granted, there are some problems people who aren't "10x developers" could never solve (e.g. writing linux) but for most stuff industrial software devs today are doing, it just doesn't matter. You just need to write the code, it needs to be maintainable, and it needs to be done as quickly as possible.
Y Combinator doesn't have any real people, actually; it's entirely managed by a crusty IBM mainframe upgraded until it can run an artificially-intelligent software stack written in Node.js and Ruby and segregated into Docker containers for each "employee". If you telnet into one of their servers on port 1337, you'll be greeted with a flurry of compiled-to-Javascript Haskell interrupted periodically with rants about how Silicon Valley is the Promised Land and that anyone not living in Silicon Valley is a loser.

;)
Tor Warns of Attack Attempting to Deanonymize Users | SecurityWeek.Com
> If you are a great engineer, you are the capital!

It only seems that way because engineering is currently the most capital-heavy part of bringing a softwarebusiness to market. Once that ceases to be the case (which may take a while, but it's the future SG was gushing about) then as long as there is a single scarce or mutually-exclusive commodity necessary for success its price will ratchet upwards until it is out of reach for most engineers (after risk-adjustment).

Pertinent example: the implosion of the indie app dev market that's been all over HN this past week.
+1, wouldn't recommend Brazil if you love your life
I'm no longer sure that is enough. Considering what happened to Lavabit, just offering end-to-end encryption is only going to work until the government decides they want what you have hidden. I doubt that Microsoft will put up as much of a fight, or take the high road out, like the Lavabit founder did.

Fighting them on the legal front to stop such practices from starting may well be the best option right now. Even though Microsoft may be doing this for business reasons, it'll still help everyone.
This article sets up a a few interesting points, but stops at only one. Yes, the ever-increasing level of abstraction available in information technology enables less technically-specialized people to creatively utilize the tools available to them, and that's pretty amazing.

But the plumber analogy fails to capture the breadth of the tech world. What I would call equally exciting to the empowerment of less-technical developers is what highly technical "10x engineers," or whatever you want to call them, are enabled to do in a world of next-level abstractions.
does facebook intend to use this internally? The code is (C) Facebook, so Facebook is at least interested enough to pay for the development, right? or is this just some sort of R&D that won't have near term impact at facebook?
Why Fedora?
Announcing the Chrome 64-bit Beta Channel for Windows
SV Trend: Entreprenuer Diet
Almost Indie – Another perspective on Indie App Development
Females only make up about 10% of the CS program enrollees, I highly doubt the females in this list are as good as their male counterparts. 5 out of 100 is good, you are getting only the top 5% though. 5 out of 1000 is better, since you are taking that top 5% and taking the top 10% of that.
Good point Skywalker X8 or 1900 are good for longer range FPV planes, I've seen some setups with 80-100km range (UHF Setups) which is pretty impressive.
Ok. I know no French at all (il y a un poisson dans votre bibliotheque) but that novel is something I've been interested in trying. Maybe I'll give that a shot.
> Webcrawlers have a pattern too.

Nope. The ones that have a pattern are the ones that play by the rules. It's extremely easy to write a web-crawler that performs random actions (download torrents, seed data, make bing/yahoo/google/duckduckgo random searches and click on 25 random indexed results, etc.).

In order for a sniffing party to understand what it's going on, it will (probably) take a Bayesian approach which will require more data than one can generate in 100 years.

Writing such a crawler for an experienced developer is extremely trivial (e.g. ruby + mechanize + nokogiri).
You mention being easy to search, but I cant seem to find your site on google or duckduckgo (in case it was my historical disinterest for plants affecting google searches). I tried some combination of the keywords garden, nursery, seeds, plants but never saw doleaf on the first page of results. Am I using the wrong keywords?
> There is no design document, no complete specification other than the source code. Yay!

this is not correct. netlink is an rfc : http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3549.txt, and if you look for netlink sockets, you can get tons of great tutorials as well as references.
3rd and 4th Quarter 2014 Software Outsourcing Trends
Ask HN: What video hosting service do you use for your video platform?
Consider a small business that needs to integrate with a video hosting service that provides API access and the videos to work across all web and mobile devices.
Support http://neo900.org/ if you want a traditionally Linux phone - it's another GTA04 project. Right now it's my best prospect for a Linux phone, piggybacking off the huge N900 community.

I have fears that the software porting effort is lagging far behind the hardware effort, but I'm putting the odds of getting a usable jessie or Maemo phone a bit higher than the odds of Jolla retreating from the iOS/Android strategy of sandboxing the user for business purposes.
it was Monday
UK to allow tests of driverless cars on public roads to start in January.

In the same way that has already begun in the rest of the world. Same legal/insurance issues stand (as elsewhere) and are likely the bigger barrier to adoption.
SF is 3/5 for safety? Where's that metric coming from.
Alternatively, a creator can now build a product with fewer people and doesn't need to raise capital. This trend is extremely empowering of labor.
Yes, you just have to think about networking a little differently. The problem is that we share documents over connections. Immutable documents don't really need to get to you immediately, especially now that we have webapps with UIs which update instantly and which can perform non-trivial computation.

Onion routing with something like Mixminion[1] works much like Tor, but instead of establishing connections it passes messages between routers. Messages are arbitrarily delayed, preventing even traffic analysis from finding you.

However, using an anonymous remailer like Mixminion would require completely rethinking browsers and our protocols for web browsing. They simply aren't designed for a world where packets might take minutes to get to you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion
I used the ABBYY orc engine to digitize printed documents (idk why they couldn't just keep around the file used to print) and it was quite accurate. At worst one out of a couple hundred would have enough issues where readability was an issue.
It's somewhat sad that AMD can no longer compete head-to-head with Intel so they have to produce processors based on ARM designs.

I'm really hoping that someone will compete with Intel on the high-end CPUs, maybe IBM's PowerPC?
If I remember correctly from a high scalability post about WhatsApp it was also on bare metal. So more complexity to manage then a simple AWS setup where you can tear up/down in seconds.
Well, yes, if we restrict our domain to the set of application types for which development can be commoditized, then development becomes a commodity.

Not all development is webapp and mobile app development, though, and some things, like actual engineering, just aren't things that can be commoditized (beyond a certain point).
IBCBET | Ligahoki.com
I was thinking the same at first, but when you think about, the defining feature of a digital nomad is that he moves from place to place and doesn't permanently settle somewhere, so I can see how this isn't quite as important as cost of living.

After all, if you don't like it in a place (or you're not happy with the public services) you can just up and leave.

Having said that, it'd still be nice and make the data inherently more useful to have additional data such as the quality of/access to healthcare (though I'm not sure how easy it is to quantify that) or crime rates.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. The demand for high-quality software continues to outstrip supply. Bad software is an imperfect-but-better-than-nothing substitute for good software, which is why so much of it gets written.

The problem here is that there's a sort of Gresham's law effect - bad software drives out good software by infection. Your technology stack is only as good as the worst component, and if you're operating at the level of indirection that Sam Gerstenzang suggests, that's a lot of software that you need to depend on, and your software can only be better than the software it depends at the cost of a lot of effort. Some component in your stack doesn't work the way you need it to? Well, suddenly you're either three layers down the stack trying to fix it, or you're writing a non-trivial piece of software higher up the stack to make up for the deficiencies of the lower level.

I'd also dispute Gerstenzang's basic premise that modern engineers need to know less than yesteryear's. 20 years ago, you could write an entire app in Visual Basic. It could integrate with a database, had a drag-and-drop GUI builder, was scriptable using a language that, for all of its many idiosyncrasies, was fairly easy to learn (and you could write plug-in components in C++ if you wanted to). A statically-compiled binary could be put in a floppy disk and would work on any computer running Windows, where it would look basically the same.

Modern front-end web code needs to navigate a Rube Goldberg machine of preprocessors and build pipelines that would have embarrassed a C developer from 1988, and incompatibilities with particular browsers, operating systems or form factors frequently cause simple tasks to take longer than expected. Because nearly every modern application is a distributed application in some sense, you need to understand concurrency and network protocols, and if you want to work on both the client and server components of your application, you probably need to know more than one programming language, or the subtle differences in the runtimes that your language has on client and server. And that's just fairly simple web applications!

WhatsApp was created by a small team, but that team needed to include skills in everything from Erlang to J2ME. That breadth of knowledge was what gave WhatsApp the key competitive advantage of being able to support almost every mobile device on the market, not just the latest generation of smartphones. You might be able to get a startup off the ground without engineering, but you won't be able to grow it much.
How did you market it at launch? Tips?
That's what it says, yes.

Have such tests already begun the "the rest of the world"?
> I cannot find him anywhere if not for the email address he sent me years later, and no other mention of life exists.

I guess his job does not involve participating in projects that have git repositories or public mailing lists.
You can't scale without well crafted solutions - scaling your rails app on digital ocean would have a higher burn rate than hiring a few good engineers to build scalable code that needs fewer machines. AWS is pricey!!
Populating a UIPickerView with Core Data
My First Unikernel
When was the last time a COBOL project has generated as much buzz as Perl's Mojolicious has just yesterday? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8095574
Not much at the moment:

Profits realized from a very long term Bitcoin investment: 10000$

Bitcoin miner: 600$ (profits) so far.

Now I'm covering the costs of running my own SaaS [1] with these profits to create a more sustainable business (I've lost confidence in Bitcoin from an investment standpoint). At this moment my SaaS has 2 trial users but no paying customers.

[1] https://calloud.com
There will be surely some great engineers coming out of schools, but I seriously question the peer review model, at such an early stage of their careers.
Big Data and Analytics are addressing the challenges of APM
Do you advertise or do you get customers organically?
A physical letter in a rented mailbox is also generally not data-mined for the commercial purposes of the service provider.

I think cloud companies essentially want the 4th amendment benefits of treating the cloud like real world private areas (e.g. bank lock boxes), without any of the obligations that come along with that.

The "reasonable expectation of privacy" in things like safe deposit boxes or storage units is based on the actual fact that service providers generally do not and cannot access the contents of those rented spaces. To apply that same reasoning to data stored in the cloud, we have to indulge in the fiction that various bots and sysops cannot in fact access that data, and do not routinely do so.

That said, I think the cloud folks are ultimately going to win, on the basis of Riley v. California (which is noted in Brad Smith's op-ed). I think Riley is technologically ignorant in glossing over technical distinctions between local and cloud storage that are relevant to privacy, but it all but says the cloud is protected under the 4th amendment. I don't know what's left to fight over.
True, but if your budget <$5k month, it's pretty sweet. If more, why live in 3rd world country when you can stay in much sweeter Hong Kong.
Checkout Nathan Barry's Authority: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ I know a couple different people that swear by it.
Some of these "userbase" attempts involved doing some things that people perceived as unethical (e.g. bribes) and caused damage that took effort to undo.
How to sell for hackers
The history of every mature industry on planet Earth says otherwise.
This article is confusing two different things: engineer and the tools used by the engineers. It's not like the tools will ever substitute an engineer or exist one tool to rule all other tools or even one tool that do everything. What we have now better tools than before, which makes possible for few engineers to produce more than before.
Examples from other jobs, graphic designers were not substituted by tools like Photoshop and InDesign, will they ever be? I don't think so - and that's by design, the tool is to easier the job, let the person concentrate where it makes more money, and not to substitute the person.
It's not that they can't/won't compete (actually, when it comes to large scale virtualization, a 16 or 32 core Opteron is much more preferable over an 4 core or 8 core Xeon, and it's less expensive sometimes too).

AMD is seeing the writing on the wall -- ARM is coming into the server market in a big way. It's way better power consumption to performance ratio. You can pack a lot more cores into a server and still consume less power, and at scale, they can compete with traditional dual CPU x86 machines. They are also cheaper to manufacture and purchase.

A great many server companies are getting into ARM -- most notably HP. AMD has said this is a move for the 2016 market (at the earliest). I think it's the right move and welcome it.
anyone used GitBook Editor ? https://github.com/GitbookIO/editor
(I haven't - looking for comments from real users)
It seems to me that with crowd-funding and big data, the people who have jobs picking winning companies out from a lineup will be obsolete before the engineers building the crowd-funding and big data platforms will be.
Well, we're coming out of state for networking and wanted to check with YCombinator , maybe they can recommend an adviser.
As opposed to...?

ARM Opteron development kits are targeted at server- notice the Opteron moniker- which means RedHat is a natural partner, and Fedora is RedHat's testing OS.

(Why not an old stable OS? Because ARM64 is brand-new)
...and we did hit that one chance in a million that it was wrong.
It's written in Windows technologies. Their Windows VPS prices are good.
Announcing a specification for PHP
Yes, only app sales - no IAP. Not sure how to explain other apps, but if you look at the list of top paid Fitness ones, many of them charge more than the typical 99 cents - that probably factors into it. It certainly does for mine! Also, I've noticed Yoga, pregnancy, etc apps absolutely kill it (consistently!) in sales day after day after day....
Show HN: Example of Oracle APEX App
The Shape of Space: How to Visualize Surfaces and Three-Dimensional Manifolds by Jeffrey R. Weeks

...this one has been a good read so far, but it is quite mind bending, I only read like a half chapter at a time slowly, and then I have to spend some time contemplating.

Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships by Marnia Robinson

...I just finished this one, and it has quite the interesting premise, and 300+ footnotes and references to scientific research, but I don't quite know if I'll be trying it out. The testimonials don't comport with my experiences, but they are somehow compelling. It is worth a read if you are looking for something different, and it definitely has some challenging thoughts to ponder. The main theory is that there is mammalian programming in your brain that releases oxytocin to make you feel good when you touch someone or engage in other bonding behavior. And there is a contrary effect that after orgasm your dopamine levels drop which causes people to get bored with their current partner and seek novel partners (to spread their gene further). The recommendation is to engage in intercourse, but avoid orgasm. And that it takes 2-3 weeks of avoiding orgasm to reset the neurochemistry in your brain, so that you get the blissful effects of oxytocin, without the dopamine depletion of orgasm.
Cool free gstore app: From Google Docs to WP
The country I have specific knowledge of is Thailand, which expressly states visa-exemption entries are for tourism only, a business visa is required for business trips (e.g. meetings) and a work permit (which also requires a business visa) is required to work in the country legally. (There are different laws covering the many labourers from neighbouring countries)

Please keep in mind I didn't say that every businessman/woman GETS a business visa for meetings etc, I said thats what the law says they should do. Your comment was about the "difference legally" between a business trip and a foreign worker. Legally there is a difference between them, and legally neither should be doing it on a tourism visa exemption.

I apologise for the assumption, as it turns out we were both wrong - I have lived in Thailand coming up on 2 years. To work here legally I created a Thai company. I have clients back in Australia and in Singapore.
It's easy to be wise but I'm pretty sure no-one could have predicted the rise of ISIS. Saddam Hussein was a tyrannous dictator that ruled for too long.
That's a little unfair. COBOL just isn't well suited to problems solved by a new web framework. Batch processing of financial data is important, but it ain't likely to generate buzz.
What's a good conference for mobile developers who do want to learn how to use Metal, advanced design, etc?