skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great advice. Except for JavaScript on the backend. That's horrible advice. ;)
If my memory doesn't trick me, there was a text you could type on word with a certain keyboard shortcut or something like that (sort of konami code) which let you play pinball under the Word program. Any one remember that one ?
Holy cow, Linux gained so much and Windows lost so much since they switched (in 2004). That would be so wrong to go for Windows (in 2014).

Disclaimer: I am from Germany
Two possible reasons: Seattle is the largest tech center outside of the Bay Area, and the cost of living is still manageable.
Old news. The city council defends the LiMux system against the mayors: http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Linux-in-Muenchen-Stadtrat-... (mid-july)
Most of them are Amigas (2000), it seems
People are different, so it's not obvious that what applies to me applies to you. I can tell you what I know kills my enthusiasm for pretty much anything, though: no learning. To just keep applying something I've mastered, over and over again, like a language and a framework (let's say Objective C and Cocoa) will wear me down fast after a few iterations. Mastery is boring.

The only solution that works for me is to become a noob again by switching to something else. An obvious option which you may already have tried could be Swift. But maybe you need a more radical change of scenery, one which does not center on coding at all. It could still involve coding in a supporting role (playing to your strengths does not hurt) but be primarily about something else, like machine learning or virtual reality. Or it could be something else entirely. The world won't go under, and your life won't end, if you decide that you want to do something else entirely for a few years or decades.
This is a two sided market, and many people see that as a challenge. However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere. (Apologies if that sounds insensitive to anyone, but it's true in the general case.)

Here's your strategy, at a high level:

> 1. Acquire as many employee leads as possible.

> 2. Sell the leads to companies.

So your first step is acquiring employee leads. The easiest way to do this is to set up a google docs form, with the set of questions you want to ask employees. Include name, location, contact info, and resume.

Post on the employment section of craigslist in every city, every day. There are ("blackhat") services that will do this for you, or you can setup your own system with proxies and automation. I guarantee you will get an absurd conversion percentage. Unemployed people will submit their resume almost anywhere.

In your CL post, be upfront about what you're doing. Tell the employees that you are matching them to companies based on questions they answer. Feel free to lie about how many companies you have signed up. Say it's something like 1000, which sounds like a lot and will convince them to give you their info, but also gives you plausible deniability when they don't hear from any companies for a while.

Once you have a sufficient number of leads, it's time to get the other side of the market. Pick some companies you want to sell customers to. Go through your spreadsheet, and answer questions how you think that company might answer them. Then, go to the company. Seriously... physically go there. If you can't do that, send a first class fedex envelope with some really nice marketing materials. Explain to them what your service is, and tell them you have X employee leads who answered this set of questions. If they're interested, they can pay you per lead or a percentage of salary for any hire.

Boom. Leads sold, money made.

Notice how you do not need to build out your product. You have everything you need right now. Maybe make a nice landing page for your Google docs form, but otherwise, you don't need to do any coding. Get the leads, get the companies, then build out the product.

Move fast. You are not eHarmony. You don't need to put out some polished product, and you don't need to play by the rules. Hustle!
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8129309
> I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it.

If it is a "good signal" then it's an indicator pretty much by definition. The thing is, it doesn't matter what is the poetic mark of "good driving"; what counts are accident statistics going down. One constant about all humans is that you can't ask them to think, or care, or be nice, and expect them to change behaviour. You need to make them change, by changing their habits and/or incentive structures around them, of which, in the case of cars, the insurance bill is a very important part. People behave in a deterministic way, especially when you look at big groups (such as drivers). You don't yell at a river and expect it to change it's way, you force it to do it.

> A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance

That would most certainly help, but I wouldn't call it the number one thing (the number one thing would be banning human drivers and replacing them with self-driving cars). I'd love to see driving licenses requiring training comparable to pilot licenses.
Please don't write backend in JavaScript. It's an ugly hack language full of pitfalls that we're stuck with for now on web pages; why put it on the backend where uptime and reliability are even more important? You need a slew of extensions to make it predictable and debuggable enough in that situation. I have yet to come across a situation where I really needed to share a library between my web page and server application, but I have in the client and server of a non-web game, so there are probably reasonable scenarios where it's useful, but from what I've heard getting a JS library to the point of portability between both webpages and node/other JS backends is more trouble than it's worth. PHP is even more of an ugly hack language filled with pitfalls. I've had a much better time writing backend in either .NET or python. Python's looseness still made it harder to deal with for complex situations but it's decent. If you like the idea of .NET on the backend but don't want to or can't have mono/.NET there's JSP which also is probably a good idea.
Nothing is hard once you have put your 10000 hours of practice in.

But this is a question about personal preference. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses, different personalities, etc. We cannot answer for your friend. The best approach would be to gain a broad exposure to all layers of the stack, not just "front-end" or "back-end", but also the databases, servers, networking, and all those pieces that comprise the modern Internet. Any one of them might spark an interest and a passion.
Which is more fun may depend on the person's skills. For instance, a person with a background in design may prefer front-end. IMO, it's best to start the person off with at least basic understanding of HTML, CSS, JS the reason being that all web sites have a frontend, but not all a backend. Codecademy Web Fundamentals can be good for this. I guess in the end, really depends on what kind of web dev the person wants to do. The person will be motivated to work on what he or she wants to build for pleasure.
> Yeah but the more advanced fields of physics like quantum mechanics are way harder than anything in chemistry.

That's a very loaded statement. If this were a forum for the physical sciences (as opposed to computer science), that would probably be analogous to saying "Android is easier to develop for than iOS" or "Java is easier than C#" (both of which would easily start flamewars on HackerNews)
Insurance companies have a strong financial incentive to have their models be well calibrated with reality, so you should expect it more and more with time that when an insurance company thinks you're a bad driver then it really means that your driving sucks.
Darin L. Hammond on Language and Evolution
Will do, but it is Chrome on Mac with Diasconnect and Adblock Plus and maybe some others. No exceptions in the console (global, not the background page one)
Always comment your code. The online post kindly submitted here documents one reason why commenting code is important. (And why structuring the code reasonably around modules that reflect the code's functionality is a good idea.) Yeah, code is only rarely written that way, but the code that is better documented lives longer.
Run Your Company Like A Grateful Dead Concert
Well that's just sad. Pinball was dropped because of incompetent programmers. Don't 32-bit binaries work on 64-bit anyways?
Ken Rockwell has an amusing satirical essay on this subject:

The Leica Man: http://www.kenrockwell.com/leica/leica-man.htm
This is great! I like the fact that there is a gui with menu bar commands, ability to navigate folders , etc. to fall back on. Is there any way to open it via the terminal like sublime or atom? It would be great if it could launch from a directory with all of the contents showing in the sidebar
> what makes it ok for one community or mini-city to be a democracy but not another, where is line?

There isn't one, really. Which is why the Soviet system instituted formally-democratic assemblies in any entity. In principle, it was a great idea; in practice, these bodies were soon hijacked by professional political operatives from The Party, who would steer them in the "right" direction and use them as another tool of control (speak up against the Party line in your factory soviet, and you'd soon be on a train to Novosibirsk). For other insights into that particular form of organization, I'd recommend Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog".

Whether the limits of the Soviet system where environmental or historical in nature (they didn't have the internet, say), it's an open debate for another day, but I mention it to define one extreme of the theoretical scale: anyone can vote on anything. At the other extreme, you have absolute monarchy: nobody can vote on anything.

Anything in between these extremes is not "absolutely democratic" or "absolutely undemocratic", which is why debate is so fragmented and dependent on specific circumstances. You can have profoundly-undemocratic organizations being run in a substantially democratic way by this or that specific leader, or formally-democratic institutions being run with an iron fist by a single individual.

I think that, pragmatically speaking, the most basic element of democracy is just the acceptance of the existence of feedback. If one is ostracised, isolated or punished for the simple act of expressing a differing opinion, people will feel that democracy is non-existent, that the game is rigged. On the other hand, if differing opinions are given substantial space and even co-opted by rulers, especially in times of crisis, the absence of formal democratic structures will be considered a purely theoretical problem and likely ignored in practice.

Others famously define the basic unit of democracy the answer to the question "can we replace our rulers without violence?". However, this sort of argument can be subverted by putting in place mechanisms for such a replacement and then, by other means, ensuring that they will never be invoked.
Why not both at the same time?

1. Think of a small project (one you could do in a weekend)

2. Architect it as a backend API + frontend consumer.

3. Explain the architecture to him at a high level.

4. Teach him Python/Ruby with bottle.py/sinatra, make the API.

5. Teach him HTML/CSS, make the layout.

6. Teach him Javascript, call the API and manipulate the DOM.
Addepar is a wealth management platform started by Joe Lonsdale. https://addepar.com/
Perseid Meteor Shower 2014
> What therapy is is a professional service.

If therapists were professionals, they would respond to their professional societies by abandoning discredited therapeutic methods. But they won't do this. Asperger Syndrome (AS) caused an epidemic of phony diagnoses, after which the professional societies responded by voting AS out of the new DSM, but therapists are ignoring them and continuing to diagnose and "treat" AS, more than a year after the handwriting appeared on the wall.

It's the same with Recovered Memory Therapy -- therapists are free to offer it to their clients, more than a decade after this phony therapy created what insiders call a "debacle" and a huge decline in public trust in therapy as a profession.

People who ignore their professional societies aren't professionals.

> You go to a doctor because you do not understand your body, and either have a problem now or wish to avoid problems later by changing your behavior. You go to a therapist because you do not understand your unconscious, and either have a problem now or wish to avoid problems later by changing your behavior.

Your effort to compare therapy to sciences like modern medicine has been contradicted by the NIMH, which recently ruled that the DSM, therapy's "bible", may no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content:

http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/05/nimh-wont-follow-psychiat...

Therapy is not a science, and it is not a profession. Therapy is to modern times what an aging aunt on a porch swing was to an earlier time -- a way to derive benefit from ordinary conversation. Notwithstanding the benefit people derive from therapy, all this talk about it being a scientific profession is nonsense, something now widely recognized.
Playstation's revenue goes sky rocket due to PS TV
Cooll and Belke are both perfectly fine joint names, if they don't want to hyphenate.
Before you pour in personal money, you should really think twice if you want to enter this market.

The employer-employee matching market is pretty fucked up in my opinion and personally, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. It feels horribly broken and I understand why so many people try to get into the market. There surely must be an easier way to match employees with employers than everything out there yet.

My main objections are:

- This is not a technical problem. Matching employees to employers feels like an easy problem but is incredible hard. Hence, there are assessment centers and headhunters. Do they work? Some articles pop up on HN every few weeks that suggest that they don't.

- In my opinion, it is not even a problem. Top talent isn't hired by match-making platforms. So you try to match average Joe with average jobs. For this job, a simple job description should be sufficient (and it is, mostly).

- Match-making platforms are easily game-able, because they're only an intermediate step. The goal is to get a job interview, thus it's better to game the system as an employee than to play by the rules

- "My PHP skills are a 7 out of 10, you're looking for at least an 8. Am I really a 7?" -> there's no objective way to judge skills. It depends on the job and on the employer. Thus, the best solution is to put as many skills as possible with the highest points as possible.

- Try to think of this "problem" by comparing it to housing-platforms. You're looking for a 2 bedroom appartment. It should be bright, not much noise, under 1000$. Surely, you can now filter search results, but a match is done in real life. There's no way to tell if the appartment is really for you unless you've seen it with your own eyes and got a feeling. The same is true for jobs. There's no way to tell if someone is a good fit without having human contact. For appartments, a simple appartment description is enough. Why would you try to apply sophisticated matching-algorithms to human beings?

The only way this might work is if you try to target a specific niche that you really know a lot about.
I looked around the site, but couldn't find anything about turning ball-point sketches into 3d models.
That article might be tongue-in-cheek, but he's not exactly rational when it comes to Leica: http://www.kenrockwell.com/leica/recommended-lenses.htm

Nor is he a particularly reliable source.
Try to learn frameworks like Laravel
He didn't say anything about smart people. He mentioned the companies that have a presence there. That's significant, because people living in Seattle and working for Microsoft, Adobe, Google, etc., may be interested in working for Apple, but Apple has no presence there.
I don't think it needs to distinguish between drivers. Your kids probably should raise your rates if they are driving poorly.
the cost of living is still manageable

True, though they are rising rapidly: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021673014_rentincrea... .

Seattle has had a better response than San Francisco's: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/... ("Over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base)"), but it is still subject to many of the dysfunctional political-economic-legal beliefs described in The Rent Is Too Damn High: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO.

It's worth noting too that Seattle and Washington don't have income taxes, which can be a substantial issue for many tech workers.
This is why I like ethereum. They take care of all the explaining, and give people a single concept for understanding an ethereum-backed altcoin. Then, any application built on ethereum can just refer people to the ethereum documentation.

Understanding how ethereum apps work has network effects, in the sense that once you understand ethereum, you understand every ethereum app.
Open Source ain’t Charity
All those companies (and many more) also have offices in NY.
"We're missing a program to handle email, calendar, and contacts in one place." ---I, for one, have also been looking for a nice solution here after trying some options.
> What is so special about Apple and Seattle that notably that company should open an office in that city?

It's potentially the largest hub of independent mac/iOS developers outside of the valley. Seattle Xcoders is a bit of an institution and has been very active for a long time. Omni Group, Black Pixel, Flying Meat, Aged and Distilled, Q Branch (1/3rd of it) are all here. So there is justification for this specific pairing, though it wasn't explicitly mentioned in the article.
Do officers decide when to turn on/off these cameras? Are the recordings stored on the device itself? I don't see how cameras would help much if both questions are true.
Seconding Wealthfront (and Betterment as a similar service). Both seem like a great idea.

~$1B AUM each, Fee-free past a certain level of invested capital ($100k maybe), no-load index investing, automatic tax-loss harvesting, etc.
> Front end is harder .... the back end just needs to work as intended. The details can be pretty much any combination of things..as long as it works.

I think I know what you're trying to say - front end work is easier to justify to a client because he/she can easily "see" what you did.

But your statement that front end is "harder" and that the details of backend implementation don't matter are patently false. Let me guess, you're a fronted developer right?
Can you give me one example of the government "misusing" the data from license-plate scanners? I know how it "turned out"; it turned out to be an effective means of tracking people on the run.
There are increasingly more tools for creating the frontend without code - my favorite right now is Webflow. This will continue happening because that's what we had in the past (Smalltalk, VB6, and so on).

Nothing seems to be replacing the need to code backend any time soon.

That's my argument for learning backend: frontend coding is unnecessary and an affectation of the current industry.
>>> original = 42
>>> class FooProxy:
... def __getattr__(self, x):
... return getattr(original, x)
...
>>> proxy = FooProxy()
>>> proxy
42

For anyone else who found this as confusing as I did ("wtf, how can proxy actually be 42?"), what's going on here is that it's calling `proxy.__repr__()` when it attempts to display `proxy`, which in turn calls `42.__repr__()`. (Similarly, `proxy + 1` calls `42.__add__(1)`.)
So Microsoft openly admits they shipped code with their operating system that they did not review or even understand what it contained.
Word 97, I remember! :) Excel 97 had a similar thing where you'd fly around in 3d, over generated terrain. I think the pinball game included in Word was extremely basic but it was nice to see the developers got to include them.
Actually, I'm not so sure. It's easy to tell people: "North.com, with a hyphen in between every letter." It's not that hard to type, and once you've typed it once, it's in your address bar.

From an SEO and aesthetic perspective, it's a shitty domain name. But from a branding perspective, it's not bad. It's memorable, easily verbalized, and allows him to brand under "north" instead of some longer or abstract name.
Some observations:

1. When proof-reading in print rather than on-screen, I catch three times more typos. Not fully sure why.

2. Giving gaps between writing and reading (even as small as 24 hours especially if you spend time doing something else in the middle) helps quite a bit, and not only with typos but also with the message itself.
From a comment on that blog:

That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 95 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system."
Looks really like BZFlag...
It's really hard to get a friend into Web development. You can encourage, mentor, and guide them but someone has to be genuinely curious and excited about web development.
The answer is of course: it depends

"Modern" front end development will often involve build processes - gulp, browserify, whatever - that will introduce a barrier for entry.

Likewise if your friend wants to get into, say, C# development, you'd be much better off with a Visual Studio environment.

That's not to say that either of those are necessary, but I'd suggest that they are the norm for developers in those areas.

Alternatively, work with something like Sinatra and plain old HTML/CSS/JS - your friend could get a sense of one of the simplest methods of creating web applications.

So - it depends. Because there are so many choices, I suggest you find out their interests first. Is it visual? Then maybe they'd prefer frontend. Is it in the overall architecture of an application? Then maybe they'd prefer the backend?
Windows is a more user friendly operating system than Linux. Obviously they should have stuck with Windows all along.