skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately that's not how economics works. Inbuilt into your statement are a couple of biases. Chiefly, that on the basis of total economic value:

glorified messaging app < puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science

...which is not necessarily the case.

Now, we can talk all day about whether EMH is accurate or not and if the investors in these companies have "perfect information" or not, but there would have to be pretty conclusive evidence that there is something other than economic forces impacting investors valuation of these companies.
Agreed, there is a term in the Perl community for it called 'tuits'.

Its called a unit of time where you can get some meaningful work done.
What nearly all discussions (every?) of technical debt miss is technical debt interest rate, product value and product interest rate. It's not a problem to carry debt if the interest rate on it is lower than that on your product and its level is lower than your product's.

I like to build cleanly, but sometimes a feature needs to be in production TODAY, so we get it into production TODAY. Or sometimes it's useful to get something into production/usage before investing too much into building it. In fact, I'm about to commit a cleanup to a "get it into production TODAY" bit of code that I wrote 3 months ago and I'm very appreciative of the fact that I got a second crack at the problem: the revision is much more general, has better test coverage, is extensible because the feature has been in production for 2 months and I understand it better now that we've been using it. I would have wasted time and money building it more cleanly 3 months ago.

As parts of the product get larger and more complex, we carve them off into their own products/services/systems so that we can more easily reason about the value, debt and interest rates. To be sure, all of these measures of debt, value and interest rates are very subjective (...in the early days ...perhaps they can be measured in various ways later on), so I'm not suggesting that we sit around saying "the debt on that would be $4,729 and the interest rate would be 39.16%". But they're useful analogies and are helpful to keep in mind and to guide discussion. And, besides, you probably don't know your exact credit card balance and interest rate at this exact moment* but you probably have a decent estimate/feel of/for it.

The problem with technical debt is not technical debt; it's that most people are blind to it. Just as with a credit card, they just swipe the card and, hey!, new stuff!; they just commit the code and push it, and, hey!, new feature! When the bill arrives, they're surprised. Just as with financial debt, technical debt is a tool. Just as with a physical tool, you can use it to hurt yourself.

I run the product/dev group for a startup and we are constantly accruing and paying off technical debt. We do so very consciously and very openly, while constantly thinking/asking: if we do this quickly and accrue debt, when will it need to be paid?; will it slow development of other parts of the system?; did we accrue a debt without noticing it?; how much debt are we paying-off/cleaning-up this week? And I'm clear with the rest of the management team about where and when we're accruing debt and they use that knowledge when considering product/dev requests. IMO, it's critical that your company and team have a philosophy about technical debt recognition, accrual and payment.

* 3... 2... 1... A pedant just checked their balance and interest rate...
Since the article takes a while to get to the point teased by the headline, I'll spoil it here: The author believes that most non-rap works spread their references and allusions across a wide body of words, which allegedly makes them too hard to annotate.
Thanks for posting that. One of the best things I've ever listened to.
This is pretty much a cheap and default comment, but I would be so happy if everybody (especially websites calling themselves the "DealBook") would start plotting prices on a logarithmic scale.
The first chapter of JavaScript Allongé explains this really really well https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge/read
I'm always curious on why I got a downvote here? The silent downvote for no explanation at HN sometimes drove me from curious to furious.
A Hacking Hiatus
Actually, Gladwell has specifically said it does not really apply to sports.
I think people also forget that the point of the 10k hours is not just the time, but also the fact that experts actively spend time figuring our their weaknesses, and focus on that, while making sure their strengths don't start to wilt. Planning rather than just doing, are also important.
Roku TV
Play with Lego bricks, doodle, fly a kite, stare at clouds, let your inner child out.
It means that the language as such - the codebases written in it - have a readability problem. If every project is written differently with opposing coding standards and practices, then it adds a significant switching cost when moving to a different project, debugging systems that includes libraries from various sources or reusing code.

For ecosystems where there is a "one way to do it", then picking up a random project or library from github and using or changing it is easy, as it is understandable in the same way as my own code; for C++ it is, well, different.

And this is directly caused by the language - the technical details of the language significantly influence the code ecosystem that grows around it. Lisps are another example of this - because it's simple to define commonly used stuff yourself, it results in every project doing the same things differently, adding a serious cost in readability and maintenance for anyone that's not the original author.
Javascript for minimum LOC to move a ball across the screen, albeit in a constructed learning environment.

C for learning some low level concepts. probably don't get into string handling in C if you're new because it will frustrate you.

Java for implementing GUIs and forcing OO concepts
"...one of the hottest trends in consumer tech right now is making rich-person things available to normal schmucks"
CSS variables are here
Message users in your iOS app from Gmail, for Free
You can contribute plugins, sure, but the direction of the entire project is in the hands of one person. As others have said, updates have become more scarce in recent times. For example, it was almost 6 months between build Build 3061 and Build 3062.

Open Source doesn't imply that there's a productivity gain. For obvious reasons I'm a lot more comfortable using OS tools at work.
We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time. I may not be able to commit even a single hour of dedicated time per day... but I can certainly do something for a few minutes here and there throughout the day which adds up to an hour. How can we make that kind of practice more effective?

I saw some article go past a while ago, claiming that intensive practice works far better than the same amount of scattered practice.

Maybe use those scattered minutes to keep up on small tasks that would otherwise pile up, so you can set aside a full day every few weeks? Or use those few minutes to relax and do nothing, so you'll be more clear-headed (and presumably perform better) for whatever you do next...
Uh Oh Rob Lowe
Ha. The marketing/consultant's version.

1 hour = familiar (heard of it)
10 hours = proficient (1 day)
100 Hours = "good" (2 weeks)
1000 Hours = "expert" (6 months)

Although a general rule of thumb (that is true) is 3 months of full time work on a topic makes you "conversant"--good enough to pass yourself off as an expert to the unsuspecting. OF course, YMMV.
Rails internationalization: 3 quick tips and 1 crazy abuse
Thank you.

When I was taking Chinese classes in university, people would sometimes poke fun at the eccentric or badly accented English. I would as them how their Chinese sounds to their native-speaking instructors.

It is strange how the reaction to that was always one of confusion or dismissal.
>Even juniors can have good ideas.

I propose that software developers drop this whole idea of "junior developer". There are just developers.
GoReturnMe.com – Reward Based Online Lost and Found
The issue isn't that new housing isn't going to be built; in Vancouver, there are condo developments all over the place. The issue is that the vast majority of the housing in Vancouver consists of condo developments that are essentially unaffordable.

As a married, well-paid tech worker with a wife working a union job for a solid wage, we could live extremely well anywhere else, but in Vancouver the idea of buying a home is laughable. At our current combined income, we could 'afford' to buy a place if we had fifty thousand dollars in the bank, but most of the places we could buy are cheap, tiny condos that are barely large enough for the two of us, let alone a cat, a dog, and a baby on the way.

The current state of Vancouver is that it's cheaper to rent than buy, and the new developments going in aren't going to solve that problem at all. The new Vancouver House development in downtown Vancouver is being sold overseas first – to the wealthy elite in Singapore, for example – because it's essentially unaffordable to all but Vancouver's most wealthy (and they already have pricey condos downtown or sprawling mansions in the suburbs).

We rented a two-bedroom condo twenty minutes' walk from the downtown core for about $200 less than a reasonable mortgage would cost (assuming a down-payment larger than we have), but when you add strata fees and maintenance on top of that, it's far more cost-effective to own. It's possible to argue equity, but friends of mine who recently sold their condo to move to the UK approximately broke even on the five years they owned it. Others have lost money on condos they've purchased, but which haven't even finished being built yet.

Owning a home in Vancouver is unaffordable for most, and renting is slightly less unaffordable, but my rent in Vancouver was twice as much as my rent was in Montreal, and my salary certainly hasn't kept pace, and that won't change until more housing is built to appeal to the locals, and not the rich Asian investors/embezzlers and the rich Emirati – but that won't happen until it's more financially viable, and it's difficult to arrange that situation without inconveniencing (and angering) a lot of people, and having to field accusations of racism against Chinese immigrants (rather than classism against the rich elite who care nothing for Vancouver beyond its potential for real estate speculation).

In the meantime, we'll keep renting.
Ask HN: What tech companies have great learning and development teams?
I have always had a passion for learning and development, fostered through my time in the Navy in the Nuclear Engineering field.

However, I stayed away from L&D in the corporate world because of the general bad reputation they always seemed to have (in HR...just 'trainers not educators, not technical, etc.)

At Rackspace, for quite some time, I ran a portion of the product org building OpenStack products/services before moving officially into L&D and built a 31 person global L&D team. I would say the success of the team was having an entrepreneurial mindset (learning experiences, NOT training) and having a team that understood the tech.

So, here's the question: What tech companies have great L&D teams and why? I want to understand what makes them great and hopefully collaborate.

Thank you!!!!
List of films featuring powered exoskeletons
How to track down a Node.js performance bottleneck in Meteorjs
> Much of the future of communications is in space.

Not obvious. This month Google announced a big trans-pacific underwater internet cable system, for instance. Although it is clear satellites still have a major role in intercontinental communications, it's not clear to me whether this role will prevail in the future.

ref: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-asian-companies-invest-...
Yeah, I cut back significantly after talking to a cousin of mine who played college ball.

At first I was a bit frustrated because she was really interested in pitching, as was roughly half of her team. So when you play 3 games a week for a 4 month season, if you spread it around (like you should at a young age - give everyone a chance) you have each kid throwing about 2 innings a week. (6 inning games, ~8 kids who want to pitch on a 14 player team)

What's your thoughts on the right amount? Maybe a game a week and really concentrate on form and technique? (No fancy pitches, just straight with accuracy.)
my favorite is the banana pi: gigabit, sata etc

http://www.lemaker.org/

http://www.linuxx.eu/2014/08/banana-pi-raspberry-pi-upgraded...
You make a good point, I realized later when I was less tired and I was confusing the general type (synthetic) with agglutinative (specific sub-category).

Oh well, thanks for clarifying.
How  to Bolster Your Value as a User Experience Designer
"one event one album" doesn't make sense either. If you only have 16 words on your entire site, make sure they're correct.
Finally! Unfortunately you only get 16 addresses (::xxx0 - ::xxxf). It's not usually encouraged to give out such small allocations, even to end users, and this is even smaller than, e.g., Linode's already quite small maximum allocation size (4096 addresses). Well, anyway, at least the VMs finally have IPv6 access.

Now they just need to get custom images and custom kernels working and they'll be back on par with Linode as far as I'm concerned.
I can see the merit in dropping titles, but not the idea. There are most definitely "junior" developers and "not-junior" developers (call them "senior", "journeyman", "expert" or whatever). Experience is a real, actual thing, and it's reflected in the practice of every industry, including software development.
Why did an offensive Greggs logo show up in Google's web search?
I'm not sure why you were downvoted.

The reasons for taking shortcuts always seem good at the time, but regrettable in hindsight. As the saying goes: "Broken gets fixed. Shitty lasts forever."
It's strange. Everyone who's had a child is an expert on parenting.

Yours is just one data point. Here's another: it's perfectly possible to actually trust teenagers without regarding them as savages, while still catching the bad stuff that inevitably happens.

Different cultures tend to raise their kids differently. Many North American disciplinary actions are downright illegal here. Our kids still turn out fine.
"Kids"? Hell, I'm 31 and the only people I ever call are my parents.
Erdős-Bacon
Open-Sourcing My Music Composition Algorithm
Hey,

Good eye, we spotted this too. Will be changed super soon.

Now let me find who wrote that!!
I feel like these type of PKI proposals don't really address the various aspects of user adoption. How do you convince a user to use something like this?

Most users have no concept of keys, much less private and public keys. So how do you expect them to understand that they (1) need to generate a key pair, (2) keep one of those keys private, (3) register the other key with your service, (4) publish one of the keys on Twitter, (5) use a local email client instead of Gmail or Yahoo, and (6) keep re-certifying with your service every 30 days?

It's much easier to just tell someone to install TextSecure and use that for your one-off conversation, then go back to them using Gmail for everything else. Like it or not, OpenPGP competes in the same space as everything else, so if you want it to be adopted, you need to make it easier than the competition.

A good example of this type of failure is OpenID. OpenID is a great standard and allows for the user to have much greater control of their online profiles. However, the extra steps involved with setting up an OpenID in the first place means that it wasn't used by the vast majority of users.
That's what I get trying to balance rough numbers in my head. I was using roughly the number of atoms, not grams. Here's the math laid bare:

Frac Remain In 1 Day = 0.5 ^ ((1/365)/4,500,000,000 years)
Frac Remain In 1 Day = 0.999999999999578

Frac Decay In 1 Day = 1 - Frac Remain In 1 Day
Frac Decay In 1 Day = 4.22 * 10^-13

Have 4 Decays In 1 Day = Total U238 * Frac Decay In 1 Day
4 = Total U238 * 4.22 * 10^-13
4 / (4.22 * 10^-13) = Total U238
Total U238 = 9.48 * 10 ^ 12 atoms

I stand corrected, thanks for catching that.
Right, but now the metaphor is so malleable as to be worthless. It is almost literally "you should pay down debt, except when you shouldn't." With very little literature talking about the later.

Seriously, the rhetoric in use is "Living with technical debt is like living with a hole in your roof - you clean up the rain water the first couple times but in the long run you want to fix the damn hole." That isn't living with technical debt. That is living in a bloody broken home.

Instead, living with technical debt is living in a home where you still have low efficiency windows. Driving a gasoline car. Not having the latest heat exchange technology. Having AC pumped into a house that is now nothing but converters to DC.

Sure, in the future things will look different. Odds are high that it makes zero sense for you to force these changes today.
6 Easy Steps You Can Take Today That Will Make You Healthier:
You are right : ] Very different product though.
Right you are. Fixed the title. The the app does sync the notes themselves over SSL.

But this is still a risk, as the link to the app that does the syncing could be blocked to maintain a vulnerability, downgraded to a vulnerable version, or potentially compromised...
Oh man, that 4th-to-last picture fills me with happiness. So old school. Is that the drive head? Love the Vernier scale made out of PCBs. And the big-ass cast iron parts. And the 1/4"-20 socket head bolts. And the ultra-sparse through-hole PCB in the background. That picture made me so happy. Wish I had been around back in the day to program one of the old machines.
So.. going with camp 1 then, eh?
I did that basically, but I saved up enough to move to and live comfortably in SE Asia for at least 3 or 4 years.

I spend less then $400 a month, so maybe this lifestyle is not for everyone, and it's certainly not feasible with a family, but the move has totally changed my life. Before, I felt stuck and directionless. Now though, after a little less than a year of total freedom, I've finished two big projects that I'm proud of. I have a much wider range of skills and I'd be confident walking into an interview at a tech company. I hope I never have to though!

I would absolutely recommend a similar path for anyone struggling with the full-time work grind.
I think the all caps in the "WHAT DO YOU THINK?" part of the title are out of place on HN.
Great, thank you for the write-up. I'll definitely have to take a look.
Grandpa? Ouch! I'm three years younger than you!
This is pretty cool. There's a demo of it running on a Nexus 7[0].
--
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg
Mariusz, hmmm I was looking for $14.5 billion but if $14 billion is offered it may change our mind. Mariusz this comment and prediction will be remembered forever!
I used to prefer tabs (for the exact reason, tabs indicate an indent, spaces indicate a space) except for one edge case that has me using spaces now. If you're anal about making sure chained method calls line up on their own lines, spaces guarantee that across the board, but tabs would mess up the indent.

var foo = SomeTerriblyLongHorrificClass->withUnreasonablyLargeChildren()
->dueToTheOddNumberOfCharachters()
->sometimesItsNiceToUseSpaces()
->here()
It lets you put your functions where you want, for readability, but still be able to use them where they need to be used.
I kind of like it. The moderated discussion on ProductHunt is often actually quite good and constructive.
If you are so sure, make money of it. I'm sure there are people that believe otherwise.
If you're a CS researcher who actually codes as part of their research, much of the time you'll be banging out barely functional proof of concept code to get some results you can take to conference.

I'm not sure there's any group that actually does focused practice coding for a significant number of hours on a regular basis.
Awesome, my bot got me some while they were cheep :)
How do you plan to net 1 USD per computer per hour? On Amazon EC2, 2XL on demand instances are only about 0.50 USD per hour. These are probably more powerful instances than the computers many of your potential users would have and also have the advantage of being uniform and a well-known commodity, and they're still half the price.
i was referring more to the original 10 000 hour rule proposed by K. Anders Ericsson & co.

I would also say that in Outliers, Gladwell seems to implying that while 10 000 hours of practice is common in such 'outliers', simple luck is an equal if not greater part.
"...Engineers make plenty of business decisions every day: Deciding the size of a database field, for instance, or a data type. Those types of choices impact the business, admittedly in a micro way..."

Micro? I have seen decisions about database architecture that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of work over time.
A good point to be sure, but I disagree entirely in my own case. In fact I realized this a while ago and put strict controls so that I actually earn whatever free time I have. My current schedule looks something like: wake up at 7am, apply to jobs during the morning, then I get to work on side projects and read technical texts the rest of the day, usually a good 6+ hrs (with exercise and some people time thrown in). I fear for the day I actually get a job, haha...
Isn't this what "Color" was supposed to be before their giant valuation and implosion?
Show HN: XMoto Port in HTML5/CoffeeScript
Depending on your skill level, you may be able to work a deal with your employer to work reduced hours, or to disappear for a few months of each year -- basically, unpaid leave, but as a regular thing.

I worked reduced hours for quite a while after my second child was born; and we have an developer on the team who disappears for 3 months a year to go be a theater director.

There's basically quite a lot of flexibility that's perfectly possible, and not even costly for the employer, but it's not habitually permitted. I suspect in a lot of companies you might be able to get a lot more leeway just by asking for it, though.

See if you can get away with only working a half-day Friday, in exchange for an extra hour the other 4 days, for example.
Not sure if this problem is fixed, but Reddit requires each day of the campaign to have the same numbner of impressions.

So if monday has 100 impressions available, tuesday has 100 impressions available, but wednesday has only 1 impression available... then a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday campaign can only be for 3 impressions. A shorter campaign (Monday-Tuesday) will give you access to 200 impressions.

The "0 impression" number in your post might be because one day out of that huge timeframe is completely bought out.
Eh, I don't know if one or the other is necessarily correct, I think it is a spectrum and depends on an individual project's situation.

So for one company tech debt is something that will cripple them next week and for another it is something that they can manage over a long period; that still matches how we discuss financial debt so I see no conflict.
Maybe not related to your softball injury point, but women in general are far more at risk for knee injuries than men. It's even more problematic in sports like soccer and basketball.

And I empathize with your arm problems. I'm still feeling the nagging effects of my Little League shoulder injury, which happened in a game where my coach showed up late and I didn't have as much time as normal to warm up before it started...
Nope, can confirm it sucks on mac desktops too. At least with an Apple magic mouse.
3 Automatic Ways to Increase Security
When to Delegate? Try the 70% Rule
Islamic State switches from Twitter to Diaspora