skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do the same thing, but with booze. The Idaho border is 15 minutes away, and the amount you save (at least, if you drink as much as I do) is well worth the time spent getting there and back.

Or if you're in my area and need cigarettes, you drive to the nearest reservation and buy them tax free (which like you point out, makes a huge difference). This one is a little bit more of a legal gray area, but that never stopped anyone.
Most usually I still do write commit messages, and that's actually an important additional value of this workflow for me. That said, the commit message is again often a quick and raw: usually a quick in-progress summary of the most important work in the commit, but not perfected at all - just quick something, can have errors, ignores all Commit Message Guidelines like length or whatever. One benefit is, as well noted in other post in the thread, that it will remind me "what the hell was I thinking doing that" when I look at it tomorrow. Second one, obviously, is to help distinguish those commits when doing any sculpting/molding later (i.e. "git rebase -i" & "git cherry-pick" & "git merge --squash").

But that, as I said, is most usually. Sometimes, as you considered, I do write just "WIP" or "dump of current state". The second one, mostly when I already don't remember WTF was I doing here... (i.e. when I forgot to commit month ago and left some stuff on the table). The first one... I'm not sure now. But I know I sometimes do; with some guilt too; but usually the need for having that particular stuff committed is stronger than the guilt...

So, still can't really understand why anyone would want to reject it :) but that said, thanks a lot for expressing your approach. As much as it still puzzles me :)
China's surveillance is always so blatant and public, they don't bother trying to hide it like America (which is analogous to political corruption in both countries).

When the artist Ai Weiwei had his email account compromised by the state, they simply logged into his email webmail UI and forwarded a copy of his emails to a 3rd party email address. They didn't even bother intercepting his email at the network or service provider level.

Edit: > "Apple increased the encryption aspects on the phone allegedly to prevent snooping from the NSA. However, this increased encryption would also prevent the Chinese authorities from snooping on Apple user data."

It's a shame articles keep confusing Apple's harddisk encryption with network data encryption. :\
iCloud is not the only victim here. Google's IPv6 access has been suffering the same attack since September. (IPv4 access has been blocked entirely for 5 months)

It's not a shocking news, however. Apple has already moved [1] some of its storage servers to Beijing. The attack could just be the authorities making sure that Chinese users' iCloud data is actually stored in China.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/15/apple-taps-china-telecom-as...
I went and got an MBA and jumped into consulting. Because I worked for a number of startups before that, my niche started out being helping big companies foster innovation internally. At this point, I'm more on the marketing/product side of the equation, which is extremely interesting in my mind. You really need a tech background to do product for anything but retail goods these days anyway; and in the media products space I work in, it's almost mandatory.

Net result is I took on a bunch of debt to go back to school but my salary is much higher now and I have a lot more control over my destiny. I don't regret it for a second.
There's really nothing wrong with pushing your changes, and even force-pushing, so long as its not in your master branch.
That becomes a problem if you also want to have your project to be buildable on Windows, and it seems silly to exclude one platform solely because your build process doesn't support it.
The problem is that it is now 2014, and many if not most of those companies couldn't function without software. They're just deluding themselves. There are fewer and fewer businesses in which software developers really are "peripheral/support employees". If you are company with software developers on the payroll(instead of using commodity IT), you're probably not able to function without them.

You are probably a lot harder to replace and a lot more skilled than many of those several hundred "core" employees. You probably are a "core" employee, it's just really convenient for them to not think of you as such.

As long as you don't complain or jump ship, they'll just keep doing that. Of course it's not all that tempting to jump ship, since even businesses that are "inherently software business" underpay developers, so if you're comfortable where you it's hardly worth it to move on for a few extra bucks. Despite the fact that all of those businesses are definitely whining loudly about the scarcity of developers.

Hell, even if you are "peripheral", if the same company needs to invest huge sums of money in office space, equipment or other "peripheral" stuff to "support" those "core employees", they will simply do the math and pull their wallets. It has nothing to do with "peripheral", it should be about scarcity and economic value. Paying you twice as much won't make a dent in their spreadsheets, nor will it make you insanely overpaid compared to many other employees.

But unfortunately in reality nobody bothers to do the math, it's all about "perceived" value, and as long as both you and your employer live inside the reality distortion field that totally undervalues developers, you'll continue to get underpaid.

The few companies that forget about prejudices towards techies and simply do the same cold hard math they apply to every other investment have absolutely no problem paying way above "market rate".
I use this http://pastebin.com/HDJvD3GC which as I say isn't my own work (although I've tweaked it a bit).

It depends on some git output strings, so is theoretically fragile but in practice has been stable over a few years of git updates.
(I've never worked at a bank, but I've talked with people who do.)

It can also be work with too many grotty doesn't-teach-you-anything-technical challenges. For example, a bank that has acquired multiple companies with incompatible, archaic, poorly maintained systems, and struggles to keep them interoperating while stitching them together under some ill-considered technical policies and bizarre regulatory side constraints. Struggling with medium-scale technical challenges that only exist because larger-scale technical best practices aren't followed isn't as productive as it could be. You do learn things but it's akin to learning how to develop code in a dysfunctional language in the absence of specifications and source code control systems and testing: too many of the things you learn tend to be kinda messed up. And by the Anna Karenina principle they may not generalize well to your next job, even if that job also has more than its share of screwed-up challenges.

All businesses tend to have some proportion of work that is too idiosyncratic and ill-conceived to be satisfying or to be a good long-term career choice, and it's dangerous to overgeneralize from anecdotes. But I don't know any way to sharpen up a claim about the proportion of idiosyncratic ill-conceived work so that we could test the claim with proper statistical sampling. Falling back to anecdotal evidence then because it's all I have, there might really be a tendency for some parts of banking have more than their share of this.
A cloud service where you just spin up your own server instances is a commodity service which will have low margins. In contrast, a cloud service where you use an API to have the cloud do something for you instead of running your own servers will have much better margins. An examples of this would be Azure Mobile Services.
"How many people are qualified to be Secretary of State? The pool of people who have been around enough countries and political leaders to operate at that level is small."

That's actually an interesting question, what sort of qualifications are needed to do a job like that

I actually think that the universe of people who could do those jobs is actually pretty large

the real limiter is that if you pick someone too far out of the box, you're going to take political fire for it

like Bush did when he tried to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court

in contrast, when you nominate a known entity, ie Clinton to Secretary of State, they have the political clout to keep unhappy hopefuls (and their bidders) quiet
Apache Storm Added to Hadoop on Azure
Why is this comment getting upvoted? It's pretty insulting and arrogant to paint a massive swathe of our community as stupid, unambitious people who never progressed past hello world.

Let's remember that in those 42 years the number of BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL jobs has diminished through to almost nothing. The last person I met who described themselves as a COBOL programmer was about 10 years ago, and even they said they did it for the money as there were so few of them left.

So the programmers edw519's knows have in all probability probably managed to switch from COBOL to to VB6, then Java or PHP and then maybe even C# or Ruby and are probably nowhere near as stagnant or unambitious as he's portraying them.

It's that or he hangs round at COBOL programmer's meetups.
In America, they limit the number of days they'll pay you while out sick. It could be worse. Fast food businesses refuse to pay for even a single day out sick and have been known to fire workers for taking more than one or two unpaid sick days. They actively lobby against laws mandating ANY paid sick days.

America is the only country in the developed world where people tolerate and expect restaurants to pressure workers into preparing food while they're sick and can barely feed their own families. Don't eat fast food if you visit.
Wikipedia doesn't do narrative justice to the interesting history behind Pareto. We tried to correct that in this blog post (http://www.emphatic.co/blog/know-stuff-think-shouldnt/).
The problem is that nobody has come up with a good way to filter through the self-published dross to find the gold.

Without the publishers filtering you can't just pick a book at random and be ensured it probably won't make you want to claw your eyes out (at least publishers would clean up the major spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and incoherent plots).

So what is left is popularity, and as already established that doesn't stop shitty authors writing books.

Peer recommendations are a real crap-shoot unless you have vetted your peers thoroughly, which takes time.

Whoever can build out an automated system to rank and recommend self-published books will make a fortune.
KIFSU and the Mobile User Expectations
For simple games, something like Game Maker is great. You can start off with simple drag-and-drop commands, and scale up to using the somewhat C-like language, Game Maker Language.
Apache Libcloud
They're also owned by Amazon. I don't have a problem with that, but I imagine someone trying to get away from Amazon would.
Doug Cutting, Chief Architect of Cloudera, on the Growth of Hadoop
Say hello to the Ubernet
I build cool stuff, I have kept up to date on new technologies, and languages. But I don't have a big network of people who "need a website" and I don't build websites, so I don't have people constantly calling me offering me work. That doesn't make me someone who has "done the same job for 30 years".

My skill is not marketing my skills on a freelance basis. My skill is in engineering.. and a variety of others (like startups, people management, etc.)

I hate 80/20 like splits that are so binary.

Part of the problem here is that it's very difficult for many people under 30 to imagine someone over 40 is not falling into your %75 category. They already think that most people can't do fizz buzz.

I once had an interview with a 20 year old with 2 years of experience. HE was the head of development at one of those startups that raised millions on kickstarter.

He asked me the question: "How would you do feature X in language Y?". I pointed out that you couldn't do it in language Y but that you could do these other things that were similar. He then said " In language Z you do this and that's the answer I was looking for". But language Z is not the same as language Y.

Flubbing a question? No problem. Everyone can get nervous. Giving a BS question and then using the "wrong" answer as a reason to not hire me? Suspicious. So, why would he try to do that? Well, it turns out we were on a video call.

Who wants to hire someone old enough to be their dad? I understand that sentiment.

But the Software Industry hasn't developed a pyramid of job titles you can climb.
Oh good god I do Business Objects work right now. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Not even for 150k.
If anything, this should demonstrate the exact opposite. The code that just got fixed predates OpenBSD. If you could measure the amount of buffer overflows in the tree on the day OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, and year after year up to now, you'd see a very clear trend. The situation is only getting better, and the fact that the OpenBSD team tries to clean up and polish old code instead of just rewriting and churning out "cool new" replacements for everything really helps. Year after year, the same old code is subjected to mass audits (such as the recent reallocarray() job, wight might've very well triggered the discovery of some bugs in col, including the one referred to in this commit). Other bugs are found in actual use. And, of course, new tools find new problems. New "hostile" changes in the system reveal new bugs. The mature code in the system really does get better.
iPhone 6 for email designers
Chartbeat: Opening Up Our Measurement Process
NSA asks itself: is it ok for CTO to also work for former head's firm?
Indeed. Your resume is just a tool to get your foot in the door, to get that first conversation with a hiring manager or an interview. Extraneous things, like irrelevant experience, get in the way of that.

Note this will depend on such things as having enough experience to show you're a generically good employee. If you were a new graduate I'd look favorably on e.g. in high school starting out at entry level in a fast food restaurant and working your way up to, say, shift manager (if you could make it that far, very favorably).
If you rode around in a 2005 Cobalt that had these issues you would be shocked each time you lost control of your vehicle. There's another service bulletin that isn't mentioned in this article about inadequate insulation around the transmission computer wiring harness. In addition to the unwanted shut downs, the automatic transmission would sometimes go AWOL in the rain. Have you ever tried to drive an automatic when the transmission computer has bad grounds? It's horrifying. This car didn't kill my GF, but it tried more than a few times.
Hey Patrick, could you talk more about the options available to you if you are good enough to get into AmaGooBookSoft, as well as ready to take on plenty of risk?
Unfortunately, since most elections in the US are winner-take-all and not proportionally representative, voting for any party other the big two generally decreases the chance of one's desirable election outcome.

(I say this as a registered Green(-Rainbow). I'll be voting for Hillary unless it looks like she has a wide margin.)
Visual Maths: A Brief History of CGI
apologists - a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial.

Defending Apple eg. very first comment below my comment claims Apple is not showing adds whereas someone showed this: http://i.imgur.com/1hdtCjB.png?1
> until I got a clue and scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was (removed education dates;

I've done that.

> I'd already been trimming older jobs due to length and lack of relevance)

And will probably try that as well. I agree that removing any indicators of age helped a lot with getting interviews. This would also help with clueless agents contacting me about PHP or Perl jobs when it's been a very long time since I did either of those things.
Faster YouTube upload, Dropbox and online backup – SuperTCP
So China is double-dipping? I was hoping that post-Snowden, this kind of request from some countries that companies need to store data locally, to make sure the data isn't taken by the US government, would encourage companies to encrypt the data end-to-end (client-side), before they get it into their clouds. Then nobody could complain about the data not being safe from the US government. It should be safe since even the company shouldn't have access to it.

I realize this isn't the real reason why China told Apple to build a datacenter there, but that's the one they used publicly, and as long as the company itself can get access to that data, then the argument is a pretty plausible one, even from China. Apple, Google and others could weaken this argument by adopting end-to-end encryption for their services.

Unfortunately, it seems the companies decided to keep the data as is, but build the data centers in Russia, China and wherever else they might ask them to do it.
EDIT: Wording of 'dropping support' to 'dropping support for the legacy API'. Also added a link to the 1Password blog.

1Password dropped support for the legacy Dropbox sync API some time ago. I was a bit bogged as well, because it needed me to re-buy 1Password from the Appstore. Previously I had v3, v4 needed to be re-bought. When you were a user of 1Password v3, they made that very transparent and also wrote[1] about it on their blog

That sucked, _but_ I get why they did it. v3 used an API of DB that was legacy and they didn't want to support it anymore, because they had a new implementation around the corner which used iCloud.

And in my experience synching got improved a lot. Yes, re-buying sucks, but that's the developers choice. That's not related to iCloud at all. Plus, the new version works better for me, so kudos to 1Password to improving their product - and charging for it seems to work, I paid them lots of money and still am a happy customer(;

1. http://blog.agilebits.com/2013/08/08/1password-3-dropbox-syn...
First off, iCloud has worked great for me.
Secondly, you're not made to use it at all... Apple makes it really easy to turn off in settings, and with particularly fine grained control. If you don't use it, things fall back gracefully to local storage.
Thirdly, I've not seen a competitor that works better. Google isn't even trying (it's web only- the equivalent of iCloud.com without the numbers, pages and keynote apps for mobile and desktop.) That's not a slam on google, the web is what google does. It's just the closest competitor.

If iCloud was bad in comparison to something else, people would be using that other thing.

I'm just glad I can now finally get rid of Dropbox once and for all.
Why would you expect Safari to not communicate with the web? I'm mystified by this attitude.
I tend to write to disk after every edit (a bad habit, I know, but it's pretty ingrained in my muscle memory), so as-is, this would spam me quite a bit.

A better criterion for determining when to display the message would be to count the non-empty lines of the diff, and only show it if it passes a threshold.

Or: only if the added/removed lines ratio is > 1, or something like that.
The Scandinavian country in question, might just be Sweden, though didn't look into it.

High fat has grown in popularity because the actual effects it have. People have started to feel much better and lose weight at the same time.

It's unfortunate the way the government treated Annika Dahlqvist when she first started recommending her diabetes patients to avoid carbohydrates and start with high fat instead. I think at some point she was shut down and prosecuted, but I am not sure.
"They should also enable two-step verification for their iCloud accounts. This will protect iCloud accounts from attackers even if the account password is compromised."

I wonder if 2FA is really that safe in a country like that, they have all the means to intercept the second channel, it just requires knowledge about the account owner or some not to complex synchronization to detect auth codes sent via text messages.
Does this only occur when the user logs into iCloud using the web, or does it happen on the device as well?

Does anyone know if iOS uses certificate pinning when connecting to iCloud services, and if so if that is sufficient to prevent against this type of attack?
Why aren't tech journalists responding to pitches?
I've had several announcements about pet-projects of mine that got to the front page of HackerNews. And although that doesn't mean that the projects were promising, game-changing, or investor-attracting, it at least means they are somewhat noteworthy in the technology world.

My pet projects are not a startup, but nevertheless I pitch them to popular tech news sites, for the sake of the experiment. With absolutely zero response. At some point several people (including here on HN) pointed out that I should not write to the generic, catch-all news@sometechnewssite.com, but I should target individual authors that seem to be interested in similar topics. And so I did; with no response whatsoever, again.

Two concerns:

1. Why do they have a news@ / tips@ emails, if nobody reads that?

2. Are technology people, and especially startup founders at the mercy of tech journalists, trying to get personal connections to them in order to get something published?

While my projects are not my startups, and I've not thrown money at them, I imagine the confusion that a startup may have, when it hits a brick wall when trying to get publicity.

It seems that tech journalists (not all of them, of course) are not quite competent, but are also over-confident (just like any other journalist, actually). And they not only report "news" from the technology field (though many of the big tech sites are not tech tabloids; just look at the front page of Mashable), but they are also often judges of whether a startup is good or bad. And I don't believe they are competent in that either.

On the other hand, does it actually matter? If a piece of technology is really good, it probably won't need TechCrunch coverage to be successful.

Maybe only the readers suffer from the inability of tech journalists to curate interesting content. But on the other hand - that's why we have hacker news.
Right now there is a firehouse of job offers from recruiters on linkedin, and all a good developer has to do to find work is take a drink from that firehose.

While I enjoy the current situation, it's unlikely to last. Sometimes we forget that there's plenty of people who have simply built up a clientele and a repuation through plain old networking. These jobs tend to be more lucrative and probably don't require you to learn the flavor-of-the-month js framework. It's no surprise that we don't see many experienced professionals competing for what are essentially entry-level jobs (despite the use of the word senior in the job title and despite the high salaries inexperienced developers command). Obviously not all experienced professionals have built up that network. Those are the people you see applying for jobs.

Source: I spent a couple years getting to know a network of CTO's and architects who have been doing ecommerce since it's inception. They are in demand, they don't apply for jobs, and they are paid handsomely, and yes some of them are grandfathers or grandmothers.
You can get around this, the CPF is required only for card payments. If you pay with Paypal you don't need a CPF.
Helping other people to beat this level = trolling level over 9000 :D
Didn't Sweden actually pass a law taxing fat at some point? Actually, now I think about it, it was Denmark.