skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever.

I'd only partially agree with this.

One of these things is not like the others: HTML and CSS are not programming languages; JavaScript is, and we're treating it like one now. As we move into a world of "client side applications" rather than "dynamic HTML," JS can be an order of magnitude more complex than it was just a few years ago. If you're going to use Angular or Backbone well, you're going to need to have a solid understanding of at least a few design patterns. You're probably going to need to know the difference between a queue and a stack and when you'd use one or the other (or neither), and you're going to need to be able to look at a problem and say "this is something I need recursion for." There's an awful lot of people who could make a good living as a web developer in 2004 who couldn't in 2014.

Having said all that, I think the current hiring process, particularly among Facebooks and Googles and startups that emulate them, is pretty heavily biased toward things one only learns in computer science degree programs (or when one is desperately floundering around trying to solve a "take home" interview puzzle). I don't want to claim that it's bad to know how to do directed graph cycle detection in your language of choice, but the need to do that is only going to come up in fairly specific circumstances -- and it's more important to know that someone you're hiring can find the information necessary to solve a problem and apply it than it is to know whether or not they have that information memorized.

(I'd also argue that demonstrating they can write readable, well-documented code that other people can actually work on is really important, but I almost never see that tested, oddly enough.)
With 100k beta users in 2 weeks we launch TakeOff
I agree with you.

Suffices to see how several founders (of successful startups) were rejected or quit big companies. I believe Google is one of the worse offenders there.
It's nearly 2015, we are in a post-Snowden, and yet we are still considering the design pattern of "start with untrusted/unencrypted connection, and then just use an optional 'upgrade' command to make it encrypted/secure" acceptable.

One Word: SSLStrip

We have had to completely overhaul HTTP/HTTPS because this "start insecure, go to secure" just does not work. And even then, its been a series of hacks like Strict Transport Security, preloading lists for HSTS into browsers, OSCP Stapling, hard coding revoke lists, etc.

And now we need to go through all this pain again for mail?!?!

This is incredibly stupid and short sighted. Any network protocol that is sending personal/private information, or sends authentication credentials, needs to do so over an encrypted channel. New protocols get a single port, encryption is required. Legacy protocols which do not have an encrypted channel, like SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, need a separate, dedicated port number for the encrypted version.
This company isn't targeting the SV "Kool Aid" crowd for engineering on the main product. Perhaps their web/mobile apps or other secondary products might target that crowd, but their core product is one that requires hardware and software teams working together, with the software teams implementing systems (applications or even lower level) programming, not fad driven JS-client-on-Ruby-backend web/mobile "apps".

There just isn't enough such talent especially in Hollywood for them to attract it locally. By the same token, the tech industry there in general isn't strong enough to be attractive to someone coming from a tech-rich area like the Bay (or even Chicago or New York). I would not move to Florida for work without some significant salary and stability guarantees, because in the event the company goes belly up, relocates to a place I couldn't/wouldn't follow, or terminates my employment the quality of the "fallback" jobs is atrocious (especially in comparison to the work apparently being done at this place).
How often do post series A startups fail?
The question is pretty self explanatory. A friend of mine said that 1% equity at a post series A startup is "virtually the same as $1M in salary". If that's true, it means there is almost no risk in taking equity at a (well funded) startup relative to an established company. I'd like to know if this is true, because it'd be amazing if it was - it would mean that investors rarely make mistakes with this type of investment.

My few minutes of Googling didn't turn up any hard numbers. Anecdotes are nice but I would love to actually see some stats if anyone knows. Can I hear your stories and your data?
> It'll only grow, though. Most certainly.

Only up to a point. Systemd is getting too bloated, and software engineering tells us that the effort to maintain this will grow exponentially.

So we have two options: if systemd improves and decides to follow UNIX principles, good. Otherwise it'll be replaced like consolekit et al. It's great that we have so many init systems to choose from. The only problem now is software that hard depends on systemd when a single line of code could avoid that.
Boomerang for Gmail Review – How to Schedule Sending Emails and Keep Inbox Clean
No, but this explains a nice trick to use it without remembering the commit message http://technosorcery.net/blog/2012/08/05/updated-git-rebase-...

With that you can do:

git fixup HEAD~2
Journald is still there. So are libqrencode and libmicrohttpd and (possibly) the hook for the coredumps (that is now reverted in systemd 214 when - after almost 2 years from the first bug opened on the matter - they discovered that hard limiting a core dump to around 700MB using a #define and without respecting ulimit was not a good idea.[1]).

Systemd components are NOT interchangeable with something else, so let's stop pretending they are. Please.

[1] CentOS and RHEL 7 ship with an earlier version of systemd, and I'm not sure if the packages have been patched in some way or not to fix this. If not, good riddance if you are a sysadmin trying to pass core dumps along to developers.
Hacker News -

I want to take this opportunity to personally say thank you! The community here has been instrumental to our success. You’ve been our supporters, beta testers, fans, and critics. Even the comment threads here have been a valuable source of feedback :)

I want to reiterate a point that James made in the blog post: Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google. Our entire team is joining Google, and James and I will continue to run things day-to-day. You’ll still see us around the tech scene at meetups, conferences, and hackathons, and we’ll still be active here and on Twitter.

Thanks again -- big things are coming!
It would greatly surprise me if a member of the Olympic men's volleyball team said "you don't really play volleyball." People at the top of their field are way more likely to say "that's great! Keep it up!" The same applies in our field. The really great programmers I have known don't play the "you are not a real programmer" game.
You're still treating cows and people as equivalent: thanks to the microorganisms in their guts, cows break down fiber, which is entirely indigestible for humans.

Unless you know the glycemic load of both digested corn and digested grass for cows you can't compare them with the figures for humans. And more importantly, drawing nutritional wisdom from such a comparison is foolish at best.
These guys have created an incredibly useful and unique platform. Congrats!
For arXiv submissions, please submit the abstract link; in this case: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401

The advantage is immediate: One gets a plain website with the abstract, which allows the visitor to decide whether the PDF download is worth it. The PDF itself is only one more click away.

I personally would also leave out the v1, as that link automatically goes to the latest version in all cases.
Well, as you know, I had relationships in the music industry from my previous gigs at music startups. One in particular, the manager of The Grouch & Eligh, was someone I could truly geek out with regarding these geeky matters. I had just finished doing a bunch of research on successful campaigns at the same time The Grouch & Eligh were looking to put out an album. Took a little convincing (as often is the case with crowdfundig virgins), but the reasons were too compelling.

I can say with authority that the hesitancy I felt from artists just 1-2 years ago regarding crowdfunding has rapidly been deteriorating. Like exponentially. So much so that I don't mind giving away some of my tricks. There's just so much more demand than there are actual "experts" in this space.
I agree.

>>> I don't have a GitHub page, nor do I have an interest in having one.

Glad I'm not the only one.

>>> I don't care about hackathons or solving puzzles.

Couldn't have been said any better. I never produce anything good when its tightly timed, under pressure, when people are watching over you.

>>> I hate the term 'nerd' or 'geek'. I am neither and I find the terms insulting.

Add "ninja", "guru", "rockstar" and other hipster name floating around these days to your list. I hate it too.

I've been doing programming for 3 years on and off. I program for fun, as a hobby and I can't see myself programming to meet unrealistic deadlines year in year out for someone, that's my personal opinion. I grew up in an athletic environment so I also play rugby and sprint for fun too. The most I would do is to program small projects at my own pace and share them to people or keep it to myself. I hate rushing into things which I feel hackathons encourage.I like to think, research, think and then create.

I program because I generally like making things, not just programs but also technical drawing, house designs (architectural and interior) and custom-modded computer builds , it has no correlation to solving puzzles or cramming algorithms I probably will never use.

Edit: There is this insanely think barrier filled with confusion in Human Resources, as a recent Computer Science graduate, some of the job descriptions have unimaginably high expectations for entry positions I actually think you have no place here if you don't know 4+ languages, 2+ trendy frameworks, and 1-2 years of experience from a fresh graduate.
I came to say exactly the same thing.

A puzzle is a puzzlemaster saying "try to find the exit in this maze I devised!". But I'd rather build my own mazes that I'm more interested in, and then try to find the exits for my mazes.

If people find other people's problems interesting, then good for them. Mostly I find that my curiosity creates the most interesting puzzles, perfectly suited to what I'm interested in.

In other words, implicit in liking puzzles is the assumption that you care for what the puzzlemaster cares for. I find that double coincidence to be rare (for instance, Gardner's puzzles as discussed today here are mostly uninteresting to me).
IPv6 picks up steam
thx for your advice. really helpful. I totally understand the cost and dependency issues but i am willing to consider it as long as i can build a good scalable system.

Oh and Yes, I love Visual Studio. That's one MS tool I have used heavily before and absolutely love it. The debugging features is second to none in my opinion.
i will definitely check out SO's miniprofiler more. looks awesome.
I agree. So far I've seen it as a classic conservatives vs. liberals debate. The conservatives have no interest at all in changing the Unix paradigm under Linux. It works perfectly well, thank you. The liberals see it as archaic and unsuited to a wide variety of new use cases including rapid-deployment VMs, containers, mobile and laptop computers, and the desktop in general.

I side with the liberals here, but with a few caveats. I'm not a huge fan of systemd, though I agree that it'll probably get fixed and so far it seems better than the hairy old SysV-init mess.

The debate is doing more harm than even a slightly broken systemd would do-- Linux is already far too fragmented to no benefit. I'm all for freedom but I don't like pointless forks that add nothing.
I'd argue that being able to think laterally across multiple parts of the web browser is much more important for front-end development than having the typical CS background (algos, data structures, etc).

But the CS background certainly doesn't hurt. Especially when it comes to stepping back and figuring out how to do the same stuff with less code (i.e. making good architectural decisions and finding the right frameworks for the job), instead of diving straight in and producing a giant mess of code, which is quite easy to do on the front-end if you're not careful. (Especially if you throw JQuery in the mix -- at that point you have a hearty soup of DOM manipulation code.)
Let's hope google doesn't kill Firebase soon, would be a shame.
Congratulations on not using the word "journey" once in your blog post or in this message.
I don't come to HN looking to generate new ideas. I come to be exposed to things I might potentially be interested in, and to learn from those who might know more than me. If I generate any new ideas at all, it's outside of the time I'm engaged here (when things have time to percolate and my focus isn't so narrow).
The linked CJR article concludes that the Guardian acted ethically and responsibly.
I have come to rely on firebase for a number of my projects, and I have mixed feelings when I see this news. This team does awesome work, though, and I'm glad that they seem to be highly valued.

I hope they will improve integration with AngularJS while not dropping support for Ember and other third party integrations.
Singapore’s Infocomm Investments Brings Fund to Europe
Huge congrats to you guys!

Still loving the name "Plankton".
Shell scripting isn't "archaic nonsense" at all, it's just that the warts from how most shells implement their command language (ksh/bash/POSIX sh) are holding us back. If you go look at Plan 9 rc shell scripts, you'll see how much cleaner they are. In addition, the s6 people have done some interesting things with execline (which looks kind of like Tcl), which works as a chain loader instead of holding the shell resident, has a simple parser and is performant: http://skarnet.org/software/execline/

The more I realize all the untapped potential lying around, the more I realize how so many Linux users are living in their monoculture. Unfortunately there is no one there to amplify all the good efforts and hidden gems scattered all over the place, so you have people just reading Phoronix and LWN articles and standing in their bubble. Meanwhile, all the non-Linux Unices and the "toy project" builders are doing great things, but everyone thinks they're irrelevant and dying.
Linux/unix has a bit of an issue with it's init aging systems. One simple example is that they are serial, meaning that services start one by one with little to no concurrency. This causes several issues. Also, the most popular variant, system V is difficult to maintain having multiple directories for various run levels and other cumbersome features. I won't go into details here, just know that the popular init systems needed a refresh.

There are other options, but systemd seems to have caught on as the popular option for a replacement. The issue that most people take with systemd is that it does much more than replace init. It replaces cron, has a login management hooks, has it's own network daemon, replaces the system logging facilities and more. It's a serious complex system.

The issue some take with systemd has a few facets:

1) Some feel that systemd's approach to managing everything goes against Unix's core principles where services and applications are supposed to be small, self contained entities that work in unison to form a cohesive system.

2) It can be daunting task to switch over to systemd as you have to relearn many traditional unix tools that most take for granted (remote logging for example).

3) Security minded people are concerned that a single service is touching so many parts of the core system all at once. There have been many complaints levied that such a large change introduces too much risk into the ecosystem all at once.

4) Some have accused the dev team of having a "not invented here" problem. I've seen it asked many times why they really needed to replace cron or logging.

The pro-systemd stance is that they are simply cleaning up many of the antiquated systems. Cron, logging, and init definitely all needed an overhaul. Linux never had a good network daemon and there are good reasons for the other things they are doing. The systemd team sees systemd as not just an init system but basically the system manager. So, by that view, this all makes sense.

Ultimately, it's a fundamental difference of opinion about what services in general should or should not look like on a unix/linux system.
George Lucas Rips Hollywood Studios: They've ‘Always Been the Problem’
Mongeese: A supercharged mongoose Array class
I love programming, but I hate puzzles.

Solving puzzles is nothing like programming to me. Programming to me means crafting your own pieces of the puzzle and being able to create something unique and beautiful.

Of course programming has some bad and boring sides. I would compare those to solving a jigsaw puzzle.
kopy.io developer here, happy to answer questions / listen to ideas if you have any :)
As a self-professed "boring" programmer, I think a lot times I'm extra useful on a team because I don't expect my work to be a fun puzzle and I'm willing to take on things that aren't much like a puzzle, but are still important.
Losing face: How Facebook disconnects us
I like puzzles (jigsaw or otherwise), just not as an essential criteria for getting a job.
"Wow, you solved the knapsack problem using dynamic programming! Great. Now here's 2 million lines of 30-year old code, much of it crufty. You'll be a natural!"
Hoverboard created (for real), using copper/aluminum surfaces
uh... oh boy. you're really pushing the boundaries of our testing... :)
I love puzzles - especially ones that are unicolor or close to it but do have weird shapes - but never related it to programmings as a whole. That just seems wrong to me so I'd say your question should be phrased otherwise as it's far from a simple yes/no question. Just depends too much on what you thing 'programmer' means.

Programming itself is such a vague and general term me and my friends tend to split it in smaller, somewhat better defined aspects when discussing about it. I'd say aspects related to creating new code/design/refactoring don't have a whole lot to do with puzzles. Lowlevel debugging of nasty problems on the other hand does have quite a lot in common with puzzles. I should check some research on this, but wouldn't be surpised if one effectively uses different areas of the brain for these aspects as well.
Thanks for a great product. I hope that Google can just leave the product team intact so they can continue to deliver.
How do you know how difficult it is to fix the technical debt of the code base? Have you seen the source?

> It absolutely affects the experience.

1. See above.

2. MS will probably fix it eventually once they fully transition

> Again, the code performed reasonably well before. The new devs "cleaned it up" without measuring the performance impact of their style changes, and now everyone is paying for it.

See my first line.

> Ah, the old "you can't complain because I don't see you doing any better" schtick.

It's a lot easier to criticize than it is to build something.
yes you can

/etc/systemd/journald.conf
ForwardToSyslog=True
Congratulations to James & the team. I remember when you were powering RickyMartin.com !
Serious question: what's wrong with the word "journey"?
Service Discovery in Docker environments
They will, eventually.
Congrats - this is awesome, and a huge step for you all. Excited to hear what else is in store on the 4th.
Dockerfile tutorials
Never let an HR manager or recruiter's decision or feedback be a reflection of your self worth. They rarely know much about our jobs.
V is for Vivid
One person decided the way microsoft windows handles services was awesome and it would be a good idea to make the linux service manager work like that with complex binaries and binary logs instead of editable, standardized bash scripts and text logs. No vote, only veto. Very anti-linux.
The important part is you can't read your private key out, nor update the firmware to something that allows you to read the private key out. The customization you can do is unrelated.
It's just cliche. There's nothing wrong with the word itself, and it's both descriptive and apt, but it's been driven into the ground by people using it in a glib fashion. See: synergy.
Could this be used without the frame to emulate iOS apps on the web?

I.e, with AutoLayout, can you not adjust the frame of the app to be that of Android, and therefore have a semi-legit looking webapp for Android without developing a responsive website?
Call me old-fashioned but I shy away from unique platforms precisely because they are, well, unique, as you don't have a lot of vendor choice should you decide to migrate for whatever reason.
I look at puzzles as a problem-class that need to be solved, not the individual puzzles need to be solved, but the fact that there is a puzzle at all should be the thing that's being solved.

95% of software development is not solving complex algorithmic problems, it's plumbing. If the plumbing is so complex that it creates puzzles that need to be solved, then something probably went wrong somewhere along the line.

Preventing the 95% of software development that shouldn't be a puzzle from becoming one is something I'm very passionate about.
It's a tired trope in acquisition announcements.
I think the MS stack is extremely usable especially if you leverage Azure to get started. It abstracts away a lot of the pain points that I've run into with dealing with the stack in my day job (mainly IIS). You should also check out the BizSpark program which will give you access to an Ultimate MSDN subscription and an Azure credit every month.
Still not sure how I feel about tech giants acquiring startups like Parse and Firebase.

Is there some market explanation for why this tends to happen?
How will Firebase grow in relation to Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)? Do you think we could see GCM being replaced with Firebase?
having mixed feelings, on one hand I'm super happy that Firebase has grown to where it is now, the product has always been awesome and with Google I can only see it getting even better (Especially after seeing its Angular binding, and how Angular features Firebase as its default backend). On the other hand, I've loved how Firebase as a small team, always stays close with their users, listen to feedback from them and provide a lot of help and guidance. I often think of Firebase team members as friends and teachers. I don't know if they will be able to stay this way after joining such a big firm like Google :'(