skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I would agree with this if I wasn't seeing entrepreneurs who are breaking the stereotypical British attitude of "sell for £10m, kids to private school, consultancy gig until I'm 50 and retire". We have US-style founders over here who are trying to build amazing things. The venture community hasn't caught up, but I think after one or two larger exits for truly spectacular businesses (forget Zoopla, which is about as innovative as Amazon would be if it helped you check the stock of book stores which you still had to visit), the limited partners in funds will pile on.

My suggestion wasn't that we aren't creating successful startups. My suggestions is that RELATIVELY, when compared to Silicon Valley, we are not fostering innovation. Of corse we are breaking through the barrier but we will always be risk averse and when compared to Silicon Valley, we will never reach the same levels of innovation unfortunately.

From just plucking figures from Google we can see that Silicon Roundabout has about 1000-2000 startups whereas Silicon Valley has more than 20,000 which is a ridiculous ratio.

> That's changing amongst the top tier of venture investors. Rentify (my business) couldn't process credit cards when we raised from Balderton, and the first board mtg of the year was focused on going for growth uber alles.

Agreed, I think it is changing but I really don't think it will catch up with SF VC. London is great for go-getters but when you go to SF you can raise money for an app that sends a "Yo". Don't get me wrong, it's not a good thing that you can get investment for the most ridiculous of ideas but i'm just trying to portray how risk averse we are as a population. Or maybe a better way to put it is that we take calculated risks.

> I agree with this although I dispute the reasons, and the notion that it will never change.

My suggestion that it would never change was a mistake. We will, as a population, become risk-prone but we will never compare to Silicon Valley. I think we will always be less likely to invest in 0-1's.
Better memory usage due to the (BSD-like) kernel, vs Linux could be one of the factors.

"My server earlier used to consume over 1 GB of memory for running PHP, MySQL and Nginx. Now, it doesn’t even touch 500 MB! It’s always less than 500 MB. Everything is just same, configuration, etc. Only OS changed."
http://nileshgr.com/2013/06/07/the-move-from-linux-to-freebs...

Slightly off topic but I really wish mainstream VPS providers start adopting FreeBSD, perhaps http://labs.online.net/ can spark that change, I'd move from Digital Ocean in a heart beat!
i18n-generator
i18n generator for node, web browser and command line

[https://github.com/huei90/i18n-generator](https://github.com/huei90/i18n-generator)

Sometimes, we need to generate language Resource json file, but we don't want to modify the json file again and again until it break.

i18n-generator save your time on modifying the only one file (may be csv, tsv, pipe format), it helps on building the needed json files.
They're also entirely disenfranchised as a living generation, since both sides of the political spectrum in the US are more interested in fighting battles for companies like Comcast and AT&T than caring about problems like the big corporations actively exploiting the working poor and the welfare system - and being bold enough to put those words into their own presentations without any political backlash - or fixing healthcare.

The one time they do hire a guy to fix things, it turns out he can't do it because Congress obstinately blocked his way at every pass. His political rivals turned a compromise, non-universal health care plan into a three ring circus that somehow made the poor think things were getting worse for them, despite how many have been able to get access to healthcare for the first time in their lives.

Unfortunately for us, the guy we hired just doesn't have a strong enough backbone to stand up to the legislature and the FCC and the corporations and tell them in no uncertain words that this situation is no longer acceptable. Polite, articulate words simply won't cut it anymore.

I come from Kentucky, the state with one of the most successful deployments of the health care program in the nation, and Mitch has actively campaigned on repealing it, right to their faces, and yet they supported him at the polls. That's how fucked up this situation has become. It's quite hard not to be disenfranchised and think there's nothing we can do.
"He is cofounder, with Edwin Catmull, of the animation studio Pixar, financed by Steve Jobs."

Nice thing to have on your resume...
I think his argument is valid, and thinking about curl as an analog to cat makes a lot of sense. Pipes are a powerful feature and it's good to support them so nicely.

However, just as curl (in standard usage) is an analog to cat, I feel that wget (in standard usage) is an analog to cp, and whilst I certainly can copy files by doing 'cat a > b', semantically cp makes more sense.

Most of the time if I'm using curl or wget, I want to cp, not cat. I always get confused by curl and not being able to remember the command to just cp the file locally, so I tend to default to wget because it's easier to remember,
Facebook building 'workplace network'
"I would think that people hiring would like potential hires to be unrepresented. An un-represented developer is going to be cheaper. (chrisbennet)

Price is just one factor. If I charge twice as much as someone else but I can solve the customer's problem in one-fourth the time, the customer saves money. Customers are usually focused on solving business problems within their budget and schedule, not just on hourly rates."

True, and as a freelancer this is an argument I make as well. But something I've noticed is that the client doesn't talk/work/think any faster. It still takes them an hour in a meeting to get their points across. It still takes us 3 hours to review key issues together. Anything that is synchronous time is throttled to the slowest person, so the "I'm 5x faster than someone else" isn't the slam dunk it should be.

And there's still a stigma with some people about high priced consultants, when they know they can get it 'cheaper' somewhere else.

A friend of mine is managing a project on behalf of his client. He's been dealing with offshore (India I think, not sure) devs for months. I built a prototype of a tool, based on chatting with him, in under 30 minutes. The tool did more than his offshore people were able to do after days of talking to them, and days of trying. He was a bit ... taken aback. He went to his client and said "we need to bring this guy on to the project to handle some of this stuff". My hourly rate is 8x when they're paying the offshore people, the client balked, and it didn't happen.

Ignorant short-sighted client? Probably, but this still happens.

My friend was more than a bit shocked, but I wasn't. The project owners essentially have a cheap team of playthings to keep building whatever ideas pop in to their head, whim changes, etc., and the cost of changing their mind and changing ideas is low. At least, they think it's low. When you've not worked with developers who've actually built the core plumbing of all the stuff you're trying to build before, you really have no idea if "functionality x" should take 2 hours, 2 days or 2 weeks.
And again my premise is validated by down votes.
I don't think guix does system configuration at all. And I don't mean "what software needs to be installed" configuration. I mean, configuration system that says "this is a staging environment, this app logs at DEBUG level via syslog, syslog gets configured to ship errors/exceptions to XXX, app uses local cache not cluster, credentials get pulled and decrypted from ABC".

This kind of configuration goes one level above package management, whether it's guix, apt, yum, pacman, or anything else.

Edit: you actually said benefits of guix in the original question - it gives you the way to make a localised installation of something you want. Chef/Puppet cannot be it on their own.
That does not matter, from financial perspective they still pay less, than any non-member of the MPEG-LA would, say Debian or Mozilla.

It also provides them a bit of control over potential competition, that they would not have with really open codec. They also make it inconvenient from licensing/business model to use in some projects, see what trouble these codecs cause to projects like Mozilla/Opera, Linux distributions, XBMC, VLC etc, which does hamper them significantly.

For Apple, that's competitive advantage.
Well, it's important to note that special relativity doesn't say there is no absolute time, but rather that if there is, it is undetectable in any inertial reference frames.
No idea why you're getting downvoted, we use ALAC in production workflows. Prior to being open sourced it was also successfully reverse engineered in 2005: http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html
Online Marketing 101: Understanding the Basics
Introducing: "Meta" a package manager for package managers.

To install, just type:

meta install meta
Which users? I only ever use curl to print stuff to stdout, but I use it for that a lot. When I want to download a file as lazily as possible, I use wget.

If you don't use the tools often enough to remember how they work, I don't think your needs are going to come up high on the developer's priority list.
LOL, this game should be given to everyone who complains about how complicated math is. Should cure them in minutes :)
An Overdose of Copernicus? Our Universe Might Yet Be Special (2013)
This really is a cool one. The different ports makes it very suitable for handling a specific kind of problem. It might also be nice if there was a port that responded with a random selection from the errors (or with a proper response). e.g. "Port 5599: All of the above, at random"
That's some lolworthy PR right there. The "UX designer for Apple's iCloud"??? These headhunters must have no idea how stupid that sounds to anyone who is actually in our industry.
I've been predicting this sort of approach would happen for a while now, and glad to see it taking shape. I would like to see it more prevalent, but living in a somewhat less business-focused area, this approach may not trickle down here for several years.
State Department Targeted by Hackers in 4th Agency Computer Breach
Your question prompted me to look again.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24399139

It seems I was wrong!

> Of these, 38% of the alleged abuse took place in the older person's home, while 45% took place in a care home.

> Physical abuse and neglect were the most common types of abuse reported.

> In 6% of cases the alleged abuser was the older person's partner, in 16% it was another family member and in 37% a social care worker.
Federal drug agents launch surprise inspections of NFL teams
There is only 1GB of ram in iPads? This explains why the browser keeps crashing when i keep 20 tabs open.. jeez!
Yes, but then there are a lot of startups in the Valley and the vast majority are not Googles or Facebooks. It does tend to look quite bubbly. And from an investor POV perhaps Twitter is not something to aim for, profits-wise.

Another problem is that the current bubble (if you want to call it that) seems heavily driven by the tendency of Google and Facebook to engage in enormous acquisitions of otherwise unremarkable or even no-hope businesses. A lot of companies don't seem to have any business plan beyond "get bought". But the big fish want companies down the road so the employees can all relocate to HQ. They don't typically want to acquire companies in other countries unless that company is truly something unique.
IMO Microsoft has made progress, but has clearly not turned the corner. Nadella made a good start, it just isn't enough.

Let's keep the hate aside and forget MS's past. The biggest problem facing MS now is the loss of mind share on the Windows platform. The brightest minds aren't programming on Microsoft platforms if you look at colleges and conferences worldwide. This cannot be reversed; Open Source products are now technically superior, the community is very well organized, and it is free. Interesting research, frameworks, libraries and programming languages spawn on Open Source before they show up (if ever) on Windows. Windows engines have run out; though they will keep going for a while.

MS had a great run for over twenty years because the entire world ran on DOS and then Windows. That gave them enormous influence and power, power to make mistakes, fail over and over, and yet succeed. The real challenge will be in adapting to a future in which Windows is irrelevant. The long-term future of Azure, Windows Phone, Windows Desktop, Windows Server and their overpriced Office Tools looks bleak to me.
"Demonstrate how you're going to raise their revenues (and do it!)"

Outside of really small organizations where you can have direct control of all parties, guaranteeing increased revenues (and/or profits) is pretty damn hard.

Guaranteeing lower costs, faster operations, increased efficiencies, etc., is easier to achieve, because it's largely within your scope (speaking from a software perspective).
Big lessons from a Tiny Titan
I am not sure I understand. iCloud.com does have a UX, and a nice one at that.
Besides reasons mentioned in this topic, Apple's desktop and mobile operating systems feature memory compression and other algorithms to save memory and battery life for the last year, since Mavericks and iOS 7.

http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/key-features-apple%E...
Heavy Android subsidies, losing iPad business cost Intel a whopping $7B
This is a very interesting movie. The 'making of the movie' was interesting too. I liked the keyboards that they were using in the office.
Your problem is that you're thinking in terms of 'what do I have to type'. Most programmers can just type out the software to do something if somebody else tells them what that 'something' should be. That's not hard, and the path to learning it is straight-forward and well-defined. The value in a consultant is not in 'programming'. It's in translating whatever problem somebody has into a solution. Nobody cares about a 'Twitter bootstrap Rails Stripe EC2' whatever. If you find yourself even saying those words to the person who'll be signing your cheques (as opposed to the tech staff you might be working with, but those you'll only talk to when you got the job), it's game over - you're now a $50/hour commodity.

"How exactly does the developer do that, without extensive consultation time with the client?"

Well yes you answer your question yourself - top 10% rates are for those who can make the customer happy with the result without having to drag exact specifications, kicking and screaming, from somebody who doesn't want to deal with all those details.

(also, here is the first hint: somebody who thinks about '200$/hour' has the wrong mentality. I do projects where my rate is that, but I never ever (ever) put it that way. Sell services based on benefits or value for the customer, not on how many hours you're going to spend. Nobody cares whether you've spend 6 weeks working 100 hours a week, or if you send 5 emails with the right words to a few people and wrote 100 lines of software on a lazy sunday afternoon. Effort: irrelevant, make customer happy: only thing that matters.)
I think of curl as a somewhat more intelligent version of netcat that doesn't require me to do the protocol communication manually, so outputting to stdout makes great sense.
The London startup scene is interesting. I think it's fair to say startups here are usually less ambitious than in SF or the US in general. But they also tend to be more practical -- there's less pie-in-the-sky thinking.

I've seen firsthand a surprisingly large number of startups that make a profit from day one. And a lot of startups that were funded from nonwealthy founders' savings. My impression is that we do stuff on a smaller scale, but it tends to be more reliable.
What you are referring to is not DieHard but rather Exterminator. DieHard probabilistically tolerates memory errors, while Exterminator repairs them.

Both rely on a carefully designed semantics under which one can provide a reasonable interpretation for erroneous computations. They employ sophisticated randomized algorithms and/or statistical inference procedures and contain proofs of their effectiveness. That's not exactly a hack.

The fact is that managed languages that provide memory safety guarantees -- through strong type systems, mandatory bounds checks and automatic memory management -- are of course preferable to C/C++/Objective-C from a software engineering perspective.

But the fact also remains that most of the code we use today is written in unsafe languages, including the runtime systems that undergird managed languages. Since these programs almost certainly contain errors, it makes sense to accept that fact and work to provide solutions.

I'd encourage you to read this article, which appeared in Communications of the ACM - "Software Needs Seatbelts and Airbags", which contains an in-depth discussion of these issues.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/9/154577-software-needs-s...

That content, which initially appeared in ACM Queue, is freely available here on my blog:

http://emeryblogger.com/2012/05/31/software-needs-seatbelts-...
That's my approach too. But he wrote himself "a very common comment to me about curl" - if someone actually finds the time / motivation to write to him about this difference, I'd count them as a user.
A quora-like spot-text-edits online tool
I walked through a lot of diffchecks tools on the web but found most of them visually not very practical. I made this one inspired by quora inline text edits check. nothing fancy. Hope it helps.
Agreed. Presumably, the article's use of quotation marks means he described himself that way. I'm guessing it was tongue-in-cheek, though.
At some point the phrase "tech company" becomes completely meaningless. Microsoft is a software compoany, Google a search engine/ad buisness, and Amazon are a retailer. Although there are areas of overlap they are effecitvely in completely different markets. The tendancy to treat them as competitors just because they are identified as large tech companies seems short sighted. It was idiotic for Microsoft to invest so much money in Bing; they might as well have started selling condos or opened a sandwich shop.

Amazon cloud computing was originally so brilliant because they sold computing like a retail product (easy billing, no annoying sales or contracts). MS make money selling server software to people who don't want to buy computing as a retail product. They are actually different markets and are both sustainable.
"How can we as a society survive if most people decide to not have kids at all?"

> at all, suggests adoption is out of the question its not a matter of giving birth to a kid but raising it.

> immigration is hardly a "solution" its like having 2 pans and a pizza dough enough for 1 pan, and split it to 2 pans making half a pizza in each. you have 2 pizzas, but smaller, thinner and sadder =[
> people who argue that wget is easier to use because you can type it with your left hand only on a qwerty keyboard

Haha I would never realize that
It's not lose for Netflix. The programmer time maintaining an API is much more expensive and restrictive then the few dollars in computational resources you allude to.
Yeah, finding step 6 took me much longer than any other step. (Followed by step E.)
As others mentioned, this is a buffer number, it's less about technology, etc. There's already some good answers here, but another aspect of this level of price should be respect. It's easier to command a bit of respect from clients at this rate (whether it's hourly, or daily or weekly).

But the respect should flow both ways here too. Treat your client and project professionally - answer calls, answer emails, show up to meetings when you say you will, etc. It's amazing how many people don't do those sorts of things. Really. I'm forever amazed at how low the professionalism bar is in our industry.

Having a higher bill rate allows you a bit of negotiating room if you need it - easier to come down from $150/hour to, say, $125/hour if need be. It's easier to comp a meeting to someone, or not always invoice for travel time. I've got colleagues billing $40/hr, and asking "should I bill for travel time to the meeting? How about the drive back home?" The idea of getting on a plane and flying to a client meeting, and getting a hotel, on their own dime, is outside their experience. If you're charing $150/hr, it's not unreasonable thing to do, ime. Even if you get reimbursed later, you've got cushion to float that for a few weeks - you're not living check to check.

IMO, the $200/hr dev is far more adept at servicing the non-technical aspects of the project - professionalism, people skills, project management, setting expectations, etc - or they hire people who are (agents, like in this article).
Ask HN: What is HN reading?
What have you read / are currently reading this month? Leave suggestions for others to read as well!

-Read-

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delany

Bloodchild - Octavia E. Butler

-Reading-

The Dragons Of Eden - Carl Sagan
Q&A with Divya Dhar – Co-Founder and CEO, Seratis
“Ship” or get off the pot
Code from these outsourcing shops is never particularly good. They sell on name, trust and client relationships - the product just has to work, and it usually does. They can't attract and keep top devs, who don't want to work on boring client projects, and won't pay to get them anyway.

They're inevitably junior-heavy, supervised by 2 or 3 year seniors, who do a reasonable job of keeping things in line but there's only so much you can do. The code ticks all the boxes for testing, etc, but is far from inspired and usually built with the present, not the future, in mind. There are uncomfortable organisational incentives to not over-deliver in quality - wouldn't want changes and maintenance to be too easy, and it's not like the client is tech-savvy or they wouldn't be hiring a "name" shop in the first place.

Most really good programmers who know their value (that I know, anyway) are working for product companies, where quality is visible, valued, and rewarded, or are highly-paid consultants/freelancers.
Not "most" people, just the ones that can't afford to have children.
Philae runs on an RTX2010 microprocessor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTX2010
That's the reason I use wget and only when necessary I switch to curl. It's not that I wouldn't forget about that nasty behaviour (eventhough I sometimes do forget) but it usually goes like this:

$ curl -o news.ycombinator.com
curl: no URL specified!
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information
$ curl -O news.ycombinator.com
curl: Remote file name has no length!
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information
$ curl -O foo news.ycombinator.com
curl: Remote file name has no length!
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information
<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
$ wget news.ycombinator.com
--2014-11-17 14:27:18-- http://news.ycombinator.com/
Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 198.41.191.47, 198.41.190.47
Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|198.41.191.47|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://news.ycombinator.com/ [following]
--2014-11-17 14:27:19-- https://news.ycombinator.com/
Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|198.41.191.47|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’

[ <=> ] 22,353 --.-K/s in 0.07s

2014-11-17 14:27:19 (331 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [22353]

With wget, I can just through any URL to it and it‘ll probably do the right thing with the least amount of surprises. „Grab a file“ is my usecase 99.99% of the time, „Print a file“ is the rest 0.01%.