skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both GitHub and BitBucket wikis are already managed by the respective SCMs.

git clone https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow.wiki.git
hg clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/BruceEckel/python-3-patterns-idioms/wiki

Also, a project atop git does issues: https://github.com/jeffWelling/ticgit

The idea is interesting to me.
My own experiences with interviewing HR pre-filtered resumes bears this out, so I can't imagine what the entire firehose is like.
Considering the population of Earth has more than doubled from around 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion in 2014 i hardly think we can blame NASA for spending a trillion dollars.

On the scale of world hunger over a 50 year period, one trillion is a blip. On the other hand spending a trillion on space research over 50 years seems well worth it if within the next 50 we can colonize other planets, moons or terrariums and ensure that the Human race has a backup should something catastrophic happen.
Microsoft is explicit about not doing that: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT

However, as far as I understand it, the patent grant only holds for .NET runtimes you write yourself or programs to be run in a .NET runtime.
Oh, and per the reference I pulled up, cost per pound wasn't falling appreciably by 2000. Yes, we're another 14, call it 15 years further on. But as the chart on page 4 of the Futron report shows, aside from a big drop in 1992, there was effectively no movement during the 1990s.

http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/S...
When I hear people retort that "companies aren't allowed to do that", I always want to say: "Did you try a simple web-search to find out how they do it anyway?"

For example, there are loopholes in both salary-calculation and also in terms of crafting hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements and then claiming nobody local can fill them.
There are lots of areas where formal education is a must.

Even when you can self-teach everything, you still need some structure, some meta-learning, to learn what you need to study to build the pillars of your knowledge. And you still need some organization that certifies that you know what you claim you know. Medicine is an obvious example. Engineering is another. No-one would like to live in a tall building made by somebody who claims to know how to build tall buildings, but didn't go to college.

I bet not many pharmaceutical companies would like to hire someone without a degree to design a new drug. Regulations, insurance, credibility, lots of problems.

> Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.

So, yes... you can earn a lot of money without a degree, but if you want to work in some areas that need a degree, you must go to college.

And I see that with my sister today. She's 2 years older than me. She left university after 3 years, went to live to another country for 6 years, and came back with no money. She worked there, but spent a lot living large, having fun and enjoying her twenties. Meanwhile, I studied and worked (to pay my studies)..

Now, I earn almost 4 times what she earns. And it's difficult to her to find a job that she likes. She tried having her own business, and burned all of her savings. She started studying again, realizing that without a career, she's going to have a really hard professional future.

I know that the choices we both made are based on very different philosophies. She prioritized enjoying her youth, and that's OK. I prioritized investing in my future, and that's OK too.

But a formal education, is still a great tool to help you in your professional life, even when you can learn all by yourself.
SQL on MongoDB
Terms of visas are normally verified at visa renewal time which for H1B is after 3 years.
SpaceX is not well run because of magic private sector pixie dust. It is well run because of Elon Musk.

For every Elon Musk there are a million private sector apparatchiks who run their organizations with all the efficiency of a Soviet shoe factory (see Comcast for a particularly pernicious example).
Interesting, this is similar to the discussion going on for "int" in Rust (or the exact opposite, depending on how you view it). [1, 2]

One the one hand "implicit int" are being phased out in favour of explicit int size. Your variables cannot be `int` anymore, you have to sit down, think and choose: u8? u16? u32? i32? u64? i64? This avoids all the pains of programs behaving differently or crashing when compiled on different architectures.

On the other hand, a new "native integer for sizes that do not matter, minimum 32 bits" is being brewed, for example for pointer offsets or collection sizes. The idea is that you will not be able to have a collection with more of 2^32 elements in a 32-bit architecture nor more than 2^64 in a 64-bit architecture.

After this discussion, my hope is to see the introduction of a fast-ish dynamic bigint (that starts native and grow up to 256 or 512 bits) that can be used in all the cases where you do not care about the exact size type, yet you want to be future-proof (this `private int index` fits this case, IMO).

[1] http://discuss.rust-lang.org/t/if-int-has-the-wrong-size/454...
[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/464
Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.
TNR's coverage of Amazon has been astonishingly biased. For instance, they printed a ridiculous article by advice columnist Margot Howard, whose book was poorly reviewed by Amazon customers and who concluded that readers couldn't possibly come up with a useful review. She wrote: '"Book Reviewer" is considered a profession, and reviews are done by other writers. Good sense would seem to militate against any group of people unschooled in creative and critical reviewing coming up with a worthwhile review.'[1]

I think that, when it comes to Amazon, TNR has a giant chip on its shoulder. I think a lot of this criticism has to do with a liberal arts-educated, New York and Washington-based cultural elite that sees itself as eclipsed by Seattle and Silicon Valley upstarts who studied computer science.

[1]http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119875/margo-howard-amazo...
Why the hell would you want to store a counter as a signed int in the first place ?
I'll naively give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume there are good arguments for being anti-Uber/Lyft. What are they? I'm curious to know if there are valid reasons besides dollars being shuffled into the right pockets. I'll assume preventing disruption is not a valid argument.
Article is a hit-piece; author is being willfully ignorant/misleading.

> Amazon’s newest investments aren’t paying off. The most notable failure has been the Fire phone, which has received terrible reviews.
> And the Fire phone was a big bet that has not worked.

He says this as if the Fire phone will now be canceled so that Amazon can try some other random experiment. The Fire phone was the first iteration of what will be a very long experiment, the same as every other product launched by a large corporation (e.g., Android, iOS, Kindle Fire tablet). How many times have we heard "It's over, Google's Android is finished" in the past decade, only to now see Android sales accelerated way beyond iOS and iOS sales stagnate?

The above is obvious to anyone who follows tech, thus leading me to believe the author has crafted a hit piece.

Disclaimer: I am employed by Amazon and own Amazon stock.
Or maybe XSLT?
Meet the ZX Spectrum Vega: 80s computing nostalgia revived for charity
Not here to give any names, but I can third this observation. The job description ads are absolutely tailored and never intended to hire anyone local. But there is one good reason why that happens - OPT.

Foreign students graduate out of US schools and join companies here and work legally by enrolling in the OPT program that can last upto 28 months. During this time, the only way the company can hire them full-time is through the H1B program. The whole charade with creating these oddly specific ads and posting them where no one can see them is because there is no other way to continue employing the same people.

The same thing is repeated as part of PERM because the company is supposed to post an ad to hire someone for a job to make sure no one local is available, but that person has already been hired!
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/institutional-holdings

http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/insiders/bezos-jeffrey-p-48340
Insiders own 18% of the stock[1], with Bezos being the largest; "retain control easily" becomes relative depending on how active the institutional investors get.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=amzn+Major+Holders
YMMV but I know at least one E-3 holder that ended up with a green card.

The E-3 isn't explicitly a dual intent visa but my understanding is that you can't be denied an E-3 specifically for having applied for a green card. If you're on an E-3 and are seeking a green card talk to an immigration lawyer.
There are a few more brands and models that pros use. The AKG K240 has been in use for decades, and I think they're quite charming. Audio Technica has made a lot of in-roads into mid-level pro studios in particular (i.e. not million dollar rooms, but still quite good studios that make good records regularly). I've also seen Shure SRH series headphones in professional contexts.

But, your statements about "pro" headphones are accurate. They aren't the nicest looking, but they are really good, and I always recommend a good pro set of headphones over the marketed crap from Beats, Bose, Monster, etc. $250 will buy a lot of headphone quality from one of the pro audio manufacturers.
It also works the other way around. Some of the best people I know have horrible resumes or no resume at all. Resumes are probably subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect that tends to plague software development.
Your experience seems rather limited. Because H1Bs by no stretch are cheap. You got to be kidding yourself if you think Indians buying up all those million+ dollar homes in Bay Area are earning low wages.
> Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative?

Where's the evidence that resumes are better than random selection among applicants into the next round, much less enough better to be a net positive given the resources that go into reviewing them?
Gems – Messaging That Pays. Social Meets Cryptocurrency
> so whenever we have 128-bit or 256-bit registers, we'll have to go back and update all this code that effectively "optimizes" 1 bit of information

This is why we have uint_least8_t and friends. In fact, int is really just another int_least16_t.

> Furthermore, casting uintx_t to int and back again while using shared libraries is a huge pain in the ass and can waste a lot of programmer time that would be better spent elsewhere

Could you give an example? It sounds like you're just talking about performing the casts, which shouldn't take much effort at all as indiscriminately as C casts about integral values.
I don't think you understood the OP's point correctly - their forward P/E, aka what earnings the investors expect the company to make in the future, is abnormally high, thus indicating investors are still quite bullish.
Not sure about this one. I'm pretty sure at one point I could hear the difference between 44.1 and 48 khz sampling. I agree 192 is overkill, but 44.1 is just above the Nyquist limit. At that resolution, the top breathy harmonics of a piccolo are only getting 2-3 samples per cycle, which seems to leave room for some possible aliasing if you are not 100% sure about your filters. So why not just go crazy and throw 4X samples at the problem, eliminating any question of proper anti-aliasing?

As to # of bits, the issue there is the wide dynamic range of music, and the fact that our ears can adjust to this wide range. Probably you would get the same effect as 24 or 32 bits with the right dynamic range adjustments, but then we'll have to argue about which algorithm is "right". A surfeit of bits just makes the question go away.
Living in Amsterdam makes me wonder... only $10 extra? Seems like a fair deal. On average it's more than 30 euro extra over here.

To be fair: we have signs displaying cost & travel time for bus, car, taxi and train. Train (for once) is the clear winner by being cheapest & fastest.
I believe their main argument (probably encouraged by the taxi industry) is that it's not safe to have unlicensed taxi drivers.

But by that argument wikipedia should be the world's biggest encyclopedia of racist porn.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690206
Uber and friends need to pay a tax which pays back (at least in part) all those who've invested in the current infrastructure based on assurances from Government. I'm not saying they have to get paid back for anything they have done that is speculative, but they need to get paid back something. Is it really that huge a tax to pay? I'm sure they could pay it back over 20 years or something and the government can write bonds against it to pay back taxi drivers immediately.
> Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends.

Does anybody know the source of this statement? I have read it for years and I always wondered where it comes from. Some interview with a friend of him? A friend's diary? Chronicles of the time?
Up until the last few months when Uber came in and put the heat on the local Dallas (TX) taxi market, government was driving at the behest of the largest taxi company via local council and board members pushing ordinances[1] that squeezed smaller cab companies. What a shit show that's been...

http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2014/04/judge-dfw-airport...
Almost every studio used to have nothing but AKG K240 phones for monitors in the room. I haven't worked professionally directly in the field for years (I work in live sound occasionally now, and do interact with recording engineers occasionally), but I still see them discussed regularly enough online to assume they are still common. I love the look of them, and always have. To me, they are the definition of "studio headphone". (They aren't what I use in my home studio, as there are better phones, if you're willing to spend more money, but they are a good headphone for a good price.)
`" " == 0 == false`, and `"" == 0 == false`, but `" " != ""`.

`"Infinity" == Infinity`, but `"true" != true`.

I could go on for a while like this.
The issue isn't taxi vs other modes of transit, it's that taxis take intentionally longer routes to squeeze higher fares out of tourists.
He's saying that route is $10 more than the shorter (and quicker) route via taxi.

From McCarran International Airport to the strip you can either go on the highway or via the local streets. The highway is slower and costs $10 more, and yet 1/3rd of cabbies will take you that route.
She did suggest an idea - asking for a clear explanation of a project, as a sort of writing sample.
Only? It's $10 more and takes longer.
Your Inner Fish
Probably the best documentary series I've ever seen on the subject of Human Evolution. Highly recommended.

http://www.pbs.org/your-inner-fish/home/

It's on Netflix.
> Docker and Joyent are businesses, and they're selling an idea to make money.

And how is it different for CoreOS, Inc? They depend on a external product and they want to remove the dependency. That's fine. Smearing their ex-vendor isn't.
Wait. Uber does more than just use the star ratings. They actually look at the route the driver took and compare it to the GPS recommended route...
The main problem with Kickstarter is people are intolerant of failure. They see their money as a purchase, not an investment with uncertain payoff. With that kind of attitude in place, how is anybody going to fund hundreds of extremely experimental drugs (or what have you) via Kickstarter?
You know, I really wouldn't put it past Uber to game HackerNews. If they're willing to dig up dirt on journalists, can you imagine that they'd have a problem with 'employee advocacy' on HN?
Netflix is a Data Hog
have him / her pick an individual plan and then set up a reimbursement.
It's amusing to point out the failures of government bureaucracy, and while it's admirable that they're trying, I think we can all agree that the people responsible for these measures aren't exactly blessed with an overabundance of competence.

That said, this article completely ignored the very significant failures in Uber's rating system: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/14/what-ar...

Fundamentally, a five-star rating is far too simple. In my opinion, an example of this done well is Ebay's reputation system.
As a former DE Shaw guy, Bezos sure knows how to stick it to New York and Wall Street.

I had a good laugh when I read about their latest bond offering (very smart considering the interest rate environment and the impending rate hikes) and Moody's subsequent downgrade. Bezos is trolling Wall Street and Wall Street is not happy.
Something I recently learned in Vegas; if a taxi driver picks you up from a casino on the strip and offers to take you (or does it anyway) the "quicker way" to your destination [also on the strip] via taking some off-strip highway, reject him. A bit of traffic on the strip is nothing compared to how fast the meter flies upwards when a taxi is speeding along a highway via a long detour and it's going to result in you paying a lot more for the journey.
> But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).

The opposite is also often true: data about a large aggregate population (across all demographics and generations in this case) might not represent the reality on the ground for a precise sample. Circumstances vary significantly and with rapid technological change smashing straight into global economic instability, everything is up in the air.

> I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else.

Based on my experience growing up in the United States, all effort is spent on imposing $30-50,000/year degrees (and debt) on students, instead of realistic alternatives that might be better suited to circumstances.
Is it actually uncorrelated with everything else? I think it's worth investigating (and I hope the addendum at the top of her article means that she will let us know how it works out!) In my experience great engineers who are bad writers definitely exist, but are more the exception than the rule.
for anyone relating with every "engineers suck at writing resumes" comment; I've been using my stackoverflow profile as a resume and it's been working out great.
There are a couple of arguments to prevent discrimination against riders. The current regulation of Taxis and Public Transit are such that disabled persons and wheelchair-riders can get rides about as easily as able-bodied people. Uber and Lyft have no such provisions.

On the flip-side, Uber seems to be reducing racial discrimination against potential riders, as per this piece: https://medium.com/matter/ubering-while-black-146db581b9db.
I have a pair of Sennheister 280 HD Pros - they've lasted me about 7 years, an excellent set of headphones. I used it to help critique music for lots of artists on their production, and I know lots of artists who use it as a cheap pair of mixing headphones.

Work bought me a pair of 380 HD Pros, and I'm impressed on how much of an upgrade they are over the 280s - I can only imagine how good the other Sennheisers are.
ESA: We're sending a rover to Mars
Just so we're clear, you're saying that a monopoly should be granted tax revenues to cover the loss of revenue incurred by a viable competitor emerging in the market, because they didn't anticipate that competitor emerging?
It seems to be working sufficiently for Uber and their happy customers. Uber is a premium service. Drivers should be fired if they don't know their way around, have a dirty or smelly car, or otherwise request things of me as a customer beyond my destination address. I routinely give out two and three star ratings, knowing it could well get people fired. 5 stars is for a perfect trip that could not be improved.
Not only that, a more accurate statement would have been "People who obtained college degrees forty five years ago earned significantly more than those who didn't."

I'm not at all convinced that will be true for the current generation. The job market used to have room for pretty much anyone with a degree. Even your degree in 17th century French literature was good enough to get you a sales or local government position at an employer who required a degree but wasn't picky about the major. These days there are so many graduates the sales manager can wait for someone with a degree in economics and the local government guy can wait for a candidate that's similarly (sort of) related.

Plus there was always law school. You can still get into law school; it's just that there's no job waiting for you when you get out.
Isn't the hallmark of good API design essentially moving from the imperative to the declarative?

We abstract the "how" into declarative statements of "what" and "how many".
None of the A/C alternatives I've seen on HN in the last couple of years even try to tackle the problem of humidity. They only focus on lowering the temperature, and sometimes even increase the humidity while doing so.

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that a lot of U.S. tech startups are located in relatively arid parts of the country, such as the Bay Area. I'd like to see what they can come up with if they were all relocated to Florida, or even better, Southern China.
How is this on the front page? It is all unsubstantiated forward-looking speculation. Does he have access to figure business plans or something?
15 Futuristic Gifts for the Super-Early Adopter
and H1-B body shops force their workers to work umpteen hours of overtime, bill the clients for it, and H1-B workers get no compensation for all the overtime.

and H1-B body shops do shady things like delay payments, take 'fees' out of payments, pay in rupees, etc.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26778017/tech-company...

as go the unions, so go the workers...
Chinese Family Firms: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
As long as the laws prohibit Uber from operating, why is it strange that the government would take steps to ensure that?

Perhaps the laws should change - certainly Uber wants them to. But flouting the law isn't often the best way to make that happen. They're not protesting injustice, they're jamming a foot in the door of a multi-billion dollar industry with technology that is still very new to regulators. The "we're just an app that connects people who want a ride with willing drivers" dodge is disingenuous, and the alternation between wounded and scoffing attitudes is grating. I don't like Uber as a company, and personally I hope it fails and the next guy picks up the torch and does these things with a bit of tact. Neither driver nor user will care.
The New Republic's majority owner, publisher, and editor in chief is Chris Hughes, one of the Facebook cofounders.
Is that really the taxi's "fault" though? I mean it is in everyones best interest to get paid the most. And in the end you arrived at your destination. Sure you don't want to pay more. But I don't know if it should be illegal...

I mean there are tons of companies/people who "do stuff" to make more money from you...