skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, by definition "despot" is simply a measure of one persons power. But this word also has significant negative connotation, which I find unfair. First off, simply because it's implying that "somewhere out there is a problem and here we are smart guys sitting in our comfy chairs in a country with electricity and deciding if it's right or not", and if "out there" isn't actually your country where you are living yourself it's none of your business. Second, implying that "situation in the country doesn't matter" as you do right now is simply absurd. We must remember, that all that stuff isn't something that simply "happens", but actual people making real decisions, drinking their morning coffee while thinking what they ought to do next in a country where everything might just change radically every minute. Believing that it is their moral obligation both to "care about your country" and "not to become a dictator" is simply contradictory, because it's quite likely that situation makes him to believe it's his only choice to hold power in his hands steadily and stepping aside after 4 or 8 or whatever years would be outright contradictory to "caring about your country". Even if we actually would like to step aside, because it's easier. He might be wrong, but if he truly does this believing that this is his only moral choice, that he does it for his people's sake — even if he is wrong in my opinion I would know better than disrespect his sacrifice by saying something like "A despot is a despot, whether they're exercising power purely for self-interest or not". But if he is right and actually rules justly, making lives better, then I have no problem with it whatsoever. Opposing it would be nothing more than saying simply that "democracy is the best form of government", and now this is something I have problem with, because even if it could be true in the case of that old, pure "Athenian democracy" (and could be not), implying that this fake "democracy thing" that is called "democracy" in USA and UK today is the same thing — is simply wrong, even harmful, and "if it actually is the best form of government" is actually a very serious question by itself.
Not all tech workers are equal.

My company does not care what language you know, or technology you use- we want people who are smart, capable of working with any technology. And we want the very best of those people, without lowering the quality bar for the sake of having people in seats.

We will let people go while we also are hiring for open positions on the same team if we realize the person isn't s good fit after all. I have little job security, but I work with only fantastic people. It's a deal I'm happy with. The pay is nice, and I never feel like the smartest in the room.

There are lots of companies like this. We have to complete with them for those top tier people. And we frequently find those good people outside of America.

The result? They often come work in our non-USA offices. That's one less job that would have existed in America, with the salary of it being taxed in America. It's a loss for the USA.
The servers are FreeBSD 9.x. After Facebook acquisition they've tried migrating it all to Linux but quickly discovered that Linux cant cope with that amount of traffic and they decided the FreeBSD is the tool to be used here. That lead to 'famous' Facebook job ad looking for Linux kernel engineers to help them bring the Linux TCP/IP capabilities in par with FreeBSD. Currently they're testing FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE for their next platform OS upgrade.
"Ugly planes don't fly" (a saying often attributed to Tupolev)
Angela Merkel argues against net neutrality
Uber has had so much bad news over a month. Add to to this they still got a funding round at 40 Billion valuation, they have been frivolent about their practices and unethical about their devices. The BD attitude is prevalent of Wall street (Read Pokers Liar and other Michal Lewis)

Consider Infosys an IT company built in India 33 years ago having a market cap of USD 75 bil and employing 200,00 ppl http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=INFY

Infy is decried and 'defamed' as a company which does just 'services' while all innovation happens in valley. OK, agreed

What has happened in valley recently is that arrogance and growth (at unprofitable means ) value more than creating successful businesses which are sustainable but which whip up media frenzy, Groupon, Zynga. Businesses like Infosys, TCS have created more shareholder value by being humble than all of these so called hot Silicon Valley (flip to the greater fool) companies. You would have heard about Andrew Mason, Marc Pincus but many surely don't know NRN, Nandan Nilekani, Ramadorai,Vineet Nayyar, CP Gurnani, Chandra and Azim Premji. Someone do an analysis how much shareholder value these guys created over a period of time

Ex Alumni of these disciplined companies are starting to build the new generation of product companies (no services BTW sorry folks) and we/they thing big while maintaining financial discipline and efficiency.

With this kind of financial discipline, long term approach, and growth over a long period of time these companies will beat this culture of hubris and arrogance in SV which is prevailing right now. How is Groupon doing, someone please put a graph of there mentions in press over the past 5 years. Same with Zynga, and I predict Uber

Lets revisit after 5 years. Let the SV valley VCs on Sand Hill road remain, while the world is disrupted with tech they cannot understand yet.

Joseph Schumpeter said creative Destruction. SV and Sand Hill road is gonna get disrupted very soon.
Ask HN: What are the best resources (free or paid) for learning JavaScript?
I'm 20% into the Codecademy track for JS and am liking it so far, but just curious to know what else is out there. Also started to read 'Eloquent JavaScript', not very far into it yet.

Why am I asking? I am determined to get accepted into Hack Reactor in 2015, if not my first try, then my second...or third.

Thanks for any help, it means a lot. :)
I find it hard to imagine how a moderator of a forum like HN could be more responsible, responsive, humane and just than dang. Keep up the good work.
Interesting research. I was wondering why did you think that the microcode might be in Verilog? Isn't verilog ascii? I suppose it's quite obviously some custom Intel binary format.
From the article:

"The code for this tool was published in CD-ROM, print, and online (ftp.apple.com) in the Advanced Technology Group's nice quarterly journal. Harry also had some Rumor Monger sweatshirts made, and I still have mine. One of the arguments I remember Nagel had was over the name. He did not believe that was the name of the Xerox PARC algorithm. --SteveCisler?"

Fascinating. Anyone got any stashes of the ATG journal referred to above?
Have a look at: http://inertiawar.com/microcode/
ScrollingTextView now open source
exactly indian media tends to be sensational at times.
iBooks style window for Mac OS X
>I personally have imagined the golden potential behind an anonymous social network (particularly when it comes to data mining [...])

See, that right there. That is why your anonymous social network isn't going to work or catch on. You're already openly declaring you're tracking your users and then planning on using their data in some fashion that they have no control over. You'll never get the early core adopters you'd need to verify the claims of anonymity, security/cryptography, and so on. Trying to involve money taints long-term roadmap direction and intentions.
You're right, it's almost definitely in some proprietary format, i mentioned verilog just to give some basis of what kind of language it would be like, i should have just mentioned VHDL's in general i guess.
Served from Sony's EC2 instances: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/strange_things_afoot...
I think small is a good thing in languages for example the C programming language is very simple in the language but very powerful. Simplify Simplify Simplify.
Wow, that's some fantastic work!.

Just to quote the conclusions of what Ben Hawkes found:
Several previously undocumented header fields have been identified and described.
The results suggest that microcode updates are authenticated using a 2048-bit RSA signature.
The RSA signature operation appears to be constant-time (i.e. unaffected by changes to the supplied exponent,
modulus or signature value).
Timing analysis reveals 512-bit steps correlating to supplied microcode length. This is a common message
block size for cryptographic hash functions such as SHA1 and SHA2
The RSA signature was located, and the signed data is a PKCS#1 1.5 encoded hash value. Older processor
models use a 160-bit digest (SHA1), and newer processor models use a 256-bit digest (SHA2).
"...Build AND LAUNCH yourself"

Really? That's pretty impressive. How big a garden do I need to accommodate the launch vehicle?
Don't forget Rosetta continuing operations around comet 47P while it transitions into being an active comet.
The author isn't arguing against maximizing shareholder value, he's highlighting the misunderstanding of what maximizing shareholder value is. Current intro-level schools of thought on how to value projects, raise money for those projects, and what to do with the money left over, start with a perfect-world scenario [1]. This scenario's cornerstone centers around the idea markets are perfectly efficient, there are no taxes, management incentives align with shareholders, there are no taxes, there are no bankruptcy costs, and possibly one more.

In this world, there is no difference in value to a company to raise money via debt or via equity. However, if we start to violate the 5-6 founding assumptions (i.e. we enter the real world) we find that there significant differences in value of a firm in a given industry who use debt or equity to raise money (or any flavor of security between debt and equity), who pay management via different bonus structures, who keep cash on hand versus pay it out, have underlying assets which are easily saleable or not, and who have different risk profiles.

Maximizing shareholder value is a nice tool to use when evaluating key financial decisions (e.g. how levered a firm should be), but as the other points out is misused or abused due to misaligned management incentives. However, tbe idea isn't intrinsically dumb, the misunderstanding of the value of the idea and how it should be used is what's sometimes wrong and sometimes harmful.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_the...
I personally flagged it because I don't find the story "intellectually stimulating". I don't know much about Uber except the few times there was an article about them on HN and I doubt they will send a pay check my way.
arc4random is their high-quality pseudorandom generator that's seeded from a good source of randomness (namely, the getentropy system call).
Do you know a good print edition with English + original?
I'm afraid there's a shortage of good programmers, with proper education in computer science, understanding of how the OS and programs interact, knowing how to use at least one programming language proficiently, fluent in algorithms and data structures - i mean people who know their tools and know what they're doing. Instead we've got lots of excited, half-educated but enthusiastic ctrl-c/ctrl-v specialists, doing whatever they think is right/necessary and not even realizing how broken their products are (or how much better they could be if their authors were a bit more knowledgeable)
I've never seen any of it, but I do know it was a real jumping point for Michael C. Hall, who went on to star in "Dexter". I just know I'm going to have a hard time not being freaked out by his character being semi-normal.
Yes. It also shows what kind of guy Jobs was.
Daniel Kahneman on Our Two Systems of Thought: Fast and Slow
I'll pick some at that nit. In the link, the author contrasts it to the quote from Zuckerberg: "Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is just that there aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today."

The example is to point out how this quote is not true, as two such engineers were not hired by Facebook. You point out that it depends on more than coding competency. While true, neither I nor the author of the piece suggests otherwise. The author, for example, suggests that ageism is one factor, and further quotes Zuckerberg as saying “Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30?”

So I don't see how it's a poor example. You argue that they were a poor fit for the position. That essay brings up “purple squirrels” several times, to highlight how a generic "poor fit" can be a surface excuse for other reasons.
Not that much if you leave out compiler specific extensions not part of ANSI C and library functions that are actually implemented in Assembly.
I think Existenitalism offers one way out of this. The idea is that the universe lacks intrinsic meaning, yet we can choose to construct meaning within it.

Also, I would point out that atheism is sort of silly. Who cares about what you don't believe in? Instead focus on what you do believe - for me, that the physical universe exists in some sort of substantial way and the other humans I meet are similar to myself (not automatons or figments of my imagination). I take it on faith that I'm not actually completely alone.
Have two payment pools: reveal poster and don't reveal poster.

I still don't see why anybody would post, but for the first week or so, the carnage would be amazing :D
If you have only worked in languages with exceptions, it's not surprising that you would struggle with Go's C-style error handling.

I've grown to prefer it, as exception handling typically boils down to "not my problem" in most code bases. Go forces you to think through each error condition, which is an unusual amount of effort for people who may not be accustomed to it.
The man with the salmon plan
Very simple fix: instead of lottery, award the visas to the highest paid employees in each field. That salary cannot drop more than 10%. (I'd add, the employee can switch companies, instead of being tied to one, given they are again paid the same amount in salary).

The "offending" companies are not the likes of Facebook or Google, or small start ups (other HN discussions mentioned the concrete companies that get the most visas). There is an apparent shortage of highly-skilled highly-qualified workers. Maybe not "code-monkeys" (whatever that means).

edit: One more thing, the above argument is supported by the sources you link, but it is not clearly indicated in them whether they considered that the majority of H1-Bs are (I presume) people starting their careers, so comparing their wages with the average of all Americans regardless of tenure is misleading.
Sad that this is still the way to test for interface implementations.

http://talks.golang.org/2014/readability.slide#17
North Korea Denies Hacking Sony but Calls Attack a ‘Righteous Deed’
Interesting tool. I can't help but wonder if it could be used as a way to resist forensic linguistics.
Sony saved thousands of passwords in a folder named 'Password'
Except that India is a country and Africa is a continent. And language and ethnic politics aren't the largest issues here: its actual policy and governance. I don't see how language homogenization solved major problems in India other than the east (Nagaland, Assam) or how its democratic to even do this the way the French and English did in their nations to minority languages.
SequoiaDB – A benchmark of the next-generation NoSQL database
Inside Polaroid's nostalgia-fuelled revival
Especially if it doesn't even solve the problem.
True, there are even Americans working abroad right now (American with a Chinese work visa). Its a global market for talent, not just an American one.
I found that I already do all of these as a result of reading through a lot of the Go standard library when I was learning it. One of the best ways to really learn a language is to read the standard library (the parts implemented in that language, anyway). That way you get a sense of the idioms used, but also understand the sometimes subtle trade-offs of common functions.
Let's Teach UX Designers How to HTML and CSS [Open Source]
Unrelated to the core presentation. I wrote http://readcode.in/ to help with reading source code in a simple single page format. It really fits go code repositories as they are usually small. e.g. http://readcode.in/github.com/gorilla/mux
The problem a lot of people have with code academy is that they just tell you to type x into some text file and it works.

The question is, what do you want to learn? the syntax? the high level concept? frameworks? What do you want to be able to do with javascript when you're done? Build a hybrid app? a node server?
Go's error handling remains verbose, unsafe and error-prone compared to more modern languages which use return values for error signaling (Erlang, MLs, Haskell, Rust).

The problem is not that Go's error handling requires more thinking or efforts, it's that it is bad, and while that's an improvement from C's terrible error handling it's still nowhere near good enough, let alone good (unless you consider C's error handling to be good enough in the first place).
America’s Next Spaceship: Designed to go where no man has gone before
Fully agree.

Recently discussing this issue among friends, not one of them could get hired for specific positions, even though they knew the required technologies.

All got the same excuse, the said technologies were being used in side projects, not on their main job.
Go to your doctor and ask to be tested for undiagnosed Adult ADHD.
You lost the novice at dependency management
This book was a great read, but I mostly agree with the critics in this article.
Curly bracket-indented Python for command line oneliners
Photographing Time: The speed of photography through the ages
Stories about HN moderation are explicitly off topic. I would have flagged it if I'd seen it.

From the Posting Guidelines:

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
What's the hardest thing you have ever had to do?
> more modern languages which use return values for error signaling

I must be missing something.. Returning a value in Go for error signaling is the way to signal errors in Go.
For the specific reason that resumes are often, if not actually outright faked, at least "enhanced", I've been contemplating starting a business in which I would perform resume screening for folks like you, for a fee.

I don't really know how to structure it yet. I don't want to be a recruiter or headhunter. What I would like to do is to offer folks such as yourself, who already have resumes, my opinion as to the qualifications of each candidate.

I myself got the very highest-paying job of my career, writing Mac OS X I/O Kit Kernel Extensions - what Apple calls device drivers - because I was the first candidate in six months who knew how to do synchronization in the kernel. That's a very basic requirement for writing a device driver, so it's covered in detail, and quite clearly by the tutorials on Apple's developer site.

I expect lots of people figured they could get a cushy, high-paying job, so they just added fake device driver work to their resume. Ironically, the guy who asked me that question was their windows driver engineer.

More or less the way it would work is that you'd send me some candidate resumes, and I would tell you which ones I think were worth your time to interview.

Quite commonly, references are only checked after an interview, as the last step before making an offer.

I wouldn't check their references, so as not to annoy them, but would call or email the HR departments at each of the employers the list, to verify their employment. "Did they work for you from this year to that year?" is a simple yes-or-no question.

Also I would verify that those who claimed to have college degrees, really graduated.

In my entire life, the only time I've been asked to supply my transcripts to anyone, was when I applied to graduate school, and so I could qualify for a discount on my auto insurance. I've never had a potential employer ask for my transcripts.

Would you regard such a service as valuable? If so, have you any suggestions as to how I could get started, or how to market such a service?

A lot of people have told me I'd make a good headhunter. I expect I would, but I don't want to do that, because I want the whole practice of third-party technical recruitment to just go away.
Could you provide an example of your definition of a simple program and the resources they had to write it?
This is really cool, I had been working on something similar.

I do think it's a little 'pejorative' to try to computationally define creativity, though.

Creativity seems to involve so many levels of cognition, and it really seems like you can automate it, describe it, or define it.

But as soon as you seem to define it methodically, and think you've got it, it changes in a way you can't anticipate, but which draws you into it with this force you can't ignore or escape. It's incredibly frustrating, but it's also very human.
Fans scramble for iPod Classic, the music player Apple killed off
Pretty telling technical story and also flattering for the FreeBSD team.
> XML itself is absurd simple. It is the epitome of simple.

I can't possibly argue with you if you actually believe that. XML is not simple. XML has CDATA, DOCTYPEs, comments, attributes, significant whitespace and so much more which JSON does not have.
I want to learn the syntax, then be able to solve problems on codebytes.com, codewars.com, and Javascript Koans.

Is CodeSchool better than Codecademy for a beginner? I do not mind investing $30 a month for a skill as valuable as this.
> I must be missing something.. Returning a value in Go for error signaling is the way to signal errors in Go.

Yes? That's the point, I'm comparing it to more modern languages which signal error "the same way", by opposition to languages implementing different high-level methods of error signaling. The clause is there to explicitly point out that I'm not considering or talking about exceptions and conditions-based error signaling.

Maybe it'd have been clearer if I'd written "languages which also use return values"?
> I've never known a language with so much discussion on why what you are doing isn't idiomatic as Go.

Python is another language where there is a lot of talk about idiomatic code ('Pythonic').

C++11 and C++14 also have a lot of idiomatic discussion since the community's trying to move to a different style with the latest enhancements.

Not sure if this is a signal of core issues.
Feel free to enlighten us specifically about how they are better.
A very fascinating project, one I would never have the perseverance to see through. Thanks for posting it.

It does, however, end with the machine being "not quite finished" in 2011, can anyone find an update?
Heh... I had a similar thought back when I was using Python. In both cases, I don't think it's a matter of the language "fighting" you. You can write Go however you like, so long as it compiles and runs. However, it IS a matter of people on the Internet mocking you for not being "pythonic".
I don't consider this interesting and worth discussing. It's an allegation (according to the one article I read). As we all know from the recent media coverage, allegations are cheap, and shouldn't be trusted automatically. I will continue flagging news stories like this that have little substance, unless there is an actual police investigation that results in a conviction.
The only concrete things that you've suggested you would do is call colleges and previous employers' HR departments.

That's both pretty trivial, and there are lots of companies that already provide that service. They're usually marketed as background checks to do just before the offer, as you say, but I'm sure they could also do it up front as you're proposing.