skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an important distinction. The desire for fidelity is clearly genetic. I agree with you, it probably entered the gene pool because of those reasons. With those reasons now gone, it can and probably will exit the gene pool. This will drastically change the nature of human relationships.
C is a great replacement for C. No, I don't mean that as a joke. Using C as a low level language and proving it correct via a higher level language gives you the performance of C without the security problems: http://sel4.systems/
In Portland (where I was and still reside) it was pretty ugly. Pretty much everyone I knew in tech was unemployed for long-ish periods. I gave up hunting and started my own business freelancing - did that for over ten years. That gradually got better over time and by 2005 or so I was making more than my last salaried position. During that period I learned to live below my means and always have a 6+ month cushion, so all-in-all it wasn't a terrible thing.
I started recruiting for startups around Philadelphia in 1998. For the first couple years anyone who could spell Java would get significant raises to leave big companies in the area for funded startup scene. Signing bonuses were given to most hires, and stock options were valued highly by most hires.

When the crash happened, I started to get calls from developers who wouldn't take my calls a year earlier. Many had a few jobs within a short period of time. I remember placing one guy three times in two years due to closings.

Many recruiters couldn't generate enough revenue and subsequently left the market, which was actually a good thing because the market had become flooded and needed a purging. Salaries came down a bit, but candidates at this point would put very little value on stock options. Options went from being looked at as a large piece of the package to being considered the equivalent of lottery tickets.

To be insulated, I'd encourage you to try to become 'known' in your space. Those with solid reputations and networks were always employed, even if they bounced around a bit.
1. Housing is a bigger commitment

Interestingly, this is a policy choice—and a bad one—foisted on us primarily by incumbent land owners who vote: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO , rather than a law of nature.
It is reasonable to expect that marriage rates could drop significantly while there still remains a large number of people who observe most of their peers getting married.
Monogomy in the modern age has always seemed like a sexual (and emotional) put option.

That said this rock that we're flying through space on becomes much less enjoyable if you stop believing entirely in the more romantic ideas of human entanglement (we are beings that need stories).
Yeah, they're not taking a stand so much as introducing the reader to the fact there is a disagreement. You'd have to chase down the original sources to get details.
I think it just starts with being curious about the world around you - write about what you see and what interests you. And in the beginning write for yourself. Don't think about audiences and reach and all of that stuff. That will come as you find your voice and what you're passionate about writing. Also, the most valuable posts come from the people that have had the experiences to write about. So just living and having a diverse set of experiences will get you great material to write about. Most of all, don't try to sound like anyone but yourself. People will connect with that.
>"The natural reaction might be to dismiss the findings as confirmations of an obviousness: that men who are married tend to look at porn less frequently precisely because they are married.

The researchers, while careful to say that their findings fall short of being conclusive, insist that the relationship between the two also "likely runs in the direction that we assert."

The reason, Malcolm explains, is likely tied to the relationship between marriage and sexual gratification...."

Hmm. Seems to be a pretty massive gap in their logic path. In reply to the very real possibility that married men simply view less porn, they quickly spun to the reasons they suspect porn could lead to men not getting married.

It also "likely" runs in the direction we assert and here is a likely reason that it might?

C'mon guys.
It is not merely the uneducated who can subscribe to extremist ideologies.

When the unskilled highschool grad gets off the plane and signs up, they are going to give him a rifle. When the engineer gets off the plane and announces himself as such, there is a chance that he will be put to better use.
Yes, I think we agree fully. I would add that the persistence of norms does not have to be directly genetic in the way most people would interpret that. It could be indirectly genetic, in the sense that we have a strong genetic propensity to adopt the norms of our social surroundings and attempt to spread those norms to the next generation. That propensity probably applies even for norms that have far outlived their original purpose.
Also, allowing yourself to depend on the other, being truthful and the other things you say will quickly translate into economic benefits. Stability, emotional/financial/..., a safety net, a second opinion, a distraction when needed, I don't know how I'd do without.
Recently on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8767449
Is String Theory About to Unravel?
Cryptol was written by Galois not the NSA. It was written for the NSA.
There's this thing called aging. It's really quite a universal problem. It means that if you marry for sex, it's not going to last.

Skipping it also leads to not lasting though.
I would go as far as to say that married couples should banned from divorce until all their children are at least 16 1/2.

That would solve the child support problem for married couples, reduce the divorce rate and incentivise stable families.
Speaking of The Bubble, there's a documentary on YouTube filmed shortly after/during the burst. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsVpNB2Lv3U

At one point you see these things, pink slip parties.. fascinating stuff. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pink-slip-party.asp

Anyway, we're not in a bubble, so don't worry. :)
A serious security push might raise computing costs to the point where some low-margin computing activities become unprofitable or folks like Amazon push less into expansion/R&D to keep budgets balanced, but I think it's likely that most computerized activity would continue. Folks are gonna still gonna wanna watch Netflix or blog about cats.
In 2015 I'll be looking to start my family with my wife. So I'm wishing for a successful pregnancy and hoping for a healthy baby near the end of 2015 or early 2016.
Since rust is a true systems programming language, without a mandatory GC, I wonder if there will be any serious attempt to build a kernel entirely in Rust? It certainly sounds possible, and I suspect it would quickly be better than any FOSS kernel currently available, given the fact that Rust is so well designed against bad or sloppy code. Perhaps I'm just talking out of my ass here, but it sounds like a good idea.
this, so much.
1) I was fortunate enough to be in a good place where my wages were not hit terribly hard, but there was a big slowdown in wage growth.

2) I did take a pretty dull "and stressful for being that dull" job with an insurance co. as a senior developer after the startup (probably closer to 'small biz' at that point) I worked for had a major restructuring. The dull job did allow me to focus a bit more on some other freelance/networking opportunities.

3) As a few have noted, the biggest thing afterwards seemed to be the outsourcing wave. That plus the sudden glut in the market seemed to nearly wipe out entry level opportunities. There was a period of time where I (being only 6-7 years out of college myself) don't recall working with a single new graduate.
I would guess that PHK, being PHK, is just being thorough rather than defensive. After all, if you can avoid a lot of back and forth, you're saving everybody time. Of all people here, he's definitely one of the ones worth giving the benefit of the doubt.
You probably said "polysilicon" because this chip has some polysilicon deposited on top.
1 in 4 chance is still a pretty huge risk considering the consequences.
This was my experience as well. I left the industry when I started seeing requirements like 5+ years experience in windows 2000 when it was 2001.
PyPI is due to be replaced with something better shortly.
I don't see why the IO model would be a fundamental issue here. Fundamentally, async/await is about automating inversion of control, which is a mechanical program transformation.
I just went through a few of the nodeschool.io courses. They're a good starting point, but don't stand alone in my mind. You'll end up supplementing the lesson "hints" with info online, but that's also a good way to familiarize yourself with various packages.

I just wrapped up the one for Hapi.js which was slightly out of date in NPM (the source on Github does seem up-to-date).
Mining API Usage Examples from Test Code [pdf]
I disagree with the Javascript hate here, and the author is missing the point.

JS is (at least until ECMA6 rolls in) a small, tidy language. It's got some bad parts, but at its core it is quite manageable. It's useful precisely because it ignores a lot of the implementation details that make languages like C or Rust more performant. I'm sick of people saying "JS is bad hurr durr let's replace it with $PREFERRED_HIPSTER_LANGUAGE".

The real problem is that stupid people write javascript, lazy people write docs for javascript, and academic people write language extensions. What happened to C++ and made it a mudball is what is slowly happening to JS, and what will eventually happen to Rust if it gains any traction.

Instead of replacing asm.js, we should look at a dedicated and simple programming environment for all browsers that care about performance-critical code. That environment should be specified as a machine, and then left the hell alone until some major change in technology alters the computer engineering therein. That way, people can program the performant bytecode in whatever they want (ASM.js, Rust, D, C, Clojure).

The thing we really need to be doing is encouraging more conservatism in our work and tools: fewer and better languages, fewer and better libraries, more and better documentation. You know, what any other field might consider engineering.

EDIT: On a related note, the W3C and WHATWG and Khronos folks should all only be allowed to propose things every three years, with all voting done in 6 months. And then limited to adding 2-3 features, tops. Similar for the JS and IETF folks. This is absurd: spend some time enjoying the fruits of your labors before adding more shit that compounds the complexity of working developers' lives!
Every time I hear about this, I think about how much of a mistake I made not getting my associate's in '97 and heading to the bay. I, too, graduated into the crash in 2001, but I was lucky because I had an independent study with a professor who referred me to his friend who was hiring.

Now, while it was terrible for B2C, government consulting was booming. It wasn't the sexiest of work, but it was a good four years of my life.

I just wonder what would have happened if I could have grabbed the money and then go to school during the crash instead... Perhaps it wouldn't have made a difference.
That' s not comparable at all. 55% of answers were correct, not 50% of the possible material in the library was relevant.
There were three interesting groups that came out of that time. One was the CEO/CIO/CTO's of startups who found themselves barely qualified for entry-level roles when the bubble burst. It was a sad awakening for them. Another group were mid-career types who found their careers and salaries put on hold for 5+ years while the market improved. That was sad because many were very talented but with no place to apply it; some never really getting their shot again. The third were those who would have otherwise been starting businesses, but the times just weren't right so they put their heads down working in boring jobs waiting for their moment.
Lunch with French Billionaire Xavier Niel
Well done guys and girls! If the integration is good, I'll likely move to FastMail's DAV setup instead of my ownCloud instance.
(Raspberry)Pi HomeGuard: helping people stay independent longer
I finished college in 2002, and moved to Dallas to support my wife while she pursued her PhD. Dallas was particularly hard hit with Texas Instruments and Ericsson shedding thousands of engineers. The market was flooded.

I submitted 45 applications. I ended up with two interviews. It took me 4 months to get my first job. I was being paid about half of what I was making as a high schooler in 1998.

In the end it was one of those strange blessings. That company ended up being a fledgling Quickoffice which launched me into my startup career.

Still, it was quite tense at the time.
History is bound to repeat itself...
What you say almost makes me want to learn enterprise.
Posted a few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8779532
I'll note that one positive in the industry is that people put some serious thought into working in a way that was more productive than dot-com crazy and we all took Agile methodologies seriously.
> Why not drop him a line by email

I wanted to, but the site has no place for comments and no info on how to reach him.

His conclusion at the end is that the total dollar volume is approximately flat, and he bases this on the graph, but it's not completely flat - it's bumpy, so you can't actually tell on a linear graph if it's flat or not.
It is not my idea (I wish it was), but the basic idea is that any intelligent life a little more advanced than us would build Dyson spheres [1] around each star to capture the energy being released. This would shift the stars EM spectra heavily into the red. Combine these with von Neumann machines [2] and the stars soon cease to shine.

Interestingly while we are not really capable of searching for such stars right now we have found few possible candidates [3]. I personally think these are likely to all be false positives because any civilisation capable of building a Dyson sphere will be able to capture all the energy being emitted and so the black body temperature of the sphere will be only be a little above 2.73K. These we would not be able to detect.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine

3. http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Other_sear...
I think that stopped because it became no longer financially feasible. In the 60s it was easily doable (for a man) to be the breadwinner for a family of 4-5, even 6 people. Anno 2014, It's just not possible anymore. A household, especially with children, requires a $60k wage minimum and the average wage is $32,140 [1].

I'm scared to think how much influence this really had on female emancipation. It is striking how female emancipation happened just a few years after it became pretty much required for household income. It might be more an effect of US (and Europe) social policy than anything else.

That way of seeing things also explains gender attitudes much better. E.g. to see why it didn't happen in the middle east. Simple : effectively nobody has a job, of the locals, not men not women. Apparently if employers have a choice out of 1000 individuals, of which 500 women and 500 men, and only 10 will ever get hired, those 10 are overwhelmingly likely to be men.

Makes me wonder if gender equality in the middle east would be as simple as dropping average wage, and getting employment up to 40-50% at least. Makes you wonder if that would shut up all the allah has ordained women ... crap.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
Ask HN: How long is the road from web dev to game dev
I've been creating web stuff for almost 10 years now but these days I fell really drained of doing the same stuff all over again on almost every projects. So I started looking around for alternatives and since I've always dreamed of creating video games (but somehow always assumed that it was out of reach to make a living out of it), I am considering diving into this.

I am a fairly experienced programmer and I have some experience in 3D modeling / rendering as hobby but I am a complete ignorant in game design / programming.
Is it realistic to think about a career change at this point ? If it is, any tips ? Can I be hireable in gaming industry in a decent amount of time?
How come the first commit for go is from that year? Didn't go appeared around 2007-2008 ?
Breaching paywalls of finance papers and distributing the content for free
There could be other filters not listed. I sometimes wonder why on the Earth the observed sizes of the Sun and the Moon are the same, and recently wondered if the effect is far better eyesight in some land animals, including humans, than would otherwise be the case. If the Moon looked larger than the Sun, the Sun would disappear more frequently and for a longer time in the daytime, and there'd be no corona; if vice versa, the eclipse would only ever be partial. Because the corona lasts 5 minutes only, once a lifetime, animals will stare at it in surprise. Only animals with eyes which won't be damaged by sustained bursts of daylight will pass on their genes. Perhaps it also gives rise to animals which can see both in the dark and in the bright light. Is such type of eyesight essential for higher intelligence? If so, it's part of the Great Filter, reducing the odds of intelligent life by orders of magnitude.
That feels a little circular though. If creating dummy transactions can increase Bitcoin adoption and/or market price, then that increase doesn't feel "fake" or "an illusion" at all.
Better: the Newton had, as part of the NewtonScript language reference, a built-in "IsHalting" function which tested a function and determined if it would halt with a provided input.

See page 23-84 of:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1509/en_US/Newt...
Getting a modern die photo requires using an electron microscope or a scanning-probe microscope, because feature sizes are down to about a tenth the wavelength of visible light. That alone makes the photos look pretty different.

Modern chips also have quite a few more layers (process steps); e.g. IBM's old 0.13μm process supports 8 metal layers, not counting other steps like epitaxial growth and oxides: https://www.mosis.com/vendors/view/ibm/8rf-dm
The quoted study "...assumes for all cars that present and future emission-control technologies will be more widely used in 2020, especially particulate filters which have a marked effect on cleaning diesel exhausts."

Why wouldn't you assume similarly optimistic scenarios for large scale power generation. It's clearly easier to retrofit and regulate about a 100 power station to trap particulate matter etc. than assuming that millions of gasoline and diesel cars on the road will each individually have correctly functioning filters.

Also, a large number of EV's on the road means that any future power plants' improved cleaner nature instantly affects the pollution impact of all the cars on the road.
In my version of the world; consultants do better when the economy is down. Because 'big companies' let people go; but work still needs to be done so they hire consultants / consulting firms.

In US companies; this shift looks good on the balance sheets and helps stock prices. Because employee cost is a different line item than consultant costs.

I believe the economy is picking up when my business takes a hit.

[All said with the caveat that my interpretation of events could be completely wrong]
The Bay Area was hit hard, and startups stopped being sexy. Oddly enough, I'd say that it was a great time to make money if (a) you'd made the connections before the bust, (b) you were building something of substance like Google, and (c) you were willing to play a longer game. The upshot of a time when no one's getting rich quick is that there's more audience for get-rich-slowly strategies. Technical excellence tends to produce get-rich-slowly paths; it's viral marketing bullshit (and overhiring) that's behind many of these rapid-growth get-rich-quick startups. When people lose faith in charismatic nonsense, that's the time to drive hard with true excellence and lower-risk get-rich-slowly strategies. If your goal is excellence, you don't want your industry to be "sexy", because that brings in poseurs with zero competence but superior social skill, and they end up (a) getting all the resources, and (b) humiliating the whole industry when they fail.

Think also about Paul Graham. Y Combinator is a case of him monetizing a reputation that he earned (and, yes, he actually earned it) by standing up for startups in the depths of winter. I, for one, plan on making a strong and vocal case for Real Technology (it shall rise again) after the Snapchat/Clinkle frivolity blows up and humiliates the current cool kids. Being able to explain why shit went to hell ca. 2017, as it will, is going to help us make a case for building something better in the next iteration.

That said, it was a bad time for entry-level salaries, and graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05. If you had a $60k offer (that'd be $72k today) you were in the top third of CS graduates, and non-STEM graduates were lucky to see $40k. I'd guess that the more experienced engineers didn't see a massive salary drop (maybe 10-20% at worst) but it wasn't a good time for job hopping. Certainly that feeling that one could get a 20% raise, just by walking across the street, died out.

It was a good labor market for finance because there was a lot of cheap talent. First-year Goldman Sachs analysts were only in the $60-65k range. (Bonuses could be 50-100%, but they were also working 60-110 hours per week.) Undergrad quants (that's rare but the positions exist) were generally getting $80-90k offers.

People expected housing prices to come down, but they didn't decline by much because there was this other bubble that was building at the same time...
Linus Torvalds' Bitkeeper Blunder
> using strstr() instead of a whole PCRE engine

This is probably faster on a lot of platforms with the common grep use-cases, yeah (i.e. very short literal strings). But as a common practice imo using the C library string functions in performance-sensitive code is tricky, because it can lead to some wildly variable performance between platforms, compared to directly using a portable-C implementation of a good algorithm.

I was bitten by strstr() in particular in the past. I had a large slowdown when taking something pretty simple (filter/extraction code) that ran fine on Linux, and trying it on FreeBSD. It turns out that strstr() on FreeBSD implements the naive O(nm) algorithm: a loop around strncmp() that tries a match at each possible starting location [1]. That's fine for short search strings but increasingly bad for long ones. I had assumed that a typical strstr() would use Boyer-Moore or something of that sort past a threshold, but on many platforms it doesn't (GNU libc, at least in recent versions, does switch to Two-Way [2]).

[1] http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/lib/libc/string/strstr.c...

[2] http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/node26.html
There's already a high performance, formally verified, "FLOSS" microkernel: http://sel4.systems/

As it turns out, very few people are interested in having software that works.
He has applied for a patent but appear not to have been issued yet: "System and method for phonetic representation"

https://www.google.com/patents/US20090043584

EDIT: Downthread someone looked it up and determined that it failed to issue
I would say that cones are better.
Sony Hackers Mock FBI: 'You Are an Idiot'
The Stratemeyer Syndicate (responsible for such endless series as Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, etc.) had this perfected long before Patterson was even born.

In fact, Stratemeyer and Ford were almost exact contemporaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratemeyer_Syndicate