skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that unemployed or underemployed PhDs usually have all of the technical skills, but none of the tradecraft. Things like how to work with a version control system, working knowledge of one or two commercially used development frameworks, security basics, etc.

Those skills can be learned. Incidentally, I'm not especially impressed by most PhDs... but I do think they've shown enough intellectual mettle to learn how to use Github.

Companies in the valley expect their developers to be rockstar coders who know a lot of languages and tools (Scala, Docker, nodejs, etc) that have very little commercial adoption outside of startup culture. At the same time, few startups have the time to let you learn on the job

That suggests that talent has a very weak bargaining position. If talent had leverage, being able to learn on the job would be part of the deal they struck. There may be a strong bargaining position inured to one with the luck of a 100% match between one's technical experience and the trendy technologies du jour, but banking on always having a 100% match to the trends isn't a sustainable career strategy.

Companies demand purple unicorns because they believe they can get them, and that people will work 80 hour weeks or steal time from their employers (risking job loss before they get the next gig) in order to meet their pre-existing knowledge requirements, and that's probably because people do. This indicates a low bargaining position for software talent (not some startup exigency that is largely fictional). Everyone else gets to learn on the job. We don't, because even though what we do is important, we suck at organizing for our own interests.

so they'll overpay someone who does have the skills.

Overpaid software engineers are very rare. Most of the good ones are underpaid relative to what they can do. A good engineer is easily worth $250,000 per year (and, I'd argue, several times that) and very few get even close to that number.

They probably know Java pretty well, along with a few commercial frameworks, but you wouldn't expect them to have the architecture skills that many developers in the valley are expected to have.

Whatever the expectation may be of them, I actually find the average Valley developer to be pretty unimpressive. The Valley may have more of the Jeff Deans, but the 90th-percentile Silicon Valley programmer isn't any better than the 90th-percentile programmer in the general population.
Multi-CDN prevents 60 minutes of downtime
The interesting bit of this article comes right at the end: in the comment on how middlemen like Uber create a barrier-of-entry for workers who want to become small business owners. The easiest place to see this is in house cleaning services, where capital investment to start a business is low. The path from worker to small business owner is one that allows (allowed?) one to build some equity and entry into the middle class. To the extent that technology-based middlemen like Uber create a barrier to this, they may worsen income inequality.
There's an interesting effect there: if Yahoo doesn't have Alibaba, its core business probably couldn't be valued at a negative level (near zero might be possible, but not negative). I guess that makes sense at some level.
and nobody said "Steve Jobs built a bunch of revolutionary/innovative/transformative things from scratch - Apple, Next, Pixar, iPod, iPhone, and Marissa was an employee who made a successful way up to mid-level executive at a Big Co". These people couldn't be more different :).

And by the way, Marissa is rude and inconsiderate only to the people under her while she has been very polite and considerate to her superiors where is Steve Jobs has never had superiors :)
That anecdote is amusing, but it seems unlikely things worked exactly like that. They are near each other in the center of town, but the stadium and the university are a kilometer apart and separated by an elevated railway. At the time EWD35 was written (prior to 1963) the stadium had just installed 40 meter lights, so while it's possible the initials were written on the back of these, it seems more likely that this is a fanciful urban legend. Do you have any more information?
Are you running into more design issues ie they didn't fully understand how to solve the problem so they are just throwing code at it? Or are you running more into code issues where the code is just sloppy?

For the first problem I would consider that after you give them a problem and they solve it have them white board it for you. Ask questions about how they handle certain edge cases or problems. If they haven't have them go back and figure it out.

For the problem with sloppy code have code reviews every few days. Just keep on asking questions about special cases, and giving advice on how to better structure code.
We use the LaunchAgent approach. A separate sshd that's spawned there for the build user.

We originally tried with named pipes (a process via LaunchAgent), but it made it much harder for our customers to modify the build command without understanding our secret incantations.

As far as SDKs, we have 7.0, 7.1, and 8.0. Thanks for highlighting that the docs are missing that!
That's fine if you don't want to read long articles. But don't insist that every article be short. I read this thing start to finish in 30 minutes no problem. Because of it's length, it went into a greater level of detail than your average blog post. That detail made the story totally engrossing for me.

I feel ya on the issue of paper though. It'd be nicer to read on paper, because you could move around with it. Maybe I should be reading on a tablet and not a desktop. Not sure.
This is such a great way to contrasting my younger self with my older self.

My younger self want's to adjust all those sliders.

My older self adjusted the screen DPI to 300 DPI, (where I can't see the pixels) and moved the weight slider from lighter to heavier until a phone showed up.

And all that showed was the iPhone.

I could care less about RAM, Sims, SD cards, memory, etc now. These aren't indicative of the experience. My younger self would have loved hunting down the right fit phone from the Android market. My older self? Nah. I'll go take some photos of my kids instead.
Just make sure the front doesn't fall off. /s

Seriously though, I can't imagine that maintenance will be very easy on this rig, and you really want your CNG plant to be well maintained and inspected
I think they mean "block" in the sense of "don't show me anything else from this person" rather than the sense of "remove this person from the community".

You can't force people to read things they don't want to, after all, and not having a way to do this programmatically leaves one vulnerable to trolls, spammers, and other bad actors.
Yea, I can see your points, thank you.
That's why I split it. The window system interface is pretty much done. The main module won't change by much.

95% of the work is done in the core module. The main module is merely for the executable and rarely changes.

I've split it up because the xlib (and future wayland) modules need to refer to the core as a library, so the main module has nothing to do there.

Though I admit that part of the reason is earlier attempts with dynamic libraries, but that was more hassle than it needed to be.

I could merge the core back into the main module, but I'll wait a bit until I do that, just to be sure.
Seems like there's an issue where some people's expectations will always increase at a rate greater than the rewards they are given.
At the very least, start the standing meeting at 7-8 am California time. That's the decent way to run a global organization from the West Coast.
More generally, any business requires the net inputs (labour, materials, processing, etc) to cost less than the customer is willing to pay for.

Poorly paid market-driven unskilled labor is the foundation of many positions.

Aside: Waiters and bartenders can do really well for themselves. I know people who've gone from part time waiting to full time call center at 15$/hr and have less take home now. In my city, wait/bar staff are entitled and insanely compensated for their labour in comparison to their peers.
"every Chrome extension" That's some serious hyperbole you've got there. You should have it checked out.
They advertise their own search result pages on Google, then sell a bunch of ads at higher CPC on their page, with the idea being that they'll make enough on the commission from the second ad to pay for the Google ad with a profit.
Shame about the bugs, but broadly speaking I am happy to see more sites using CSP. Wonderful feature, and the report-only mode is a great design.

I won't pretend to know if the best way to modify Gmail is to inject additional script tags into the page, I would hope it isn't, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.
Power in any form (government, church, big business) corrupts and power attracts corrupt people, yes. Thing is, power is incredibly resistant to egalitarian distributions, so someone has to have it. We just have to make the best we can out of it, and the best is substantially much better than the US government.
He obviously wanted the Woz to care about money as much as he did. You see his generosity of spirit now?

I admire Jobs for his drive and his vision and his ability to get the best work out of amazing folks but his methods were often terribly inhuman when you really look at them.
money transfer <> wealth transfer.

You've made some good moves by going where the market values your skills. The system that enables efficient/cheap access to your labor is facilitating, but not causing your increase in wealth.

In many other locations, it would not.
goto is perfectly acceptable in C code. The most common use case is for cleaning up after errors before returning, although they're also used to break out of nested loops cleanly.

goto is harmful when used improperly but fine everywhere else.
24 days of Rust – from_fn
"But in Silicon Valley, the big money, and most of the prestige, is in making cool products. This is partly because product businesses, based on technology, are easier to scale than content ones, which require more human labor. It also reflects a cultural bias. The Valley’s greatest companies, from Hewlett-Packard onward, have been built around technological ingenuity. Tech executives know how to hire engineers and designers; they’re less adroit at recruiting editors or producers. When Loeb joined the Yahoo board, he recruited Michael J. Wolf, the former president of MTV, and the two consulted the noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen about who should become the next C.E.O. of Yahoo. Andreessen made the case for a product executive."

This seems to be missing part of the story. Didn't Yahoo! previously try hard to reinvent itself as primarily a "content" business under a CEO recruited from Hollywood, Terry Semel? IIRC it was Yahoo! failure to thrive using that strategy that got it into (relative) trouble in the first place.
The thrust of his article was not about this, but these are good points.

The three ways of making money -- transaction fee, selling hardware, and selling ads -- exclude just paying for an internet service (where I would call subscription, metered, and IAP different ways for paying for a service).

You could call that a subset of e-commerce except that he defines e-commerce companies as those that "that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms," and uses Amazon, ebay and Uber as examples.
I just did the same as you and I see way more than iphone. http://i.imgur.com/ROeAjIA.jpg
Really good point -- I had forgotten Apple's proliferation of incomprehensibly-named Power Macs and how Jobs reduced the line to the bare minimum. And, indeed, part of his strategy was to kill off Apple's actually innovative product, the Newton MessagePad, which had finally hit a solid implementation with the 2000. As much as I loved the Newton, killing it was a sound tactic in pursuit of a sound strategy.

By contrast, think of Jobs at NeXT: he pursued a failing strategy because he was trying to innovate for innovation's sake (trying to build a 3M workstation without a proven market; building a totally-automated, world-class factory without enough orders to keep it operating; obsessing over minutiae like the handrail design at NeXT headquarters). The result was fantastic technology but a company whose promises had to wait for Jobs' return to Apple.

I like to think that Jobs' failure at NeXT was an educational experience for him; however, with Mayer, I'm not sure she can pull off a second act after what I expect to be an unceremonious ouster from Yahoo.
Final Root Cause Analysis of Nov 18 Azure Service Interruption
Can you describe in few words which flaws do you see in rust?
Similar work to the 2010 Cambridge University student iGEM team - http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge

Here is their research for bioluminescent trees - http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Tools/Lighting
I'd suggest it's practically impossible for anyone to get by on 4 hours sleep a day and remain even remotely sane.

Sleep deprivation is classed as torture. Even if you're a Type A personality, 4 hours is not enough to avoid issues with basic cognitive competence (at best) and general mental health (at worst).

See e.g.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...
Don't be so proud of this technological terror you've constructed.

The ability to produce 3.6m tonnes of LNG annually while at sea is, uh, well that's actually pretty kick ass.

But I'll bet none of the crew have light sabers.
Netflix: offline viewing is 'never going to happen'
The difference is that Jobs was an asshole, everything I've ever heard about Mayer is that she's probably a psychopath.

My guess is that she was able to cover it up well at Google by burying everybody in data-driven decision making processes and working hard. But a data-driven decision making process about creative stuff is precisely the kind of approach an emotionally disconnected person would use as a tool to do their job.

She was a long-shot try for CEO and has done some good things. But it may be time for her to move on. My sympathies for whatever group ends up with her in charge next.
Yeah, that's a pretty sticky part. Venus has appx earth gravity and atmosphere at that point, so you'd need an Earth-class launcher to get off; something at least like an Atlas or Titan II. The launcher itself we could get there reasonably, but the propellant, well... that's an awful lot of mass to send to Venus. It gets much easier if you can do ISRU, which may be easier on Venus, but is still a novel development project.

EDIT: after further reading the article...

In the article it shows that most of the payload (60k kg out of the 70k kg payload) of the airship module is the ascent vehicle. Each of the two transit modules is launched by what looks like 4 Delta IVs and one SLS Block2--each. (Plus two crew capsule launches at each end of the mission for Earth departure and return.) So I guess they have some mass to work with. Heck of a launch schedule.

That 60k kg ascent rocket is just a bit bigger than the Pegasus XL, which can launch 443 kg. A Mercury capsule is 1200kg. Granted the ascent capsule doesn't need a heat shield, but that's not a lot of rocket for two people.
Hump the Bundle – NSFW Undie Bundle #1 – Porn ❤'s Charity
Hey everyone, I posted my site here late last night to the crickets.. Oops.

https://www.humpthebundle.com

Was really hoping to get a good discussion going about what we're doing.

We're a porn parody of the great Humble Bundle!

Let us know what you think about the site,

Humpy Leftnut
Agreed. This article starts with a hypothesis ("Marissa Mayer bad!"), and then lays out cherry-picked 'facts' and anecdotes around it.

It could as easily have started with "Marissa Mayer great!", and done the same (but with a different set of 'facts' and anecdotes).
Once you have started to use a tiling window manager (Awesome WM in my case), you can't go back, it's just a huge boost of productivity for developers - especially when you come from OS X where dragging/resizing windows is a real pain.
On the other hand, if I'd realized I'd be starting a Google hate train with my original comment, I wouldn't have commented. My question was strictly about this particular case.

No company is perfect. There have been a few distasteful decisions from Google, but every company has had those. And besides, Google could be far more evil than it has been. We should probably give them the benefit of the doubt unless there is some strong evidence.
My first response is phrased as an argument against your point, using what I thought was a well-known example that strongly supports your point. It's facetious.

I've read of a philosopher who made the argument, "the theory of evolution can't be true, because if it were true, that would imply that someone could make a lot of money by replicating images of Elvis Presley." My comment has the same structure, but I'm already aware that the evidence directly contradicts the stated point. So "your theory of terms having negative valence based on their meaning (instead of arbitrarily) is incorrect, as can be seen by how the slow of wit gained new respect from society when the socially-enlightened term 'retarded' replaced the old, denigratory 'stupid'. According to your model, 'retarded' would be an insult because of its negative meaning."
Looking for Talents
Database version control, made easy
It is. But that doesn't mean they can't rebuild it (it will NOT be easy, but they have the $$$ to splurge on a talented team)
For perspective... if we compare to CPM on YouTube views (and account for Google's take), $0.0001 is one to two orders of magnitude less than what content creators earn via forced advertising consumption.
Backdoor Installed on Coolpad Android Phones
The Dissent protocol itself only guarantees proportionality: each group member gets one and only one transmission slot in a given communications round, with exactly one fair-share quantum of transmission bandwidth. So at this level the protocol definitely does not enable minorities within the group to be silenced; it just prevents minorities (or any subset) from using more than one slot per round.

How groups are formed and managed is another issue that Dissent doesn't determine, and group management policy may or may not enable minorities within the group to be silenced. For example, one group might have a policy in which a majority of group members can vote to silence or outright ban some member; in that case certainly the majority has the ability to silence the minority. But the Dissent protocol itself in no way endorses or requires such a policy. Another group policy might be not to provide any group-wide silencing mechanism, but only an individual-block mechanism - where any user can opt to stop seeing messages from any pseudonym they deem annoying, without affecting any other member's ability to continue seeing messages from that pseudonym.

In short, Dissent the protocol is completely agnostic to what kind of blocking mechanisms you might deploy, if any: it just provides the proportionality property you need to implement whatever voting or blocking mechanisms you might want reliably.
You could take advantage of having a single git repo for multiple cargo packages. This has worked extremely well for me. It was a lot easier having a single git repo to manage and control but still have separate packages for each of the different pieces. You could have the main package become the executable and have the core and various other packages in there, too.
I was looking for a tool to have our database under version control, and this looks interesting. Anybody else has any experience with this, or any such tool?
Java Socket Programming vs J2EE: A Comparison and Migration Walkthrough.
Ask HN: Working in a startup
I have recently graduated from college and taken up a job as a frontend developer in a startup. The job itself is fulfilling but I do find that I am missing out on something in life. I have learned lots of new things in the past 3 months and had the opportunity to work with great people on one hand but find that the other things that I like to do (blogging , participating in meetups and doing exercise) have taken a back seat due to the sheer amount of time and energy required for working. Any advice on how to cope with this
Million-Mummy Cemetery Unearthed in Egypt
I think it means "far exceeds the expectations at his current role". If you get several FEs, then it's time for a promotion.
NoScript's kind of a pain to live with, but it's better than this crap.
That's a super cool idea.

I do wonder about unintended consequences. Invasive glowing trees might wreak havoc on ecosystems, especially on tree dwelling nocturnal creatures. At least they'd be easy to spot :)
Middlemen provide value because they manage reputation, which puts them in a strong position to manipulate the market if there is lack of competition.
It's not unusual for content that appears to be by famous names to be ghost written and (sometimes) approved by the famous name.

Or their agent.

So here was absolutely no reason not to hire Paltrow - even if she can't write her way out of a YouTube comments section.

Celebrity culture sells. It's kind of disappointing, but empirically it's what a lot of people want and will pay money for.
Again, Cuba's no longer a vassal state. I suspect they have little interest in hosting Russian nuclear missiles, and I suspect the US would be more than happy to help them resist a Russian effort to restore the Cold War situation.
BlackBerry officially launches the Classic, a smartphone for yesterday
Blackberry introduces Classic model. It's 2012 all over again
Can you add the 2014 Moto X? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_X_%282nd_generation%29
In a political organization there's no problem with repeated "we were frat buddies in college", "we have fun going golfing together", "I've never met anyone who kisses up that much", etc.

In practice you see it applied in very large teams with team wide metrics. Like 1000 people in a call center. The guy who hacks the system or gets assigned to a special team that naturally results in better results, can consistently win every time.
On your second link, there's a great pun on "HumanOS", which in Spanish simply means "Humans".

On the university site, there's a few hidden links to Cuban Mozilla fans[1], a digital publication for open source software [2], a youth-targeted site for open-source users[3] (seems down), and a women-targeted site for IT [4]. Note that there's more, but everything seems to be down at the moment, it might be the HN effect

[1] http://firefoxmania.uci.cu/ [2] http://swlx.cubava.cu/ [3] gutl.jovenclub.cu [4] http://haciendoweb.upr.edu.cu/
Please read this explanation by Redhat's Kurt Seifried:
http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/1075

tl;dr not a vulnerability
Seeing as the YouTube video with the most views, Gangnam Style, has less than 2.2 billion views as of today... And the top channel has less than 7.1 billion views... I think the tip amount would need to be closer to $0.10/view, which I personally would not pay.
AnandTech purchased by parent company of Tom's Hardware
Audible, Comixology, Amazon, and Doctorow’s First Law
Obviously getting to the moon is step one. Getting to Venus and Mars are at least on a comparable level of difficulty, and Mars is much more like the moon than Venus is, so we're already used to getting around it.

I think it's more a case of going with the devil you know, even if Venus might be better overall for various reasons.
Distributed Deep Learning on MPP and Hadoop
Show HN: My first startup, making premium long distance cyclewear