skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ya what you say is true, it's definitely possible to make a game as a side project while working a day job. The only problem is that it’s difficult to know if/when to throw in the towel. My old partner and I ended up spending 11 years on a game that way. That was before Kickstarter, although I'm not sure anyone would fund the style of game we were making because it was just a 2D platformer sequel.

It’s also true that there are few or no expenses in programming other than labor, but even living a subsistence lifestyle adds up. I think we each averaged over 500 hours per year, call it 10,000 total to be conservative. So we could have made the game over about 2 years if we could have raised $70,000 and paid ourselves minimum wage (which just barely makes ends meet for a single person where we live in Idaho). Instead we worked a bunch of dead end jobs, I ended up moving furniture for 3 years and my partner got sucked into computer repair rather than programming. We would work seasonally and then be on call at home during slow parts of the year and spend what money we’d saved on rent and food while we hacked on the game for days on end. Struggling with burnout and destitution for so many years set our careers and personal lives back so far that we still haven’t started families and we’re pushing 40.

What I learned from all of this is that if you want to raise money, you need to earn an order of magnitude more, somewhere between 2 and 10 times as much as you think, because of life’s expenses (mainly debts in this era). It works just like time where even tripling your estimate is sometimes not enough. As far as I can tell, there is nothing like an artist guild for indie programmers, no support structure to lend any dignity to the lifestyle through grants, commissioned work or the attention of benefactors. There’s just the starving artist mentality, which grows more unpalatable with age. I don’t view this as anything close to sustainable, so it’s no wonder that the overall quality of indie games has fallen to amateur levels (and eventually apps as their prices race to the bottom). It’s going to follow the same trend as books. I’m hopeful though that maybe something like a basic income might come along and rescue art from slow decline. Art is synonymous with culture so I guess that’s why I get so worked up about all of this, because I feel it’s intimately tied to whatever technological future we would like to see for ourselves and future generations.
> I know even Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been pushing the "we've been genetically modifying food for thousands of years!" line but I think it's a bit disingenuous.

Its not. Not that its his field or anything, but I suspect Tyson has educated himself somewhat on it before making that statement, and it certainly matches what I've learned from direct contact from people working in the field.

> Crossing a tomato and a deep sea fish is fundamentally different from crossing two strains of corn and we should expect different risks.

We don't cross tomatoes with deep sea fish; we might take genes from deep sea fish (or some other similarly distant species) and insert them into tomatoes, but then, one of the ways that the genetic changes occur that natural and artificial selection both work on is horizontal gene transfer between species (including ones that are very far apart on the tree/web of life), so this is not as fundamentally different from what goes on in traditional breeding as many people seem to think.
Actually I think it would be quite interesting to know what caused the confusion.

My first reaction was that the projects are completely different and the question must have been grounded in a complete misunderstanding of what NW is, but as I think more I realize that there are some notable similarities.

Meteor synchronizes the clients and server in such a way that it seems they're running in the same process on the same machine, and the only thing the developer need worry about is adding some declarative configuration for security and efficiency (obviously this simplifies things a bit).

NW actually makes the client and server run in the same process on the same machine (or rather the parts of the stack that typically run on the client and server respectively).

The parent comment asked a question which may well have provoked an interesting discussion into a topic like this. And although its phrasing may have been a little blunt, it didn't come across as rude. If we assume that evo_9's comment was honest confusion rather than laziness, it's then only fair to assume Kiro's was founded in genuine interest as to where the confusion lies.
Someone has been reading too much Neal Stephenson...
Also there doesn't seem to be anything that is actually "countering" anything at the moment
Yep. I was running Arch Linux on a personal droplet, and they decided to deprecate support for it. I don't even think there was an official announcement about it. There's even quite a bit of backing to bring it back [1], and oddly, they use an old video on their front page with when Arch was still listed [2].

"Built for developers" => can't use developer's favorite OS. :(

[1]: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...

[2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/assets/video/create-e68d7b3c.we...
Actually, the "Life wouldn't be worth living afterwords" was more associated with the anti-war nuclear disarmament group.

The people who wanted us to be prepared to strike were the ones who thought war would be survivable and the conditions afterwords tolerable, at least for some substantial chunk of the population.

Maybe that's all just my perception.
For all the talk of ending racism in the Valley they have blinders when it comes to hiring and would rather have more immigration than fix the problem by training and hiring the poor minorities that are citizens.
I'll do my best to respond to your points. Your post has made me realize I didn't do a very good job explaining...thanks for pointing it out.

First: this post has nothing to do with the company and whether it does or does not have its shit together. I posted this as an individual because I was excited that I was told we were getting an intern and they'd be working with me...which is something that's never happened to me before.

Whether or not the wiki aspect is secretarial work is entirely dependent upon the intern. If we end up getting someone with no CS background then yes, that aspect of their work will likely be secretarial. If we get someone with a strong CS background then I'd give them a list of things we've considered building and tell them to go for whichever one they want (or come up with their own). Some examples of projects off the top of my head: bi-directional syncing of ground-based versions of our wiki with a version aboard the ISS, building web services to communicate between various databases and mission critical tools, working on methods to suggest content to people who may not be aware of it, etc.

The NASA headline is not intended to be misleading. The intern would work onsite at Johnson Space Center, not at a contractor offsite. Within our group the fact that some badges say "contractor" and others say "civil servant" is irrelevant; we all work on the same stuff. And, quite frankly, what we work on is pretty awesome: developing EVAs, responding to on-orbit failures (think the "square-peg-into-round-hole" scene from Apollo 13 [1]), SCUBA diving and working in the space suit in the NBL...and on top of that, and because I've found a niche for myself, developing software to smartly fix our knowledge management problems. I don't know anyone with a job cooler than mine, except the astronauts I work with daily.

I'm sure there are lots of companies that give interns work that extends the classroom. This is not one of them. There are two reasons for this: (1) there are no classrooms teaching EVA, and (2) our group does not focus on software development. If a rockstar developer ended up getting this internship then they would have a lot of freedom to work on projects of their choosing, but they would not get oversight from Peter Norvig. That is probably a deal-breaker for some; it probably sounds awesome to others.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2YZnTL596Q
Because if they don't they'll be out-competed by those that do?
Amendment 64 put to good use
Note: if you see "that page doesn't exist", wait a couple seconds and refresh (AppCache)
If these guys switch to io.js they no longer will be node or webkit since they use blink under the hood.
Show HN: Rocket Renegade, a Space Shooter for iOS in Swift
> Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth?

I don't have a source handy, but I believe studies have shown that immigration does indeed help economic growth with the vast majority of that growth benefiting the immigrants themselves.
"But Verizon definitely provides a Title II service over those fiber lines, telephone service. It is required to. It doesn't really advertise it, but you can buy it. In Fios areas the entire telephone system is replaced by a single FTTH. Verizon is a common carrier, Title II, telephone provider."

Sure, but it then claims to use Title II to do upgrades to it's ISP service capacity on those licenses, which is ... contradictory.

If the agreements, etc, said "we will perform necessary upgrades to telephone service over fiber lines under Title II, all others will be under Title X", that would be different.
But they don't.
The claim it all falls under Title II.

So they are definitely contradictory.
Strip away all the fancy, it's just a list. I don't buy it
Good to know that there is still something going on.

A few months ago I looked into creating desktop apps with JavaScript and found Node-Webkit and the Atom-Shell. AS seemed to bloated for my taste, but I found NW was kinda stale, back in the days.
Skype 5.9 for iPhone: Start conversations quickly and easily
>It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down.

This thesis statement is overly reductionist. In fact, immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3]. Therefore, every argument you make against immigration is actually for it (as pg and sam campaign for).

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188

[3] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means...
Etsy said to be nearing IPO
Yeah you probably prefer professional idiot Thomas Friedman
I'm surprised the article doesn't suggest increasing side-channel noise as a crude interim counter.

Certainly it would be a big power drain, but for the security conscious it sounds like a reasonably easy short-term solution. That, and not accessing sensitive data in public, of course.
I've added a sentence to make it clear I was talking about "immigration more generally"

As for your point...

Anyone who gets on a moral high horse about "discrimination" is going to end up in web of contradictions before long. Virtually every human institution is based on "discrimination", and much of that discrimination is going to be at least partially based on factors such as innate ability, geography, or genetic distance. Families and kinsmen treat family members differently than outsiders (you don't let anyone off the street into your home). Local community members discriminate against carpet baggers and tourists. Software companies discriminate against people not smart enough to write good code. "Elite" colleges are elite because they discriminate based on class, character, and aptitude. Etc. Etc.
No. You're missing out a whole third group, the people who aren't very moral/empathetic but who do fear reprisals, for whom laws are effective enough to prevent seriously antisocial behavior.

They're the petty thieves of the world, the ones who don't see the problem in taking the last two of something even when others have had none, but who wouldn't punch someone because they're afraid of getting arrested and sent to jail. Think Larry Ellison.

Besides, for the people who don't care, we have prisons. The laws might not work for them but the walls do.
In your case, no. It sounds like you're designing, not building, the app. Letting your contractors use the technology they are most familiar with and that has the most mature tooling (for the platform) is in your best interest. Apple will be supporting Objective-C for a long time to come so you lose nothing from sticking with what works.

I say this as someone who has written many thousands of lines of Swift over the last few months. In an effort to learn the language and explore some user experience ideas I decided to write as much of my app as I could in Swift (it stands at about 95%). Since starting in September of last year I've alternately loved and regretted choosing Swift. For reference, I'll list the pros and cons.

Pros:

- Greater productivity through new "safety" features (lots of caveats here, see the Cons section for why).

- The expressiveness of Swift often means less code to read than with Objective-C. Hopefully that also means less bugs.

- Swift code is (to me) much easier to reason about than equivalent Objective-C.

- The language is just plain nice. This is subjective, and not relevant to your particular case.

Cons:

- The tooling is very immature. I have encountered multiple situations where the compiler itself crashes during a build.

- The static analyzer for Swift code reports erroneous problems. Until you learn the situations it doesn't understand it can lead you down the wrong path to resolution.

- Certain build problems are very difficult to diagnose. I have lost multiple days just searching for code changes that caused the compiler to crash.

- Xcode error reporting for Swift build problems can be vague, ambiguous, or non-existent.

- Xcode crashes, a lot. Technically this is nothing new, but since Xcode 6 I'd argue it has gotten measurably worse.

Swift is clearly going to be great, and it is clearly the future. Unfortunately the future isn't here yet.
>In a way, I consider that to be an advantage coming in to a new programming language, in that I have no preconceived notion of how things “SHOULD” be. I can learn the language and use the constructs as they were intended, and not have to question WHY it was designed that way because it’s different than what I know.

>I just could not get my non-functional mind to wrap around the functional Scala. And since I really didn’t need to code (nor the developers want me to), I gave up on learning Scala.

>I’ve barely heard of generics, communicating sequential processes, and other “cool” and “advanced” concepts.

Emphasis added
You could connect all of your VMs to it via ipsec or openvpn and have your own little private network.
Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript
BOOM - time for me to spin up more of these!
Joe Hutto Accepted by Wild Mule Deer
Regarding your contention that there is a large class of qualified engineers who are somehow unable to find work, I just don't buy it.

If the reason they can't find work is because employers are unwilling to offer relocation, why on earth would those employers be pursuing the even more costly and complicated relocation of foreign workers? In general, I genuinely think there is a domestic talent shortage. Of the talented developers I talk to about new opportunities, a majority are overseas—if we could bring them in easily, we'd readily do so (and pay them market rate). But the visa process is so tenuous and expensive at this point that it's incredibly challenging for startups to even consider that route.

Moreover, I'll put my money where my mouth is. You say you're a capable engineer. If you email morgante@cafe.com and convince me of that, I'd be happy to offer (a) relocation, (b) training in our stack, and (c) NYC market salary.
And the decline of child abuse: The most seriously abusive punishments people thought nothing of a few centuries ago are seriously out of favor today, which leads to children who weren't raised to think the bigger and stronger inherently have the right to hurt them, and therefore don't think that once they're bigger and stronger they have the right to hurt others.
No, tinco is right about officer safety. You really want those "men with gun and right to use deadly force" to feel safe, so that they don't exercise their killing license prematurely. When the officers feel safe and thus sure of themselves, they're more likely to follow proper procedures instead of being afraid of their own safety.

I'm not saying that you should give them armoured troop carriers though. You want them to feel safe, not invincible.
"Trust but verify": There are standards for tumor measurement. However, for something with major life-altering consequences, having the same radiologist compare scans is important to avoid observational variability.

A neurologist I know, she always checks the actual scans as opposed to relying on the report narrative alone. Her background is in computer science, before her MD.

The issue with new analysis tools is that most doctors won't stake their reputation by exclusion. If a doctor says the tumor isn't growing, and it is, they are liable. If a neurosurgeon removes a benign tumor, then its business as usual.
Or the smartcard develops a hardware fault?
Mobile Internet breaching into PC web user space
Finally got a win, took me about 10 rounds. Really cool thanks for sharing.
Thanks! I'm a long time FreeBSD vps user. It'd be great to check if DO droplets can support CARP failover within the same datacentre, and then expand to be able to do this across datacentres.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/carp.html

My use cases so far haven't involved CARP but I'd like to start experimenting with that!
The beaver slayers of Patagonia
Inside Colombia's Coffee Research Laboratory
I named my new external drive "Rama". Not sure how far I can take that, though.
I've been coding full-time in Swift for the last three months and at this point our source base is about 10K lines of code. Given this experience, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably choose Swift again.

The good:

- Swift is a far better language than Objective-C. It's much safer, the type system is great, and the functional features are a joy to use.

- Everything largely works as advertised; even for a super new language, the amount of total brokenness is minimal.

The bad:

- The current compiler's error messages are frequently bad to the point of being useless. Try to mutate an immutable dictionary? You get a type mismatch when you could get an error about immutability.

- The compiler is a lot slower than I think they mean for it to be.

- The debugger takes several seconds to evaluate an expression compared to almost instantaneous evaluation in Objective-C.

- 8 MB of standard library in your app binary.

The ugly:

- "SourceKitService crashed" messages in Xcode flashing on the screen at 30 hertz.

But at the end of the day, if you're hiring an outside company to do this, why does it matter to you what language it's written in? Shouldn't they be able to use their best tools?
Note that space suits are built for vacuum, not for corrosive atmosphere.
I've always felt that 'survival of the fit enough' is closer to the intended meaning.
I'm going to be honest here and say you're like the best person for the job you have. The guy who got VP? He's a more qualified manager than you. The guy who does support? He's got 8 years experience and a masters degree. You? You're the best developer they have. This practice is even more common in enterprise. I worked in tech for the largest company on the planet (take a guess) and it was routine to find the best developer was as most a team lead, never management. HR strategically will shoehorn these people but cutting off their avenues for growth. In my experience however, if it's money you're after these companies will happily shell out. It's not money their trying to save, it's expertise. It will also pretty common in enterprise for guys to NOT want to be moved up. Not everyone wants to put their neck on the line, and once you move up it's impossible to move down.
>No. I asked if it is morally acceptable under any circumstances to treat a black American the way we treat Nigerians, by threatening them (or their employer) with violence for economic competition. And I'm wondering, if not, why not?

Because they are citizens of the country born under the United States government, and thus should be afforded certain guarantees from that same government. Including a decently paid job. I think that Nigerians deserve the same guarantees from their country too.

I don't believe that Nigeria owes American citizens a job, though. Or vice versa.

Unfortunately to prevent the emergence of poverty, it is necessary for some employers to face an implicit threat of violence that restricts competition among workers. Minimum wage, etc.

>I'm confused. Uncertainty and admission that an empirical question can have multiple answers is racist?

You remind me of this amusing episode: http://foxnewsboycott.com/glenn-beck/glenn-beck-raped-and-mu...
> We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform.

I don't know. I'm not a pollster, but simple and easy immigration for skilled workers (doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc.) is pretty popular. Likewise, background checks for employment, voting, and a few other things are pretty popular. Generally open borders and expansion of flawed programs (like H1B) have mixed popularity at best.

The problem is that politicians that are pro-background-check and pro-skilled-immigration. Just like in a lot of issues these days, I feel like there's a lot of consensus around a middle ground, but partisans on both sides are loathe to actually approach that middle ground.
I want that too. Now I'm using Backupsy[1] when I need a VM with more disk space.

[1] https://backupsy.com/aff.php?aff=367
One is hiding what you intend to do. The other is lying about the intention.

What makes one worthy of legal rules and the other not? Don't know.
In case someone missed it: The header graphic in this article is a great homage to Beastie, the (original?) FreeBSD mascot, analogous to the Tux Linux penguin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon
Lamb and mutton are traditional staples in Europe, as well as goat and kid to a lesser degree. In the US, there was plentiful land for grazing cattle, and beef was considered more prestigious than mutton in England, so that's what they settlers focused on. At this point the flavor of lamb [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexanoic_acid etc.] is considered unpalatable by many in the US and most recipes are designed to minimize gaminess. Supermarkets like Safeway usually have no goat meat but small amounts of lamb. I think that has more to do with it than any demonic symbolism.
I agree that companies should hire more innately smart people and then train them for their niches. I think the charge of racism is a bit of a leap in this context.
"Survival of the fittest" is only a tautology if you interpret it to be one, which is pointless, so people tend not to.
Is tooling really that critical? Coming from JS, I can write whatever without any tooling at all. The need for heavy tooling in most other frontend dev is one of the reasons that I think that JS, despite all its issues at the moment, will come to rule interface development. The baseline in JS is that one can read, write, and understand it using only the human brain.
I keep telling these people that we have things like number theory as well that's as hard science as it can get :) - and it's still a theory. I'm not sure how 'strong' is the word 'theory' in English though, but in my mother tongue it definitely has the feeling of being a 'guess'.
"Survival of some set of the fit" is my favorite.
Bitcoin breaches $200 mark as bubble bursts
> We gave them 30 days to access the archive and download a ZIP file of their artwork, and also provided Archive.org with a copy of the data.

This was extremely classy Chris. Sorry it didn't work out. It was still a valuable contribution.