skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Responding to you a bit late…

I certainly didn't intend to compare radiologists and dermatologists to median software developers. I bring these fields up as a reminder that career flexibility exists at a level that is considerably more elite than dental hygienist. In short, if you are a very ambitious and academically talented person, there are high earning and high prestige professions that will still yield considerable career flexibility .

I also think you may be selling "developer" a little short here. Part of the problem here is that "radiologist", "registered nurse", and "dental hygienist" all mean something very standardized and specific. Software developer, on the other hand, means very little. It can range from someone who just finished reading a book on php and myql (or didn't read it but claims to have) to someone with a PhD who is doing mathematically intense programming on genomics (though I suppose that person would probably have a different title).

A lot of jobs I'm interested in these days say "MS required, PhD preferred." These grad degrees require majoring in a STEM field, degrees that even at the undergrad level have a very high attrition rate, perhaps even higher than pre-med coursework (which doesn't honestly require the same difficulty in math). To get into a top school, you need to score at the top percentiles on standardized tests. In spite of this, elite PhD programs typically have an attrition rate between 35%-50% attrition rate (engineering is best, pure science is worst). MD programs at elite schools, by contrast, have vanishingly low attrition rates (UCSF, for instance, is below 0.5%). No joke, attrition rates at elite PhD programs are between 75 and 100 times higher than elite med schools. Of course, as people have pointed out to me in the past, it's not apples-to-apples. If you can even realistically apply to a PhD program in CS, you probably can already work in industry for a fine salary. If you leave with an MS, as I did, you have a valuable degree. MD tends to be more all-or-nothing, and (as you have reasonably pointed out), highly selective residencies in lucrative fields are hardly guaranteed.

It will never be apples-to-apples when comparing fields. But considering that when you go by pay, your typical programmer is between dental hygienist and registered nurse (in San Francisco), we should probably recognize that we need to compare outcomes for a comparable educational path. But I wouldn't say that becoming a radiologist or other medical specialist is so much harder than getting a PhD that the comparison is useless. Especially if we're going to take seriously the talk among silicon valley CEOs and congress about a critical shortage of PhDs in STEM fields.

Overall, I'd say that the career stability, pay, and flexibility of health care fields may win out over tech at a high level as well as a low one.

This doesn't mean there are no good reasons to want to be a programmer, but I do think it's relevant when the US president stands next to tech CEOs at press conferences and agrees that there is a shortage of STEM workers.
Yes, this please. Sometimes there are comments or you want to investigate the profile/history of the poster.
Building from source and installing packages aren't mutually exclusive. Particularly because of the buildroot stuff for GNU autoconf apps, you can just grab '/' in the build root and get everything installed by the build, then update the %files from that (removing common dirs, so your package doesn't own /usr just because it made buildroot/usr).

OTOH if someone said RPM spec format was archaic I'd certainly agree.
Here’s why humans are so obsessed with colonizing Mars
Put you still end up paying around 0.2%-0.4% in platform costs. Or is this different in the US?
The 2015 MacBook previews a future that’s not quite here
Ah ha, that's why. I publish whoishiring technology trends every month[1] and was curious about the change. Fortunately the API allows a list of users, making it an easy thing to handle.

[1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/
12-inch Macbook Review
On a somewhat similar topic, I also enjoyed "The Machinery of Life" by David Goodsell. Worth it for the diagrams alone.
Work in tech outside of the tech industry for a while. I go to conferences and just breathe in and out for what feels like the first time in months. Just being able to use jargon without stopping to explain it is a wonderful thing.
In a graphical browser as used by most people? Sure you can. Chrome's method of striking out the https bit and turning it red is quite evocative.

What I take issue with here is the "HOLY CRAP, STOP EVERYTHING!" nature of the warnings as thrown by browsers nowadays. The severity of the warning is not proportional to the likelihood of there being something actually wrong, hence crying wolf. ("Yes, I know this is a self signed cert, because it's mine, now screw off and load the page I asked you to, thanks.") IMAO, there is zero reason for an expired certificate to throw this kind of warning.

And there's an argument that there's a good reason for that, but that reason ignores the fact that users have been steadily conditioned to click past the warnings, and most of the time, to no ill effect.

Apparently enough people fail to make the connection that there are plans to apply the same thing to plain http connections sometime in the near future.
This part stuck out for me.

"Again and again, time has proven the Malthusian pessimists wrong."
EA Builder REVIEW Need to Know
I've seen tech support watching netflix between calls. Though this was at a university and these were students, so they also did homework when they weren't assisting people.
Maverick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_%28book%29

Read it when I was 17 and it shaped what I expected from work in the future.
At the risk of being a little pedantic, >> isn't combining two functions, e.g.

Just () >> Nothing == Nothing
Nothing >> Just () == Nothing

It's perhaps viable to think of (m >> f) as modifying/continuing the m effect/computation using a continuation which is constantly the f effect. But that's about as close to "combining two functions" I can get it without specifically picking a monad that is a function.

On the other hand, >=> is absolutely combining two functions. It's exactly (flip (.)) in a Kleisli category over some monad.
I wonder if treatment of said prostitutes is improved because of its legality, and can be managed and legislated? If I understand your comment correctly you're saying all things being equal nothing has changed (for better or for worse) except now prostitution is legal. What I would say is if this is the case at least a legal framework allows the government to mandate improved work conditions, or cut down on illegal human trafficking etc if they want to.
You can also use it as a basis for searching - "flash alternatives" might turn up something good enough with better licensing.
I do a lot of 3D printed and laser cut art (see http://deviantcartography.com). Nearly everything I do can be easily physically reproduced with the right source files, or even with a bit of work you could replicate each piece from the source data. I find these implications fascinating. It's not all that different from the easy reproducibility of photos or digital prints, but it feels different now that that same reproducibility is moving into the realm of physical sculpture. My gut is that artists should figure out how to embrace reproducibility, but how that will play out with sculpture is unclear to me.

I highly recommend Cory Doctorow's quick read "Information Doesn't Want to be Free" and particularly his metaphor of the dandelion vs mammals for what I think is the right general direction for artists in an age of instant reproducibility.
I'm sorry, this isn't meant as an attack on you, but I thought Ender's Game was a rather terrible piece of over-indulgent nerd fantasy with a heaping helping of apologia for "preemptive" warfare. My wife also loved the book and I just don't see it. Well, I sort of see it, it's appealing to anyone who felt like an outsider in school. But its treatment of that feeling all seems very dangerous. It resorts to a weird sort of ego-stroking to explain away why the reader cum Ender was an outcast, then justifies all of the hyperviolence against all offenders under the age-old abuser's excuse "I didn't know my own strength." I don't think people read enough into the book and treat it too much as light, throw-away fiction.
How our startup got the first 10 paying customers. And you can too.
Quiet by Susan Cain, great book about introversion and why we have the "Extrovert Ideal".
It's really fascinating to see how introverts have their qualities and how

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - Robert Pirsig:
Fantastic book that talks about philosophy in a new way and goes deeper into discovering what's "Quality" and what are the main 2 ways of interacting/reading the world around us.

Adam Smith, theory of moral sentiments: Just began the book under ryan holiday advice, but can't really say more about it.

Game of thrones, 1st volume, I suppose this book doesn't need any explanation :)
Can I just clarify - you work remotely for NY finance industry, at presumably near NY rates, paying 4% coproation tax and no tax on dividends from that income?

With tropical weather.

What's the schooling like?
Yeah, these are 21-year-old kids. But Facebook is still in heavy growth mode, and their options packages for engineers are no joke. Facebook also has enough money and talent that they will build a few more blockbuster products before they're done. Apple is seen as desirable because their core product engineering teams are treated like royalty and they don't hire very many people, so it's seen as a badge of honor if you can get hired.
Ray-Ban Virtual Mirror
What do you mean you realized you'd never "really hustled in your life"? Explain.
OS X 10.10.3 released with new Photos app and more
Show HN: Preschool Resources as a Service
Wow, that's a great idea, thanks a lot for sharing

(and I never thought I'd click a NRA link, specially on HN)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons

The $100 Startup
Should Future Fighter Be Like a Bomber? Groundbreaking CSBA Study
A fatal aircraft accident is one with a death. But most "fatal" airline crashes have only a few deaths. Take the recent AsianAir crash in San Franciso. It was a "fatal" crash, but only four of the three hundred some people on the aircraft died.
Best feature of homebrew for me is the possibility to package a software with a pull request.

On the other hand, Homebrew packaging _maintenance_ is done by homebrew maintainers.

Sooner or later, when they achieve the thousands-of-packages mark, they'll need packaging guidelines, and then packaging rules, and then a packaging team (maybe with their own email domain [@debian ;)].

When (if) this happen to linuxbrew, you'll have another linux distribution.
oh, sh*t, no!

I loved the site. Now I will have to add it to the long list of companies that got bought and lost their essence, like cdbaby, reddit, or digg.

I started using whassapp in order to scape facebook. Now those bubble monsters are acquiring everything they can while money is free.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki
The drinking water on board sailing ships was stored in a butt, which had been scuttled (holed) to withdraw the water. Sailors would gather around the scuttled butt to take their water ration, and exchange rumors and gossip, which was shortened to "scuttlebutt".

This has a direct analog in the office water cooler.

It is therefore also entirely appropriate to measure information of dubious provenance in terms of buttloads. That is easily extended to time spent on the Internet, for obvious reasons.

Assloads, on the other hand, refer to the use of donkeys as a pack animal, and would be more appropriate for non-pourable items, which could be balanced across the backside of the animal, or strapped on (to a pack saddle).

I am, sadly, unaware of the history behind the fuckton, or its metric equivalent.
Won't they find you on Twitter as well? Even LinkedIn has the same problem from what I hear from hiring managers, becoming increasingly frustrated by the number of recruiters that contact them when they post a job there.
While I agree with your conclusion, the Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing doesn't match what I observed. I was at allstate at the time, and when the groundswell of attention paid by the rank and file was sufficiently overwhelming (in a positive way), that the PHBs had to say "chill. We need to investigate this" in true Gartner fashion. Later, it did get adapted, but there is a lot of .net there.
Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Coram: Boyd
Mark Donohue (w/Paul Van Valkenburgh): The Unfair Advantage
Carroll Smith: XXX To Win (its a series of books)
I somehow got downvoted for pointing this out yesterday, but with target return rates of 7-8%, pensions can't invest in what most of us would consider a prudent portfolio. At least not in a low inflation environment (since targets seem to all be nominal rather than real).

While I would agree that a pension fund shouldn't be in all equities (or investment with similar risk profiles) if the fund managers are mandated to target 7.5% returns its hard to see how they can include a sizable cash or treasury component and expect to hit that.
Anybody see parallels between this and Stem cell research?
The DNS response doesn't have to come from the same channel as the original request. If you've got an ISP that doesn't check the source IP of what you're sending, your target's endpoint will see your fake response and treat it as the real one.

Where we stand now, the only thing stopping an eavesdropper from becoming a man-in-the-middle is the will and resources of that eavesdropper.
I don't know if it is a reflection of San Fransico being insane but it does make me question the Techstars program. They funded a company that sells followers.
That's incorrect. The seconds hand moves 6 times in one second on my 7S26 movement (21,600 bph). On a modern Rolex, it would move 8 times in one second. You can check this with a high speed camera (such as the one in the iPhone 6). Nonetheless, there are vastly superior mechanical drives out there that are continuous (Seiko Spring Drive for example).
They don't actually generate the key on the server but use the keygen element. This generates a key in the browser and doesn't send it to the server.
I am currently reading Skiena, Algorithm Design Manual and Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

Next up is Cipolla, Clocks and Culture and Chiusano and Bjarnason, Functional Programming in Scala.
I'm currently running 10.10.3 on a Mac Pro 1,1, at almost 9 years of use. Of course 10.10 isn't supported by Apple, but it works just fine, and with the combination of an SSD and cheap RAM, I imagine I can get another 3-4 years out of this desktop barring a hardware failure that pushes me to a new system.
And now they're just mostly naked.
Yes: https://nixos.org/wiki/How_to_install_nix_in_home_%28on_anot...
12-inch MacBook Review
> Then the Brazilians invented it again

This is untrue, there were many people who traveled the world to fight 'all comers' in no holds barred competitions. Mitsuyo Maeda[1] is one of these people who brought judo to Brazil which later become BJJ. Maeda is not the only that did this however (travel and fight anyone, in any discipline)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuyo_Maeda
Objective-C's "null pointer dereferences doesn't crash" behaviour rears its ugly horrible head again.

Programs crash for a reason! Crashing when faced with nonsense is a good thing! Let us not forget this.
Yes.

However, software companies that hire for a specific popular tool/framework need to be punished with mediocrity.
Is it just me, or is this kinda gross? I totally understand if it's just me.
Statistics: How Many Would You Check?
Amen. I made enough for the down on my house - and I was the 2nd FTE hired.
Honestly I thought the most apparent (to me) advantage to Homebrew over deb/apt/yum is that it's Git based, so incredibly easy to contribute to. I've never contributed an apt package but I have created a number of homebrew packages for different projects it's incredibly easy.

That said, I don't think yet another package manager is necessarily the right solution unless linuxbrew can find dependencies installed by apt/yum so it's not a "one or the other" scenario.
> When Rails was created, Ruby wasn't mainstream. When Twitter launched, Rails had been out for just four months. Adopting Ruby and Rails were bold moves made by people that didn't care about popularity. They were forced to assess the quality despite the lack of stars.

Apparently they didn't do a good job since they've long since abandoned it.
> No locals were out of a job

Could you explain how you formed that conclusion?

> They lived there as tourists so paid a lot more into the local economy than locals

How did you determine that? I've lived as a hippie in India, similar to what Steve Jobs did. I spent 0 money and lived off the temple welfare system. I was exploiting the generosity of people who had a thousandth the resources and welfare that I had. I wasn't alone. There were hundreds, if not thousands of other Westerners doing similar things.
Deer need predators. Humans need higher income and education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
Should "Who Is Hiring" posts require a certain age of account or level of HN Karma to post in?
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder. An interesting peek into some of the data gathered by OkCupid, as well as an overall assessment of the power of data held by tech companies today.
Exact Maximum Clique for Large or Massive Real Graphs
Cloud Coincidence: Microsoft Embraces Docker, HP Downgrades Helion
I'm agnostic and I don't agree with you. Sure, there are without any doubt some wise statements to be found in the Bible.

But each and every of those thoughts have been presented and discussed in other books in a more concise, clear, less ambiguous and more applicable fashion.

Additionally, the Bible is full of rather tasteless anecdotes - judging from a modern perspective.
You're not. I've met very few OS X users that are even aware there is a strong contingent out there that despises iTunes. On OS X it's still great, and as of iTunes 12 it's back up to the speed level it should have always been, that includes syncing.

On Windows it has its foibles, but I still use it every single day at work. It's more than manageable, it's just not as responsive as it should be because of how it is built.

On both operating systems it tries to do too much. Where it excels is as a simple, clean jukebox. Start using it to manage movies or anything else and the flaws show up in spades, but that's never what it was to me.

I've been using iTunes since I was 9 years old. I've used every major version and it's one of the only programs I was using on OS 9 that I still use every day on OS X. As a jump-in-and-go library based jukebox, it pretty much has no equal. Throw in iTunes Match so my home library is instantly available on my phone and work PC, and I never have a reason to use anything else.
"Quantum Computing since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson. This book makes me wish I was cool enough to understand everything in it. But still, it does a very good job at connecting the high level bits, and letting you skip over proof sketches if necessary.

He is connecting quantum computing, computability, computational complexity, foundations of mathematics, probability, crypto, philosophy, and a bunch of other things I haven't gotten to yet. All the deep stuff -- but it's not pretentious or tedious at all.

Scott Aaronson is a great writer and lucid thinker. I got hooked from the preface alone.
Fight 215: This is our chance to end mass surveillance under the Patriot Act
For profit small businesses vie to replace NGOs in Haiti
For tech roles this effect is compounded by the fact that, in a startup, the person doing the hiring is likely to be technical themselves so they can quickly work out whether someone has basic skills, whereas in a bigger company HR likely can't do so as easily.
Why do we still tolerate the Supreme Court?
Although I'm sure companies won't complain about the additional publicity, are there any concerns of copyright issues with scraping and republishing the text from other HN posts?
Statwolf LTD - http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/84952/software-develop... - Dublin, Ireland, Web developer for data analysis platform
Ask HN: In my messaging side-project will emails or handles work for people?
I'm considering that maybe people want the ease of simply logging in with their email, and the simplicity of entering (perhaps autocompleted from contacts) their friends email to set up a messaging connection with them.

I'm also considering that, maybe emails and spam are already so overloaded, people may value "a fifth channel" they can use out-of-band to chat with whom they choose. Say I can share my handle with a subset of people who may or may not intersect with those who have my email. Or I can publish my handle, while keeping my email secret.

If anyone cares to share some thoughts or experiences, that works. The Q's not asking for a prediction of the future, just a reflection or a tale from the past.
The article fails to answer then who is in Tier 1?
It's an interesting thought.

I'm primarily a Ruby developer. Literally every single time I've started a web-oriented project using something like Sinatra or Padrino etc., I've ended up regretting it. I end up building a shitty, half-featured, buggy version of Rails. My experience is that most other projects end up the same.

I suppose mileage may vary; perhaps it's easier to write bloated apps in Rails. I'm not convinced that's a good reason to avoid it, though.
Can you help me understand why Quiet is a good read? It's been recommended to me before but it just keeps on getting bumped on the backlog.
>After getting used to the (update) speed, flexibility, and reliability of Homebrew, it's shocking and frustrating to go back to Linux, where package managers were born, and have to settle for a less robust ecosystem.

I feel the exact same way, but in the opposite direction.
After years of only reading technical, business, and philosophical books, I finally decided to take the plunge and read some fiction about 2 years ago.

Since then, I've caught up with Song of Ice and Fire, read the first 11 books of Sword of Truth, and did the first 2 Dune books.

Most recently, I finished Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and I'm currently going through a bunch of HP Lovecraft (it feels good to finally understand the Cthulhu mythos and all that it implies).

When I finish that, I'm going to finish up the Sword of Truth series (the most recent 3 books), and I'm eagerly awaiting the 6th book in A Song of Ice and Fire.

These days, I don't actually read all that much, as I've picked up an appreciation for audiobooks and how you can read your stories while doing other things like driving, cooking, and shopping. So I don't read in freetime anymore, but instead just rock the audiobooks in the "between" times.

Obviously, audiobooks don't work with technical books so much.
Mattermark is sorry for marginalizing designers
How to create a mind - Ray Kurzweil
The spammers don't post HN replies; they send email or call.
The long nightmare is over, Linux finally has a package manager!
Am I correct in using the term "bike-shedding" to describe our obsession with package managers, programming languages and web frameworks? It seems every new release changes things just a little bit, usually to make things more comfortable but without much efficiency gains. And we discuss it over and over. Have we run out of hard problems?
From what I've seen, it's more like "Hey, we're hiring an xyz! Know anybody who'd be interested?" with a link to a web page or email address.
Just a different one.

There are a lot of reasons why different programming communities don't listen to each other, and I find the fibonacci example to be a "bad smell".