skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Programmers Above 50, Is It Possible to Have a Career Past Your 50s?
This article is on the frontpage so this might be a bit redundant but this article points to a worrying reality that we young programmers don't want to confront.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/

Many people just dismiss the issue by saying , "If you don't stay with the times then you deserve to be fired" but if MIT Grads , who are in the 99th percentile of ability and pedigree are in such a bad situation then one can only imagine how bad it is on the ground.

So , I'd like people who've been in this field for decades or those who are above 50 to share their advice and experiences.
Sounds like unikernels are giving the traditional OS a lobotomy and leaving only the brain stem to handle basic functions.
Or tell you what side jobs you can and can't take. [1]

[1] http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/videogame-composer-blasts-m...
Some Advice for Changing Accounting Systems
Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and analyze their own employees work flows and design it

That would be nice, yes. Most organisations are tremendously bad at this kind of introspection. And like introspection of the individual, it's painful and time-consuming. Especially when a process doesn't work well and you get into the eternal battle of "we need better employees" vs "better training" vs "change the process".

Not to mention that plenty of managers are Calvinist enough to design the fun out of work; employee fun is presumed to be a cost to the company that must be minimised.
Coverage of ten recent statements about cash, http://wolfstreet.com/2015/04/25/don-quijones-war-on-cash-qu...

"As a result of technological advances and generational priorities, cash’s days may well be numbered. But there is a whole world of difference between a natural death and euthanasia. It is now clear that an extremely powerful, albeit loose, alliance of governments, banks, central banks, start-ups, large corporations, and NGOs are determined to pull the plug on cash.."

In 2011, System D (global underground economy) was claimed to be $10 trillion in size and growing, http://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2011/11/07/rise...

"..the OECD concluded that half the world’s workers (almost 1.8 billion people) were employed in the shadow economy. By 2020, the OECD predicts the shadow economy will employ two-thirds of the world’s workers.."
Woman wins against warrantless surveillance and detainment
Truly simple video chat and screen sharing for small groups
We're currently in the middle of deciding which insurance packages our company will purchase/offer through Zenefits and this quote hits home:

>“It’s a lot easier to approach smaller companies,” says Conrad of this approach. “Try getting on the phone with a decision-maker at a 1,000-person company. It takes weeks if not months. We can close a lot more 100-person companies more easily.”

Their sales guy has been pounding us with phone calls lately trying to offer help/close the deal and it accelerated when April was ending. Not sure if that's a +/- with them but it definitely stood out vs other companies that we've dealt with.

>While it costs an extraordinary amount to build a salesforce that can cold call every one, he argues the unit economics makes each new customer a worthwhile investment.

Does anyone know of any articles that reference any CLV calcs for Zenefits?
> However I'm not sure if the drawbacks can be addressed in the current JS model, notably: very slow warmup, huge download size

Only for the first time loading it.

It would be great if some big organization (looks at Google) hosts the "standard" version of the file, much like jquery, so that it would be cached and ready to be used on the local machine most of the time.
My room mate plays DoTA for 6 - 7 hours a day AFTER work. Now that has to be tiring but he does it everyday.

I'm amazed at this level of obsession and dedication. If we could figure out how to turn this on or off for learning to code or figuring out math then everyone could do wonders.
Sorry about that then, it is just that HN tends to be full of young Web devs rediscovering the ways of old. :)

Nice idea though.
Weekly Tech Catch-up
"If you think about it like we’re driving a car, we want to go extremely fast at an extremely high speed, and go very far,” [CEO] Conrad said. “And if you want to do that you’re gonna burn a lot of gasoline. So this round we had to do the mother of all pit stops for gas and beef jerky, to continue building at the speed that we’re going."
Why would they abandon free advertising income, there's yet 3 billion+ people to learn how to use the internet, that's a lot of money son.
no offence taken at all :D and I totally agree with you, that's why it's so important to share old tricks despite their simplicity :)
>> We don't need unions. In tech, labor does hold the power.

This maxim may have been true 20, 30 years ago, but with an ever-increasing pool of STEM applicants, advances in automation and the juggernaut that is globalization, the pendulum is swinging.

>> We always have the option for taking our ball and going home (start our own company).

No, we don't. Such a simplistic decision like this has never existed in tech other than in grossly inaccurate Hollywood film plots. Starting a tech company comes with an enormous amount of risk and challenges. These risks aren't easily absorbed by most individuals. A person's company may succeed in the end after hard-fought battles, but in all likelihood, most will fail.
Here is another one for your list: https://boxfuse.com

We launched Boxfuse last month with support for running JVM apps as unikernels on VirtualBox and AWS.

Here is a blog article from last week about deploying Dropwizard unikernels to EC2: https://boxfuse.com/blog/dropwizard-aws.html

Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
Introducing BeCode a community fro web designers, creatives and developers
I think this shows why the USA Freedom Act would not do enough to reform the USA Patriot Act. Christine Von Der Haar had her emails read without a warrant
For mobile and web development, use Vagrant + Virtualbox. No reason to pollute the base system with different versions of weblibs, languages and servers.
Show HN: Bitmap to Vector conversion
When js is disabled, fixed-positioned, 100% width, 100% height sidebar takes all page, hiding text
Terrine de Foie de Volaille – Poultry Liver Terrine
I hardly did any midi with it, maybe that's why I didn't encounter that :)
The extreme lengths console gamers go to mod Pro Evo
In this case, * is "https://sdk.cloud.google.com" and I don't see how it's worse than trusting a package from PyPi. If anything, the curl command offers some guarantee that you are running code endorsed by Google.
DRM: Disabling the disabled
> Sounds like the OP was never a "programmer", but rather a farmer trapped inside a programmer's job.

I don't think that's really how it works. People are too complex, too dynamic to say someone is definitely X or Y.

I've been programming since I was a kid and loved the work, until at one point I didn't anyore and wanted out. I was done with tech. Does that mean I was never a real "programmer"? Was I soldier trapped inside a programmer's job? If I were to become say, a baker after this, will I have been a baker trapped inside a soldier trapped inside a programmer's job? Of course not.
I am not sure why they modelled their pricing model on a per node basis rather then the total data storage. I guess the nodes will be isolated from every other cluster, but that makes the initial price to setup a cluster a lot higher then lets say using Azure Table storage.
i see, well that's the default behaviour ... apparently js is not optional for that theme, im sorry :)
Making a phone call is an asynchronous event, and as the song suggests, sometimes you give someone your number but they never call back. With any distributed system in real world conditions, a similar situation arises where a request doesn't get handled or is lost along the way.

</explainer>
"Money does not decay over time..."

... except in the form of inflation. Adding yet another centrally-planned mechanism for that (negative interest rates & elimination of cash) will amplify rather than reduce chaos, and (as intended) lead to a less-free market.
does anyone know of a Go client?
Watch Live: SpaceX to launch dummy in key test
Amazon Isn’t the Only One Killing It with Cloud Computing
> Slander/Libel, in the UK where this isn't, has to contain falsehoods.

Be careful this is a dangerous interpretation of UK law. Slander/Libel must contain some element that the person doing the saying/publishing cannot prove in court. Note the burden of proof lies on the person saying/writing rather than the person sueing.

(I am not a lawyer and this post does not constitute legal advice.)
I assume this comment is related to the journal. The article is not.

But, to reply: yes, many organisations have fully functional, well-debugged logging infrastructures. A lot of them also use binary log storage, and have been for over a decade, and are more than satisfied with the solution.

Both rsyslog and syslog-ng have been able to assist with setting such a thing up for about a decade now.

> Where are the rsyslogd and syslog-ng competitors to systemd's journald? Where is the interoperability? Where is the smooth, useful upgrade mechanism?

The journal has a syslog forwarded, but both rsyslog and syslog-ng can read directly from the journal. Interoperability was there from day one. Smooth upgrade mechanism took a while to iron out, but it's there now, too.
Only because the browser vendors are too scared (for whatever reason, legitimate or otherwise) to add extra languages to the mix, like python.
I do something similar except with "view" aka "vi -R" aka read-only mode.

A couple things I like about "view":

1. No warning screen when using "view file.c" if you or someone else happens to have the same file open for editing.

2. No "unsaved changes" prompt when quitting "view -" (or in other words, no need to force-quit with :q!)

Edit: Also worth noting is that "view file.c" vs "cat file.c |view -" gives vim a better chance of getting the syntax highlighting right since it knows the file extension.
Do you really think that your requirements apply? I think none do in case of really a small system. See, I think I understand your requirements, but I think they are not common at all.

For a small system - a desktop PC and maybe a custom router box - you do not need one central place for the logs. Thus you don't need an easy way to change it. You don't need to preserve logs in a more efficient way than logrotate does. They don't need to be stored more structured than the filesystem does, the queries are local, and grep is more than efficient enough.

Maybe a binary log is the best choice for you - it seems to be what you want. But that does not generalize to the general public. That is why the rant feels very misplaced for me.
Seems like the original article is way more positive than the click-baity title by The Register:

"So to get 1 kWh of usable storage in a lead acid battery you are looking at spending closer to $800. This makes the Tesla more like 2/3 the price per ‘usable kWh’ compared to good quality sealed lead acid batteries. Not bad. But wait, there’s more…

2) Battery Life
The Tesla battery comes with a 10 year warranty and an optional 10 year extension. This is huge. Most lead acid batteries come with a 1 year warranty. Let’s assume the battery gods smile upon you and your lead-acid battery lasts as long as it’s specification (1,200 cycles). You have only got 3-4 years out of it until you need a new one.

If your Tesla battery is going to last 3 times longer, then its practical cost over 10 years is actually less than a quarter of a comparable lead acid battery. Now we’re talking!"
Giant mlocate.db file (with OverlayFS)
That NASA Warp Drive? Yeah, It's Still Poppycock
http://www.obeythetestinggoat.com/ for the curious...
I wonder what Marc Andreessen thinks of this statement...

Context:
http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-on-startup-bu...
That is not surprising at all. Most of people who use the Internet on mobile don't even now what a browser is, much less a domain name. They search every site they want to visit, even if they just needed to add .com to their search term to open the site straight away in the browser. The "Internet" is the google search box.
You can always move to Hbase ... Google BigTable uses Hbase api.
The OP means the creation time of a Linux "container" is less than 10ms, ie the time for the system calls you need to create the namespaces and cgroups. While you can boot a unikernel from nothing in that time.
France Is One Step Closer to Adopting Extensive Surveillance Law
Show HN: London Waterloo live train info as cross domain JSON
I suppose you should be able to use any Go Hbase client.
Traffic around Mars gets busy
Note does it doesn't say they don't build any profiles at all, or use your behavior for their own purposes, or that they don't collect data. It is in fact, very likely they do use profiles of their users for internal purposes, even if just for improving those services.
http://209.208.79.122/uploads/
Full access to everything uploaded. These guys need to secure their shit.
Not sure if it's a state by state thing or a general change but: Is there any way to bring back the example (live?) insurance quotes with or without uploading a spreadsheet of employee information?

That seemed like the most amazing feature to me when we were first exploring the service because it provided such a great way of comparing all the plans.
It is not a unikernel though, just a minimal Linux.
Going Gluten Free
I don't know of any real projects outside of interpreters that use it. It has downsides (long compile times come to mind) and I'm not sure how well you can utilize the strengths (like the JIT) for non-interpreters.

EDIT: Writing it is more restricted than normal Python, so you have to think about what you do (especially type hints, to make sure it gets what type your variables are) and the long feedback cycles due to compile time are annoying, but still very comfortable. And for building interpreters, the more or less "free" JIT is magic :)
> For one, because it is not packaged for my distribution.

Are you running Slackware?
The existential crisis is the brain dead policies leading to this situation. We must not have inflation to protect the wealth of people and institutions with billions of dollars. But it's ok to destroy the ability of normal people to save or conduct business.

If we live in a world where it's too dangerous to have any unauditable transaction, perhaps we're doing something wrong at another level.

Most of these arguments are bunk anyway. The government captures every phone call in entire countries. We collect images of every piece of mail. Are you telling me that the government forgot to collect the serial numbers of every dollar bill as it enters the banking system?

The other sad thing is this really reinforces and legitimizes the fear that fuels the right wing. Perhaps the goldbugs on talk radio are right!
I can't and won't defend Aerospike's descriptions on website or white paper. And yes, "Thanks Aphyr".

I came across Aerospike technology via a pre-existing system at a previous employer, and watched that system scale up and perform in a serious way. It wasn't all unicorns and roses all the time as real life never is, but in the context of the real world, it was great. The software is rock solid in a way I've rarely come across, and support was spectacular. (I forget my current production clusters are even running sometimes they are so stable, reliable and self-operating)

And at the end of the day, there was no other solution out there remotely competitive that we could find. And I looked - not because we were dissatisfied, but because that was our fiduciary responsibility to the company, to ensure that we were deploying the most cost-effective systems that met our feature and performance requirements.

Ultimately yes - I think that as an engineer, you need to understand what your tools are really capable of and avoid doing what I call "BDD" (Blog-Driven Design). That isn't the ideal answer - it would be nice to have a reliable understanding of the capabilities of the materials we use to build systems (like civil engineers can reason about materials like steel and concrete in repeatable ways) but what we call "software engineering and architecture" is still a very young discipline, very often with unrealistic expectations about our ability to deliver in given budgetary and temporal constraints, so we do what we can.
No one has tried Node.js yet as far as I know (possibly under OSv not sure). PHP, yes, is running as a unikernel, using a rump kernel.
strncpy()'s NUL-padding behaviour is the right thing for its niche, which is copying to fixed-length buffers such as the 14-character filenames in ancient filesystem directory entries. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/1454071

That niche doesn't particularly exist anymore, so strncpy() isn't often a good fit for what people need these days. Hence they don't like strncpy(), but what they really mean is that they shouldn't have been considering strncpy() in the first place.

strncat() on the other hand... now that's a weird function!
It's distinct [features][1], mainly immutable data structures and transducers.

Pixie runs over -RPython- PyPi.

(The bracket "thing" is not a Clojure feature, it is lisp)

[1]: https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie#features
Meet the Darpa-Backed Hackers Building a Google for Every Web Weakness
Pixie (1) is a Clojure-like language that is written in rpython and is run via pypy (python jit), the advantages being fast startups (Clojure compile some libraries on startup which doesn't make it very suitable for writing CLI). This particular article is about running Pixie on the Raspberry Pi, check the Pixie language page to learn more about Pixie itself.

Pixie does not require the JVM.

> In what way is this clojure inspired? is it a brackety/syntax thing?

Have you looked at the article? It shows an example (that uses brackets and indeed looks like Clojure/lisp syntax).

[1]: https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie
Evolutionary history of 50 years of music using big data analysis of sounds
> At the end is answered why python can't be directly included in Firefox or other browsers(the presenter/main developer works for Mozilla)

Direct link to answer: https://youtu.be/PiBfOFqDIAI?t=1611
Deploying software: Principles to ensure frequent, low-risk deployments
SpaceX Pad Abort Test on Livestream
Also, it seems Google's Page Rank is sometimes optimized to show old documentation instead of the most related and current one. this is natural because there are more links pointing to the old one but needs to be fixed.
In short term scenarios with negative/penalty interest rates, cash is considered an option favorable to accounted money by some.

It seems that a Swiss pension fund tried to evade negative rates on deposits by withdrawing a very large amount of physical cash with the intention of vaulting it. But the bank refused to allow it to withdraw the money in the form of physical cash.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2015/04/25/the-sw...

ADDENDUM: The OP article is more about banks imposing negative interest rates, actually triggering a renaissance in cash storage. While storing huge amounts of cash as an individual during a deflation is, from an egoistic perspective, the better option in terms of personal purchasing power (minus the obvious physical risks). That the banks and financial regulators don't like this is clear, since it's money not under their control.
I wrote that below, that is a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The important point is that the theoretical availability - there probably is a PPA somewhere - of journalctl is an additional, unnecessary hurdle.
Came here to ask the same question. Under archlinux python 3 is the default, which breaks scripts who don't specify that their are python 2 only and start with #!/usr/bin/python and not #!/usr/bin/python2. But even there as user I don't see the need for this tool.
Coverage starts in just under 100 minutes ...
DDG would be a perfect fit for Apple, IMHO, as long as they don't kill the company and leave them some autonomy.
As the blog post says, Bigtable internally runs virtually all of Google's big services. This means it's rock solid, and it's not about to get discontinued anytime soon.
I've never worked with RPython.

Looking through that list it doesn't look dreadful. There are a couple of things that jump out though - you can't use kwargs in function definitions which is probably used quite a lot in dynamic settings.

Eg in Python one might do (warning; crazy, contrived example):

def create_thing(**kwargs):
thing = dict(id=gen_id())
thing['other_data'] = kwargs
return thing

thing = create_thing(name='name', foo='bar')

You could avoid it, and generally in Python you're better off being explicit about everything. But it's definitely a feature that gets used a fair amount, especially in libraries where you don't explicitly know what the api call takes concerning user data.

An easy (more explicit) workaround would be:

def create_thing(other_data=None):
thing = dict(id=gen_id())
thing['other_data'] = other_data or {}
return thing

create_thing(dict(name='name', foo='bar'))

It's just a little more work for the calling code.
How can you have multiple hypervisors...? Do they both run in ring -1?
$4.5B Valuation for an SaaS business that doesn't charge for it's service and makes money from commissions?

Did they invent something no one else can do? Why would insurance companies not just scrap the middle man and build their own thing?
> you're saying that yours is unconditionally better

I don't think I'm saying that. The article presents two setups and a few related use cases, where I believe binary log storage is superior.

> With the services you run, you might be able to dictate that the log formats are restrictive enough that writing a parser for each one isn't a problematic overhead.

I don't need to dictate all log formats. If I can't parse one, I'll just store it as-is, with some meta-data (timestamp, origin host, and so on). My processed logs do not need to be completely uniform. As long as they have a few common keys, I can work with them.

For some apps or groups of apps, I can create special parsers, but I don't necessarily need that from day one. If I'm ok with only new logs being parsed according to the new rules (and most often, I am), I can add new rules anytime.

> Parsing up-front, assuming you know what data you can safely throw away, might appear to some as a premature optimisation.

>> We have well documented tools and workflows, so anyone new to the system can catch up and start working with the logs within minutes.
> It sounds like this is something which could be usefully open-sourced, to show how it's done.

LogStash is a reasonable starting point. Our solution has a lot of common with it, at least on the idea level.

> Pre-parsed binary logs in a locked-down environment might be as flexible as freeform text, but I'd need to see a running system to properly judge.

Only our storage is binary. That is all the article is talking about. Within that binary blob, there are many traces of freeform text, mostly in the MESSAGE keys of application logs which we care less about (and thus, parse no further than basic syslog parsing). You still have the flexibility of freeform text, even if you store it in a binary storage format.
Seeing Through Police
Depends whether he means "You can't use any SaaS IaaS datastore for privacy-aware customers" or "Google itself is less trustworthy than (AWS or [insert competitor here]).

The former is a valid position - if a fairly harsh one in the current tech landscape. If the latter however - I'd like to see a more fleshed out explanation as I don't see Google being much of an outlier on this front.
I wonder how much of this 'programming is a dead-end' angst that seems to cycle through HN fairly frequently these days is US-centric?

I say that as an almost-40 Australian software developer...