skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a temporal factor here the author's missing? The specific countercultural elements she's talking about are all the best-known artifacts from the countercultures of 30, 40 years ago. Listening to GG Allin in New York isn't subversive because in New York he's been old hat since around about the time that I suspect many of the people reading this article were still learning to read. Listening to GG Allin in the suburbs might be, though, because it would have taken years or decades for him to show up as a new thing in the suburbs of south Florida.

The Book of the SubGenius was also pretty darn subversive by the standards of the whitebread town I grew up in, but the cultural context in which I understood it sure changed a lot after I grew up, got a job, and found myself occasionally having drinks after work with a colleague who happened to help write it. She was nearly old enough to be my mom, and found my enthusiasm for what she considers to be a youthful lark to be rather adorable.

I bet my parents also thought it was adorable when I discovered the music they grew up on when I was a kid. Or rather, perhaps they were irritated because by then the psychedelic counterculture they belonged to had just become another puppet to use for selling processed cheese products.

I don't know that I can really judge the urban counterculture for the city I live in nowadays. I'm too busy being old and married and raising a kid and paying the bills to really notice it. And I'm in bed by the time the shows start, anyway.
I second that. I found other interesting information on the site. Thanks for sharing.
This is actually a common feeling. You need only watch SLC Punk which addresses this issue.

I really became aware of anti-sheep-sheep in college. I had a pretty tame outside appearance. My hair was short. I shaved. I dressed in a way that was affordable in the town south western I grew up in (Old Navy, maybe some music tshirts from Hot Topic). Ironically I actually hung out with some real counterculture people (by the definition of this article) growing up. They accepted me although I didn't always dress like them. There was no way to dress like them because there was no one style.

My first summer job in college was working with a group that was basically a group of liberal hippies from the east coast, and I don't mean that in an insulting sense. We did backpacking and trail work for an americorps program. I initially didn't get the job, but my girlfriend did. When someone dropped out of the program I joined.

Immediately I stuck out like a sore thumb. These people weren't even close to being accepting of any ideas other than their own. They were conformists. I didn't have the right hair, it wasn't long enough. I didn't wear the right brand of shoes, Chacos were required. I didn't even drink the right kind of water because I refilled a cheap gatorade bottle rather than use a Nalgene. Even the things I did that happened fit in with the group were questioned. During our first team party I mentioned how much I liked "The Doors", and I someone had the balls to say I didn't look like I would like that kind of music.

I ate the wrong food because I wasn't vegan. The chain smokers told me: "don't you know the crap you're putting into your body?".

After 3 months of backpacking and working in national parks my appearance was quite a bit scruffier. The head of the program actually had the balls to say "I looked like a team member now".

I began to value people who had their own ideas, regardless of whether those ideas were or weren't mainstream. I'd rather see new culture than counter-culture. I'm suspicious of people who define themselves by being the disagreeing with mainstream because to me that seems just as restrictive as conforming.

It's extremely rare to find anyone who's not looking to be validated by their peers.
Availability, MTBF, MTTR and other bedtime tales
Ask HN: If I were your dream hire, would you hire me? I live in Somalia
I'm at a dead end career-wise and the job market I'm at does not offer any better alternatives than my current job. The pay is great but I find the work I do pretty depressing compared to the stuff I know I'm capable of. I've tried to demonstrate and explain the value I could be bring if we were to do things differently but I've lost hope that I'll ever get through to anyone.

HN has always been inspiring regarding starting your own business and although that is something I want to try, I'm more curious right now about the feasibility of finding a job outside the country. The question is, I don't know if that's even possible.

How would a company even determine if I'm worth hiring and going through all the work to get me a work visa if they can't even interview me in person? Would they tolerate my crappy internet if they try to interview me over Skype? What if the position was for something mid-to-entry level and not some key position. Would it still be worth the hassle to get me on board?

I actually got in touch with German company who had a job posting for JS developer and asked them this very question and their reply was encouraging[0] but I wondered if I could get more input from other sources.

I guess I ask cause I keep hearing complaints about the lack of talent and it makes me wonder if that's a possible opportunity for me.

So what are your thoughts?

[0] Sociomantic Labs response to my question[1] "For our team in Berlin we often hire outside of the EU and have lots of experience with this. We have 35 different nationalities in the office and always welcome a new team member outside of the EU."
the .net ecosystem is the kind of thing i was thinking about, but i'm pretty sure java has the same kind of solution.

as for the other persons answering me: i'm not only talking about long request. think about something like scheduling emailings or reports or ios notification , periodically or based on some db state change.

not something you'd want to handle with just an async framework.
Good point about the reasons of productivity leaps. Funnily enough, I recall that one of the main selling points of Java was portability (the famous "Write Once Run Everywhere"), even though C was already supposed to be portable; but the environment wasn't, and you still had to develop OS-specific code.

Anyway, yes I agree the ecosystem is key. This is why a lot of new languages are either running on the JVM (like Clojure and Scala) or are interoperable with C (like Rust and Nim). In other cases, languages have managed to create an entire ecosystem very rapidly (Node.js and Javascript in general, Ruby and others).

> The thing is that with modern hardware, even toy software projects are quite usable

You're right. I must admit I'm not a big fan of this "throw more at the problem" approach, and I wonder for how long this approach will work. After all, Moore's law is slowing down, as the unit cost per transistor has stopped decreasing after 28nm.

> but this isn't the case with hardware design.

Yes, for one because if you design hardware that is sub-optimal, in other words that requires more transistors, that translates into higher costs, and lower margins. That's some powerful incentive IMO. Not to mention that if the hardware is not powerful enough, the toy software projects that you mention will have trouble running ^^

Therefore I think a central question is the loss of performance compared to the gain in productivity. A naive translation of C to assembly leads to disastrous performance. For years (decades?) people had to resort to assembly for speed-critical routines, and you can still find assembly in video decoders for instance. But the productivity is so much higher than the loss of performance is acceptable.
Feeling deeply alienated can make one hyper alert, which can lead to interesting art if you don't let it kill you.

My big problem with the article was the idea that Miami is considered suburbs...
This is TTIP, not TTP. Can you clarify what you mean?
The negotiations are being done in secret. The result will be presented as ordinary bills to legislatures.

But I'm not sure if there is anything reasonable about non-national security issues being discussed in secret. We're talking about commerce here, not nuclear weapons.
>Basically, an object which implements call will always cause `typeof` to return "function".

Are there any implementations which actually do this? In Node:

typeof({ call: function () { } }) --> 'object'

({ call: function () { } })() --> TypeError: object is not a function
> an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors

Relationships are built in person, except for getting "married" on EverQuest when you're 15.

> I give my students my phone number and encourage texting.

That's a disaster waiting to happen.

> …sending Facebook messages…

I hope to God you've got separate profiles for your personal life and your professorial identity. And being connected to their personal profiles? Another disaster waiting to happen.

> I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24/7 learning environment.

Mostly what you've done is destroyed any ability for you to have a life and do your own research. Reminds me of the jibe that people used to give to Linux enthusiasts, "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." You've abrogated any expectation that your students respect your time—you're on-call 24/7.
More anecdata: I've also went through several rounds of interviews in the past 3 years and I can confirm algoal's point of view. The interview process absolutely is broken at most places in SV. It also appears to be broken in the most demeaning way possible for the applicant. Harsh criticism I can handle. Gladhanding and well wishes followed by a nuclear "no response ever again by anyone who works here, even if you knew them at previous companies" is more than I can handle.

PS: I interviewed at mid-sized startup companies, all 100-300 people.
This is a great article. Ok, I skipped the parts where he explain how computer works and the history of MS, but I loved how he goes from the internal working of Messenger to the higher level problems in MS.

On the other side, does anyone have a good, encompassing explanation to why AOL was a such a systematic value destroyer? I always read about MS structural problems, but not AOL's.

Nullsoft (Winamp), Mirabilis (ICQ) and Netscape (Navigator) quickly come to mind, but I guess there's more, including their own ecosystem with keywords and promotional websites.

Fact is, after an AOL acquisition, everything stopped evolving. Maybe not Netscape, but it lagged behind, still. Anyone?
What happened in the US during my generation, was that every student with an interest in math, also took physics. And physics was very much taught as applied math.
I don't know how much one head of cattle costs, but it sounds like >1000 missing cattle is worth millions. The article doesn't seem to say, unless I missed it.
I would just like to point out that Hasura is a PaaS. More like heroku, but with some ready to use microservices to get started quickly. So with hasura-db (which is a wrapper over Postgres) you get a BaaS like thing that helps you prototype and use quickly for permission safe REST + document operations, but always let you switch to custom code-driven-database operations that we usally write for applications.
I am curious if anybody has experience using Haskell and clojure/core.typed and could comment on the two. In the article the author states "You're writing fewer bugs, you're reusing more code, new developers are causing less damage, and you have more room to deal with technical debt before it bites you.", I wonder if the same could be said of projects with core.typed.
I don't want to speak for all libertarians, but I would argue that liberty and property rights are essentially very linked in that you exert liberty over your own property, be it your body, mind or personal belongings.

Perverse incentives are real but I guess I'm just skeptical of a centralized authoritative body sanctioned to use force can make them any better.

To quote the (extremist?) classical liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design"
> it's followed by a caveat which misses the key point

Which is a bit ironic since you missed my point. I agree she was abused by an uncaring and incompetent prosecution. I don't think anyone disputes that. My point was that the article and the comments here and on the article seem to insinuate that she was free of culpability and should have never been investigated. Again, they're treating this almost as if they just scooped a random person off the street and accused them of spying.

That could be further from the truth. She had all the red flags. Hell, she could still be a Chinese spy for all we know. Not that I believe it, but the only thing we know for certain is that the prosecution dropped the case. We don't know why they dropped the case. A lack of evidence isn't proof of innocence. Or she could have even been a double agent and maybe their prosecution was a miscommunication or an accident, or maybe it was to make everything appear more legit. Not that I believe any of that, but they do say reality is stranger than fiction.
This is a cool essay! It's very approachable. I would really like to understand git under the hood one day, but I'm intimidated by how much it does with such a small memory footprint.

My group project partner and I were having the toughest time with git last night. I thought we were all ready to walk out the door and then we ended up monkeying around with it for an hour and a half.

The atlassian visual guides really helped:

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/

They're great for people who know the names of all the git commands but who are still thrown off in really basic situations, ie 'Is it merge master? Merge origin master? Merge origin/master? Why does it say already-up-to-date?'
> But I also see no fundamental difference to say a planned economy

Unfortunately from Arrow's impossibility theorem (linked above), there is no objectively "best" ranking for allocating resources so all plans will be sub optimal (provided values are subjective). Because of this, any system/allocation will always produce winners and losers, the only difference being who they are.

In a planned economy you can prevent those products from being made entirely or at least kept to a minimum but again, who decides the trade off. Subjective morality is always an issue. Democracy, btw, is based on a principle of subjective morality, if a majority of voters feel that their plastic toy is more important than an endangered fish then isn't that the way it should be? If not, why not? Of course, the real issue is that people have a hard time predicting the consequences of their decisions. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy for a possible fix).

-----

As far as the means of production go, I'd like to set aside the moral argument (for now) and just talk about incentives. A country (with any political structure you choose) has a natural gold source somewhere in an area, they don't know exactly where.

0. Who predicts a market for gold and how are they incentivised?

1. Who searches for the mine and how are they incentivised?

2. Who develops the mine and how are they incentivised?

3. Who discovers and researches new mining tech and how are they incentivised?

4. Who organises and hires miners, craftsmen, support and how are they incentivised?

5. Who pays these employees and other operating costs and how are they incentivised?

6. Who markets, ships, advertises the finished gold and how are they incentivised?

And the big question, what if the venture fails? does everyone above get paid? If any loans are taken to start this venture and can't be paid back who takes the liability?

It is not that I don't believe there isn't an alternative but capitalism, as a system, has answers to all of these questions and the list isn't exhaustive by any means. Any upgrade/fix/replacement should have answers to questions like this before it can be seriously considered.

edit: formatting
Ask HN: Is a CS degree worth the effort today?
I just read this Quora thread:

http://www.quora.com/Would-you-choose-a-coding-bootcamp-or-a-computer-science-related-degree-Why

How useful is a four-year CS/IT/SE degree if people coming out of three-month coding bootcamps get a better job placement and salary?
For those downvoting me, parent is a Doctor Who reference: the Master is a character on the show obsessed with that specific beat (which any further explanation would be spoilertastic).
Thanks!

Unfortunately neither of the data binding libraries for Android worked for me, because they are either too hard to extend or too big/complex.

RoboBinding's idea is nice, but to me it's too implicit. It's really hard to tell what's happening behind the scenes.

As for the Xaramin - I would like to try it, but I run linux on my development machine, and it didn't start with Wine.
Does anyone else find it ironic that they have a big page about the failure of modern democracies to protect rights and how setting out to the sea can free us from tyrannical governments with run-away spending, followed by [1]:

The Floating City Project combines principles of both seasteading and startup cities, by seeking to locate a floating city within the territorial waters of an existing nation. Historically, The Seasteading Institute has looked to international waters for the freedom... However, there are several reasons we are now seeking a host nation:... b) it will be easier for residents to travel to and from the seastead, as well as to acquire goods and services from existing supply chains; and c) a host nation will provide a place for a floating city within the existing international legal framework, with the associated protections and responsibilities.

[1] http://www.seasteading.org/2015/04/podcast-is-seasteading-be...
>With cattle prices at near-record heights, early estimates of the heist pegged the value of the stolen animals at $1.4 million. Less than a decade ago, the same thousand-plus cattle would have netted only about $500,000.
I've been making the argument that we should be sequencing the DNA of endangered species. Preserve some of that legacy digitally before it's too late.
> The point of a professor at a research university is to interact with graduate students

lol no—at an R1 university the point of the professor is to publish their own research. Managing grad students is just another obligation to be avoided when inconvenient.
If you're going to let the haters stop you from sharing, then they've won. I systematically ignore non-constructive criticism on what I write, and work hard (moderation, deletion, etc) to get rid of it.
i'd love to. got a ouija board?
> Also, going to China, where you have family, is suspicous now?

Did you read the article? She went to China and met with a senior Chinese official. She then came back to the U.S and immediately started asking about sensitive and protected information. So yeah, I would say that's pretty darn suspicious.
Browsers are definitely starting to offer what operating systems do. It is interesting to poke around in the chrome://gpu pages and you see just how aware chrome is of the underlying hardware. It disables features based on hardware, and drivers rather than rely on the underlying system.

Browsers offer a reliable way to use hardware without any configuration. It is easy to forget how difficult something like video playback could be (relying on player software) before sites like Youtube came along.
That is a most excellent explanation.
Great read Justin. I think the challenge lies in getting creative .. finding a way to resist the temptation to splurge on the business before getting those first customers because you have to.
Err, so you're saying this is about reducing the power of Chinese manufacturing and cost of labor by playing other east Asian countries against them, and that's somehow NOT about US power and interests?
> With cattle prices at near-record heights, early estimates
>of the heist pegged the value of the stolen animals at $1.4
>million.
Don't beat yourself too much. 100% of the "overnight successes" you hear from the media bubble were ALWAYS X years in the making, where X >= 10.

> If I want to do kaggle competition: I won't even try to do single submission thinking - "I won't make it to the top 10, why bother, instead do something else."

If you want to achieve mastery, you already lost. When the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa received a honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at Oscars at the age of 80 he said, "I don't think I understand the cinema yet".

Seeking mastery has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with our own insecurities: "If I'm the best maybe women will love me", "If I'm the best maybe people will like me", "If I'm the best maybe I will find my own identity".

Give up mastery. Embrace learning.

> "It doesn't look like the one I saw on the internet".

This is the wrong mindset. Instead ask yourself: Does it look better than the work I did yesterday?.

> Maybe I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master something and setting up wrong expectations.

It takes time and consistency. Small, quantifiable steps every day. This applies to everything: dancing http://danceinayear.com/, web development http://jenniferdewalt.com/, ...

Good luck!
Yes, but it wouldn't be as pleasant to ride on the road. Riding a bike with a roof over your head? I don't know, but I appreciate seeing the sky and the horizon when riding a bike.
Wasn't saying it's a bad thing, but the enterprise market, especially in finance is bloated with various ActiveX components because it was the flavor of the week (turned into the falvor of the decade) when companies had to transform legacy thick client applications to web applications, the sad part is that by the time everything was in place ActiveX was already legacy :)
Heck I've had to review ActiveX builds are recent as last year which were "brand new".

I personally loath ActiveX, i hate pretty much any tech that require me to load a 3rd party app inside my browsers whether it's the pesky JRE which you can never update because the 1 site you need it
for won't support anything past JRE 7.1, or that ancient ActiveX which you need to open in IE10 in IE7 compatibility mode with virtually every security measure disabled.
I'm just saying this move might hurt quite a bit of people, but MSFT seems to be moving away from their usual desktop software modus operandai and moving towards becoming more and more of a services providers/SAAS company.

It doesn't mean that if they decide to take out ActiveX it won't hurt allot of people, and even MSFT in the short time, luckily they still will have some sort of backwards compatibility support and i hope it will be available to normal consumers on demand also. Since sorry but once in a while i need to use an ActiveX too, whether it's some old WebEx or Citrix installation or some really outdated SSL VPN and i don't want to keep some Windows XP/7 VM on hand all the time to do it.

I know it's not what the cool kids do, but sadly for people that tend to work with big and sometimes anachronistic enterprises it's a reality.
Shock the World at Pavlok's Shock-A-Thon in Boston This Week
indeed. The problem, I think, is that most people implement the naive solution before they realize that it's the naive solution. As each person gets only one click of the button, a lot of people don't get the chance to implement that easy fix -- they get it wrong once, and don't get to ever get it right later.