skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software engineering is a young field. While I think separate SE and CS degrees is how things should be in the future, I'm not sure it's the right thing to do now. I recognize that SE programs do exist, but we (as a species) are still new at building software. We've been doing the other engineering disciplines much longer. And as you point out, we're unlikely to see programs split in a poor economy.

(I do have to disagree with your point 3: building it is very much engineering. I consider IT management and service of computing resources and information.)
Strange how in what I have seen so far, when things go really bad, it almost never is a technical problem, its almost always a people's problem.

But he is still right that it is an often-overlooked problem and that we don't even perceive it as a problem. In many organizations, people have just accepted the effort and resources needed for building and maintaining software even tough it could be much less.
There are tons of jobs this background will be invaluable for.
Your question is an oxymoron.
One over infinity is a different kind of zero than we're talking about. An infinitesimal value is not a nil value.
Content aside, surely I'm not the only one annoyed by having to click 7 times to see the whole "article"?
sounds good, let me know how it goes! I had a psuedo HN meetup with @mattc58 and @cricketgeek way back in the day. that went well. We met at Ray's.
DSLs and metaprogramming
Fuck Dubai. No flashy tourist attraction is worth that kind of risk.
It wasn't just that they were participating in a bubble. As this article makes clear, they were participating in a system built on slavery and oppression.
}{ Useful for one-liners, but has no use in production code.

What about production one-liners? Let us not underestimate the power of a well-applied one-liner.
HAHA

My hair is still wet from finally getting a shower today at 240 pm...

CS is the BEST ticket to get a job that's NOT staring at a monitor from 9-5. If you're willing to do sales, you'll be flying around the country (or at least driving), doing installs, and possibly earning commissions.

If you're willing to do entrepreneurial things, you'll be staring for 10-15 hours a day, definitely not 9-5, then be checking in and on the phone most of the time after you get something moving, but definitely won't be 9-5ing it.

Additionally, for many branches of development, if you prove you deliver, you get some ridiculously flexible schedules by the standards of any other field.
Technology makes fleet management easy
Ask HN: License Manager in Ruby/RoR
Hi Rubists,

I am going to ship one RoR application, and come up the question: how can protect the application? In Java there are some license managers, so how about Ruby? or what's your solution?

Regards
/Jack
One over infinity is not a zero at all, because it's an ill-defined operation. You need to say exactly what you mean, and which number system you're working in. Are you in the surreals? Non-standard analysis? The hyper-reals?

If you work with standard analysis, your comment seems to be a non-sequiteur. If not, you need to say which system you're in. Personally, I think the other systems are largely unhelpful, although independently interesting.

And of course an infinitesimal is not zero (nil being a different technical term).

If I've missed the point(s) you were tying to make, you'll need to be more explicit. Probably further "discussion" here is not going to be fruitful, but I'll be interested to read anything you care to add.
I've spent a bit of time in Dubai. It's not quite what the author makes it out to be.

I've heard about the abuses - there are some and it's horrible - but it's not indicative of the way most people are running their businesses in Dubai.

A mentor of mine from England headed up a project management firm there. The workers under him made 20-40 times what they could make back home in South Asia, in places where the malnourishment/literally-starving-to-death rate is sometimes 30%.

An acquaintance of mine who worked in Dubai had a Chinese girlfriend who was a stewardess on Emirates Airlines. Emirates is pretty incredible in that they pay the same amounts to their staff regardless of country of origin - almost all airlines and cruiselines pay much less to people from China, the Philippines, etc, than they would to someone from France or Australia. Emirates pays everyone the same. The acquaintence's Chinese girlfriend bought one house every couple months back in her home province in China on her wages. Her family was becoming incredibly wealthy.

A company taking someone's passport and changing their contract is really horrible fraud, a horrific crime. But that's an indictment of the whole society - this kind of nonsense happens in the West too. Take South Korea and the United States - a common story is a girl gets promised high paid waitressing/hostessing job, gets sold into slavery. This is a terrible thing, and should be stopped - but does that mean that United States is running on slave labor? No. A few bad people is not an indictment of an entire society.

For a lot of very poor people, Dubai helped pull their families out of poverty. The did some amazing things there. Those things won't be mentioned in a piece like this. People who would be living on subsistence farming in China build houses and manage property after working in Dubai. People from Sri Lanka, India, and Eastern Europe can support their whole families and save money after working there for a couple years, in places where there is no opportunity and everyone is literally starving to death.

The author doesn't care about the good. The opinion piece was written before doing any research or interviews, the research and interviews were set to tell the story. There's some bad stuff there? Oh yeah, absolutely. There's bad stuff in the USA too. And England. And everywhere. There's also a hell of a lot of good that's happening there, that wasn't mentioned.
I don't see how adding a predefined style called "level 2 heading" to paragraph would be more distracting than adding a "/this is a level 2 heading" TeX command.

That said, I think having a catalogue of suitable elements for each context and a (modifiable) document structure tree is better than either of the above alternatives.
Better yet, about:blank
Well I guess that comes down to a moral choice.

Would you be okay with "making out great" and becoming rich if it meant that other people had to work in 130 degree heat for 18 hours a day in order to build the buildings you live and work in, and had their wages withheld and passport confiscated by their employer?

Would you think that you had made a bad choice?
The hidden meaning of the hidden Starbucks logo
The likelihood of Apple releasing a tablet, I'd say is low. But they could. Fair enough. I don't think they will, but that wasn't my point.

However, if they do release a tablet, there is absolutely no way on gods earth, they would ever make a competitively priced one. For a start, it'll cost more than the iPhone, or it simply won't make any sense. So we're up to the $500 mark already.

My point was, that even if Apple come out with a tablet tomorrow, it will definitely, categorically, not be in the same area as the crunchpad was planned to be - cheap.
Looking at the graphs: would I trade 2x gain in eventual performance for a 20x gain in startup speed, 3x leaner RAM consumption and great immediate performance? I wasn't sure, but after 2 months with JRuby - yes I would.

My vote goes to Ruby 1.9.4 coupled with speedy and efficient C extensions.
6.00 uses python now? :(. Call me old-fashioned but I think scheme should have remained. I feel I really benefited from scheme being my first programming language. Recursion is in my blood now :)
The article gave the tag line for one book as "The much-anticipated new book from the best-selling author of 'Y Marks the Spot'!" so I assumed they'd written a book of that name. But despite having found a couple of authors to conenct to the name both were male. Then I thought perhaps it was a pseudo-title and looked at "title:spot".

Also looked at 150000 advances but that didn't really get me anywhere either despite bringing up that the author of "the g-spot" got that advance but that's the wrong year.

Her friend "Patty" is a sort of lead but I don't want to know that badly ...

My Google-fu is waning.
Anyone have any other cool James Bond tricks?
The opinion piece was written before doing any research or interviews, the research and interviews were set to tell the story.

I'm not sure how you can make this claim. Do you have knowledge of the chronology of the author's events as to when she wrote the article and when she performed the numerous interviews - with both sides - in the article?

The author doesn't care about the good.

I think that the author's point is that there is no good if the country/economy/system is built on the back of what amounts to slavery and fraud. That it doesn't matter how much "good" has been done if these abuses took place as a part of manufacturing the "good".
Damn, beat me to the quip :OD
A New Way to Nab a Better Seat on the Plane
If you're using photoshop it's really easy to automate the creation of the sheet. Dealing with the coordinates is just a matter of using the right conventions and sticking to them.
This is just another example of how cheating spreads rapidly. If lots of people are cheating then you'll eventually have to cheat to stay in the game.

Not that SEO is all cheating, but really that people are using SEO techniques to push up their content above other content just because they gamed the algorithm. Eventually everyone has to start gaming the system.

The question I have now is how much cheating can go on before it breaks. I'm curious about this in general because cheating happens a lot (e.g. our recent financial collapse brought on my non prime mortgages). Question is can we measure cheating, can we head it off before a collapse, how much can a system endure and remain stable?
Ahh, jQuery helps, but still, IE6 burns.
At the same time, Dan Lyons really got what Steve Jobs may say in that situation.

Making something is really hard. Making hardware is hard.
It's Getting Harder to Be a Criminal
That is exactly the question I am asking. If someone gave you (and I don't mean you in particular) the chance to make all this money with minimal effort on your part, are you so sure you'd turn it down?

To answer this question regarding myself, I don't know. For example, I wear clothes and shoes that are obviously made using horrible labour in third-world countries. Also, what are the people who already live there supposed to do? Halt their lives and livelihoods and move out?

All I'm calling for with my comments is more restraint when it comes to the 'holier than thou' comments. It's too easy to express casual outrage and condemnation on the internet.
Eco system
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> I think that the author's point is that there is no good if the country/economy/system is built on the back of what amounts to slavery and fraud.

I don't mean the big buildings - I mean the author doesn't mention all the good that happened for a lot of workers that came to Dubai with no other options, were treated relatively did well, did hard work but were paid extremely well for it, and went from being poor to being upper middle class in their home countries after their tenure was over.

> That it doesn't matter how much "good" has been done if these abuses took place as a part of manufacturing the "good".

The author didn't make an attempt to get the average wages, or how the process works on average, or how widespread any abuses are. She didn't publish anyone's account who came out well in Dubai, and there's many. She didn't write about the people who, by working in Dubai for a couple years, made enough to live very well in their home countries, buy property, send their kids to good schools, and get their families out of poverty. That happened too. That's the good I was referring to.
Chicago Workshop on "How to Build a Web App Business" (Dec 8)
This is so not my area of expertise. However, I wonder, wouldn't more small servers imply more hardware failures? Exchanging one HD in a big server might be less work than exchanging 10 HDs in small servers. Of course the HD in the big server might take down more "applications", but I think that is taken care of in other ways (hot swappable HDs, redundance?).

Overall I wonder if maybe a new OS for the cloud is called for? It seems inefficient to have seperate VMs running full OS for every tiny application. Maybe in the future not only storage will be a service (like S3), but also CPUs and RAM could be plugged together at will? Like there wouldn't be lots of small or big server instances, there would be farms of CPUs, farms of RAM, farms of storage, that could be combined at will. Maybe networking would be too much of a bottleneck, though :-/
Team GEN on Custom Firmware 6.XX; 5.50 GEN-D3/5.03 HEN-C Release Imminent
I faced this precise dilemma. I finally just quit. It was less stressful to do what I wanted, and worry about the bills than it was to have the bills paid by not doing what I wanted.
One exception would be in multi-threaded applications. JRuby is the best choice in this domain from my experience. Ruby 1.9 still uses a GIL making JRuby a better choice for concurrent software.
Couldn't put this in the title, but it's being presented by Freshbooks' CEO, Mike McDerment.

(Disclosure: I don't work at Freshbooks, but some friends do. Also, I'm considering going because of my own startup.)
Sorry. But after reading that article, I just don't believe your personal experience is indicative of what's going on in Dubai. You're the one who sounds out of touch.

Have you even gone to interview the workers slaving away to do construction on Dubai's skyscrapers as the author of this article did? Have you seen where they live? Did you interview any of the people who had their passports taken away?

This was a throughly researched article, while your experience amounts to just your friend's project management firm and an acquaintance's girlfriend. Maybe project managers have it good in Dubai, but how does their experience compare to the rest of Dubai's workforce?

And what about the water quality problems they're having after dumping their sewage in the sea? What about the lack of freedom of speech addressed in the article? Or the fact that being gay in Dubai is illegal? Or the threats of Islamic radicalism? Or the impact of the falling oil prices and Dubai's debt economy?

There's so much in this article you seem to dismiss with a wave of the hand by saying other countries have their problems too. They certainly do, but that doesn't excuse or explain what's going on in Dubai.
While I certainly would not want to live/work in Dubai, its very difficult to _not_ participate in a system built on slavery/oppression. Have you ever been to the factory cities in Asia where a good bit of your things are made? Have you bought a tank of gas and thought about what percent of your money is going to oppressive regimes? If you're a U.S. citizen, do you pay taxes which support a global military hegemony (do you know how may have died in Iraq over the last 8 years)?

Its real hard to not be a part of the system. I do understand your point and it does feel better to be further removed from the bad behavior. But most of us are participants.
In what type of volume?
Everyone wants their content to be found, but that doesn't mean everyone's content is equally worthy based on content or relevance.

Obviously you need to rank the sites, but it just seems to me that the ranking algorithm they use doesn't correlate that well with relevance if it has to be gamed.
It certainly seems short sited. I think a good part of the secret sauce for the U.S. is that we allow people/businesses to fail (bankruptcy).
And if your content is unworthy or undesirable and you game it, then that forces worthy and desirable content to game it too in order to compete.
Spy on BBC was addicting to watch. Among other things you learn is that if someone is tailing you, there are two others tailing you (for redundancy).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_(TV_series)
It can be improved to correlate more closely with relevancy.
How Tax Law Fuels College Sports Arms Race
I think you're missing the point. The general argument here is: we're all aware of the accounts of those who have done well. Dubai was up until recently quite obviously prosperous. I have no doubt that the stewardesses of Emirates Airlines were doing marvelously. But if the lowest stratum of Dubai suffers these conditions, then the prosperity of the Emirates Airlines stewardess is blood money.
On the other hand, didn't porn help establish BitTorrent as a viable P2P protocol? I may be misremembering, but I feel like delivering adult movies was an early driver of BitTorrent adoption.
FusionGarage won't be developing this themselves. They will just covertly sell full documentation to some Chinese company that will manufacture it in huge quantities for Asian markets at first. We are going to see CrunchPad in few months from now under completely different name.
No offense, but the conditions that these workers are in seem a lot worse than anything you could have inside a factory in China.
The measurement of "some" is always important. The degree to which it's passed off as "just the way things are" is also important.

The exact nature of "good" is also worth considering. People getting boned over in the name of curing cancer is different than people getting boned over in the name of acquiring real estate or building luxury homes on artificial islands that will collapse into the sea in two decades.
I agree with your point, FWIW, and in fact I'm saving up for one :-)
Europe did it back in the day. If you were a debtor you were thrown in debtors' prison until you paid off your debt... but you can't earn any money while you are in debtors' prison... Catch-22. I'm assuming that it's meant as a deterrent to try and prevent people from getting into debt in the first place. Not that it's a very good (or humane) idea though.
I travel very frequently and wouldn't pay the $10 monthly asking price for this.

It's a novel idea, but worth maybe $10/year, not $120/year.
A Contacts Manager
Natural user interface: A key test for Microsoft in 2010 and beyond
Tracks of My Tears: Reconstructing Digital Music
Additionally such agreements (essentially "insurance" against downtime losses) are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. Likely you'll be going to court over anything significant, and paying $100/hr or more to your team of attorneys.
Oops, sorry, "seized."
The Five Worst Inventions of 2009
The question is, where are you going to draw the line? In my eyes, the more direct and deliberate your involvement, the more culpable you are.

It's one thing to be forced to pay taxes, some of which may go towards a war you're against, and quite another to go and get rich off the slaves of Dubai (especially if you do it knowingly), or go to Dubai specifically to exploit the slaves (as some of the people interviewed in this article admitted to doing).
Hi, I'm one of the creators of http://www.abtests.com. The issue of statistical significance has come up over and over, so I'll try to explain our view of it.

We ask people to input their raw data...both trials and conversions. If they do this honestly (anybody can fake data about anything) then in our view the results speak for themselves. We've had folks upload data that was obviously not statistically significant, and we've had people write blog posts denouncing those results. We've also had folks upload test data that was statistically significant and people say they're learning a lot.

So we've had both solid and suspect data uploaded to the site with good discussion around it. This is exactly what we hoped for...I think in the future as more tests get uploaded the wheat will be separated from the chaff, so to speak, and those tests with significant data will get lots more attention than those that don't. In fact, we're already seeing this in the traffic logs.

And, as several folks have mentioned, many tools do the hard stats math for you, telling you when your data is statistically significant. This helps people know when they can be confident in sharing their data with others.
"2x gain in eventual performance"

It only takes 2 seconds before JRuby catches up with 1.9.2. That's not long, so unless your program only runs for a few seconds, the wait is worth it
soooo Seesmic got a lot of money from Microsoft to port their next version to windows first using silverlight.
As someone who grew up in one of these manufacturing-centric Asian countries full of child labor and such, I disagree.

Dubai had (and maybe still has) widespread problems with slavery and indentured servitude - both are problems not widespread in any of the major manufacturing centers in East Asia. Where the worker in Dubai is hit with a litany of hidden fees upon arrival, the worker in China is not. Where the worker in Dubai has his passport held until false debts are repaid, the Chinese worker does not. Working in a Chinese factory is almost utopian compared to the conditions that have apparently been exposed in Dubai.
This is a distinction, but the distinction? I'm not convinced of the broad applicability of the divide.
Europe’s Media Companies Don’t Get Startups
“Intellectuals Cannot Operate At Room Temperature.”
Estimation anti-patterns
I never comment. Oh, shit...
Ask HN: easy noprocrast loophole
There is a frustratingly easy way to circumvent "noprocrast", defeating its purpose. For example, in Firefox, you can use "private browsing" (Shift-Apple-P on a Mac).

Would it be a good idea to track IP addresses to make it a bit harder to work around the noprocrast delay?
They didn't conspire to prevent it from occurring. Some data was lost, and some bad data was destroyed. In fact, the data that was destroyed does not seem to be part of the data that was lost.

And Climate Science didn't need as much transparency years ago before the AGW controversy. Subsequent events rendered old data to be of more value, but we take for granted in late 2009 how inexpensive disks are. They were not nearly so cheap even last year, let alone years ago. However, the volume of data produced by climate science instruments is enormous. It's very unsurprising that some was lost.

But I and others keep pointing out: We know how to reconstruct that data from earlier published data (back before any of these emails were written, before any conspiracy you allege existed) and published code. Why is this unacceptable? It seems to me the reason is because you don't like that it's science butting it's rude head into the libertarian economic religion, pointing out resources are finite and liberating whole geologic ages worth of carbon back into the atmosphere can have consequences. Perhaps I am assuming too much, but that is the opinion I keep butting heads with on news.ycomb, which is libertarian-free-market-only-conservative-type rich to an unusual degree, at least for someone who lives in the Capital Of Liberalism.