skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about software developers form a programmers association and learn to negotiate and hire agents and lawyers and all that to make sure they're fairly compensated?

If you're going to have lockstep salaries then you also better have solid onboarding and training programs and an actual promotion process other than "if you aren't bored and stay a while you'll get promoted".
Cool! A few years ago I was couch surfing at a stranger's house on the opposite side of the U.S. and found myself unable to find the house again after a late night at the bar. Didn't have the address because we had met on a bike trail and followed him home earlier. Eventually I remembered I had taken a picture of his cat, and sure enough it was geotagged directly on his living room!
Most people don't know this, but Dell actually has an amazing line of computers that come with Ubuntu on them already. Best part - there's a team of people who make sure there's 100% driver support for everything on the computer.

Check it out: https://sputnik.github.io/
if you have an older mac just install Ubuntu Mate http://i.imgur.com/HB2meal.jpg

https://ubuntu-mate.org/
They have been selling Ubuntu on laptops for years now, you used to be able to get it on low end laptops like the vostro now days it seems its reserved for developer editions of their xps line only.
Invoking The Halting Problem is a pretty big sledge hammer. Especially for a language that you claim you don't know much (of the specifics) about. And your argument is so broad and without specifics that it just boils down to "expressing things in such a way that the compiler believes you", with no mention of Rust except that it might cost some performance if you are not able to communicate this. But how hard will it really be to communicate? All semantic properties are not created equal across languages -- some languages make a set of them easy to check in all realistic cases, others very hard or impractical.

For instance, there is definitely a concrete conversation to be had about the ownership model and implementing data structures -- you even have to use `unsafe {}` for implementing something as simple as a doubly linked list[1]. So that's a concrete example of how single-ownership makes something conceptually simple and safe hard to express in safe code. But in this case, there is so much vagueness about the supposed "massive performance implications" (HP + laziness = massively inefficient) that it comes off as trying a bit hard to... let's just say "to be negative".

> (And really my point is that I perceive there is an ambient pressure toward copying function parameters in general in order to minimize refactoring ... which is what I mean by there being an overall performance impact).

Well admittedly this argument is more concrete.

[1] But that's just a burden for the implementer, since you can expose a safe interface to the data structure.
Dell has computers that they sell with Ubuntu on them already: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...
The fall and rise of lawyers
This quote: "Since the 1960s the IRS has collected and published income levels for all American lawyers filing as solo practitioners. In 1988, solo practitioners earned an inflation-adjusted $70,747. By 2012, earnings had fallen to $49,130, a 30% decrease in real income. And note, $49,130 is not the starting salary for these lawyers. It is the average earnings of all 354,000 lawyers who filed as solo practitioners that year."
Any attempts to eliminate accidental complexity in products should be lauded but the people attempting to make these apps quickly run into the fact that there's still a lot of intrinsic complexity built into the system that can't be hidden away.

Like a frog in boiling water, anybody who started in tech when it was simple and then gradually learnt along the way as tech adapted are in a good place because they've just internalized all of the little tricks and quirks and magic invocations that are necessary. Anyone who's trying to jump in now has to accept that it's either going to take a large amount of time and effort to get acclimated or it's going to be a very hard, sharp shock.

The same would apply the other way around. If young people were teleported back to the technology of the 50's, they'd be equally frustrated with all of the quirks of a typewriter or an ice box. But old people would be fine because they'd already internalized all of that learning.
>startling prediction of the mass surveillance methods that were eventually adopted by the NSA after 9/11

Except Carnivore was known about well before that. Not sure why everyone is pretending this is all new.
New Keyword Extractor: smarter and more flexible extractor
I've been appalled to find out how much more I make than some of my colleagues, even though we have the same job title. Now, I feel like I produce more than they do (and higher quality, to boot), so maybe my higher pay is justified, but really, I don't think it's that justified.

I would much rather have levels with merit bonuses than have to rely on being a good negotiator. I could be the best programmer in the world sitting next to the worst programmer in the world, but if she negotiates better than I do, she makes more. Or vice versa. And I don't think that's particularly fair.
I think it's by analogy to the chess piece version you mentioned. A strategy has a skill cap. Therefore, a player who only knows some subset of strategies, where the max skill cap within that set is X, will always eventually be beaten by some other player who knows a strategy outside that set, with a higher skill cap. That player can be said to "have" the skill cap of the highest-skill-cap strategy they're currently aware of.

To put it another way: a "perfect" player with mastery of every strategy they are aware of, but with imperfect knowledge of the space of possible strategies, will have a skill level at the game equal to the highest-skill-cap strategy they're aware of.

Or, if you only practice the strategies you already have, you'll only ever get as good at the game as your best strategy is powerful. It can be much higher-ROI to explore the game's strategy-space to find higher-skill-cap strategies.

Imagine a game where a player who has 80% mastery of a large number of strategies, beats a player with 90% mastery of fewer strategies. The 80% player probably won because one of the strategies they were competent at had a high-enough skill-cap to dominate the other player who didn't know that strategy.
Mozilla was sending a Web browser to do S40's job...
The year of the Linux desktop was brought about by Android.

Oh, right. Ubuntu had nothing to do with it. Definitely not back in April of 2008, with LTS 8.04. No way. It was Android. The mobile operating system intended for smart phones was what brought the Linux desktop to everyone.
I don't know about his official residency status. I do know that he spends enough time on the road for conferences, etc, that it is possible that half of every 6 months works for him...

As far as who is in the office there... Any office we have is a sales office. All of our tech/engineering folks are remote, and spread all around the world.
Real-Life Hoverboard from the Movie “Back to the Future”
> On the first, few people effectively negotiate with their employers for salary increases, and a lot of people fail to negotiate at all.

Boo-fucking-hoo.

Grow the fuck up. If one cannot learn how to effectively communicate, then one will face the consequences.
Whatever. People will figure out ways to game this system too.
"Jessica Hill published and copyrighted Happy Birthday in 1935. While the copyright should have expired in 1991..."

1935-1991 is a 56 year term? Why did they pick that particular length (the 1909 extension)? Seems rather arbitrary and goes against the point that the extensions are bad.
What's up with Airbnb's slow-loading photos?
I don't know why, but in my Soviet literature course in college (early 1980s) we read Cement. Maybe it was on syllabi back then because there was also an English translation. (Now that I look at Amazon, maybe there wasn't a translation back then.)
"why's (poignant) guide to Ruby: in color" is in color, the other one is not.
As @gizmo says, he's a weird case. He's one of the best prose stylists in English, his use of the language is incredible. But then at the same time he wrote his first 9 novels in Russian, and translated his own English works back into Russian, and into French. I'd classify a large chunk of his work as English literature, but I can't comment on how he's viewed in Russia, or for that matter in France, given several of his novels were written in the language then translated.
> I've been appalled to find out how much more I make than some of my colleagues...

Have you done anything about this?
I didn't talk about MVVM in this talk, pretty much all of my examples were about decomposing the M.

That said, I'd love to hear what Fowler thinks of it, too.
Sounds like a great way to collect a company of low performers. Since all the people who can do great things will go elsewhere, where they will actually be paid for being above average in their skill & efficiency.
They have some cheaper ones too, such as this: http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-3551-laptop-ubuntu/pd?r... (also a 14" for cheaper)

I have a Dell Mini 9 that I got for >$200 years (2009?) that came with Ubuntu that I still use regularly. Now it's running Puppy Linux (Slackware based) though.
Erlang team has an unparalleled understanding of time and how to manage it properly in highly available systems. Studying their time elapsed measurement code should be compulsory reading.
yep

New XPS 13 Developer Edition​http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd.aspx

New Inspiron 14 3000 Series Ubuntu Edition
http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-14-3451-laptop-ubuntu/pd?r...

New Inspiron 15 3000 Series - Ubuntu edition
http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-3551-laptop-ubuntu/pd?r...
Maybe the "entry level" vocabulary, etc., is exactly why it was taught in my Russian class in college.

As for it's doctrinaire qualities: At least it's not Alexander Dovzhenko's film, "Earth."
I reckon this article is against freedom and democracy.
The odds that's actually _why are pretty low.
Assuming basic knowledge of Haskell, there's not much between them (one function definition that takes all of two lines).

Both of them clearly show what the function is doing in an operational sense, but neither give any high-level indication of what the whole thing is for. They don't say whether this is part of the computation of a hash function, or a format conversion, or what have you -- that takes documentation and proper naming. These just tell you a way of turning one random list into another.
Business Books

Zero to One

Starts with why

EMyth revisited
Is there a way they could build an Android-based OS that is open, and that facilitates open apps and data, as well as end-user control?

What if they took over Cyangenmod or forked it?
I think a huge drawback of XML is it can't differentiate between an element and an array of one. So to "read" it correctly you should read a schema, too.
That's a good idea. Unfortunately the Ubuntu USB "livecd" gives me a bizarre error code in reference to keyword firmware.

I would actually buy a new linux laptop if I knew where to get one.
It's very fair, if your company similarly does a poor job of highlighting benefits of purchasing your product it will similarly be killed in the market.

Negotiation is primarily about your value prop. Workers who understand this ensure they are contributing the most to the bottom line of the company and have the data to back it up.

Changing the color of buttons,etc generally adds far more to the bottom line than making the code run a little bit faster / use less hardware. (obviously there are exceptions, but you can only cut costs to zero where as revenue can grow infinitely)

eg. I bet the invention of the Like button vastly outweighs the invention of HVVM for FB in terms of adding to the bottom line.
I'm very happy that I bought Dell XPS 13 (aka Sputnik 3) instead of MacBook Air.

There were some problems regarding driver support thought... but in the latest Ubuntu 15.04 most of them, maybe even all of them, are gone.

I've been using it for almost 1.5 years and can't recommend it higher.
Or any of these from the Free Music Archive's Happy Birthday Song Contest, almost two hours of happy birthday songs.

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Happy_Birthday_Song_Contes...
Where do you go, that you hear so many complaints about unbalanced matchmaking?

Tournaments and ladder systems almost automatically cause match "balance" in the way you're speaking of. Some games go further and introduce handicaps, so weaker players can play stronger players with the result not being predictable. In either case, nobody is really thinking about balance; it's just built into the social systems around the game.

The only time one might hear complaints about match "balance" is in non-competitive "casual" play. (This is actually a large part of what Nintendo's game design is about. The Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Mario Party, etc. series are all about letting people with unbalanced skill—family members, say—play casually against one-another while still having fun.)
I take issue with the premise of this article. I majored in Russian at a liberal arts college; the standard practice (which was reflected at similar schools) was to teach one survey course of 19th century literature, and one of 20th, both in translation. That way comp-lit students could take either course. There's a canonical Golden Age (mid-19th century) and Silver Age (early 20th) that is universally taught.

Stalin made life easier for Russian majors by effectively destroying the intelligentsia by the 1930's, greatly reducing the amount of literature we had to study.
Besides the fact that you don't take into accunt the spread (the buy / sell prices, which are never equal), the big risk associated with this kind of 'arbitrage' is the fact that the transactions won't occur simultaneously. What happens if during the sequence of this 'arbitrage' prices move enough to offset the potential gain ?
> And it came at Microsoft's expense

Except for the fact that Microsoft makes a couple of billion every year on Android licensing fees:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-making-2bn-a-year-...
Any sentence of the form "everything is an _______" is going to lead you to trouble. It doesn't matter if the _______ is a function or a monolith or an MVC app or a file or an event or a closure or a command. You end up being theoretically correct, but you're really only saying "I want a small toolbox".

The framework you are programming in is the entirity of computer science. Good libraries are the ones that do their job well and don't get in the way of your using other tools to solve other problems.

Once you set up camp inside a framework and declare you're not coming out, whether it's MVC or immutable state or Salesforce or whatever, you're basically guaranteeing that you're going to be spending a big chunk of your day sanding down square pegs to fit in round holes.
You can set up dual boot with an EFI boot manager such as efibootmgr, refit or refind. First shrink your mac partition with disk utility in Mac OS X or gparted, then use the free space to install Linux. The cleanest way to share data would be to move it to a separate partition which both OSes can mount, although you can mount non-journaled HFS from Linux if you want to avoid doing that.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro

Edit: Corrected outdated info
I can't help but feel some "couch coach" desperation with Mozilla's confusion at where should they aim at.

Google has Android which is open source but "spyware" prone and suffers from vendor incompetence/uninterest in updates -- in fact this will bite Google sooner or latter. While Apple's iOS is privacy aware but closed source and carries a huge price premium.

On the other hand Mozilla is known for open source and for caring for privacy. Furthermore with Snowden's revelations, at least among the IT crowd, as well as governments, there is interest for a secure system.

Give me a high-end phone [1] which focus on privacy.

Something that supports a stack like Xposed and Xprivacy out of the box.

Something whose baseband processor is decoupled from the other processors. And if possible the source code for the sensors or at least the ICD, so that you have an alternative to binary blobs.

Give me something that supports encryption and can get consistent no hassle OTA updates.

And make it with a compatibility layer to Android's apps [2]

I'm all for open source, but Android just ends up being nothing but an headache. A better solution would be welcome.

[1] just look at the OnePlus One for $350 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnePlus_One In fact Mozilla should have partnered with them.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29
>because the country is seen as dysfunctional

All the more reason to study their literature.
Thanks. I'm downloading the LTS now.
For the record Capital Lamda in Unicode: Λ

Unicode uses the spelling "lamda" in character names, instead of "lambda", but I could not find the reason for that.
Actually, it refers to a phrase used by Walter Lippman in his seminal 1922 book, Public Opinion [1]. The genesis for the book is the lead-up to World War 1. The US population was rabidly ANTI-war at the time. In fact, Woodrow Wilson won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of the war."

But the US banks were in a position to lose billions if Western Europe was defeated in the war, and so the power elite decided that it was necessary for the US to enter the war to protect the interests of the 1%. The intellectuals of the time believed that it was possible to win over the American public by creating what was effectively the first mass propaganda campaign in history. At the time, the word "propaganda" didn't have the negative connotations that it has now, so Edward Bernays, who was really the mastermind of the effort, wrote a book titled "Propaganda" summarizing everything they learned in converting the American public into Hun-haters.

After the war ended, the fear that the liberal intellectual class stirred up against the Huns, was immediately transferred onto the communists. And then these same intellectuals moved into comfortable positions on Madison Ave and made millions creating the modern advertising industry.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_%28book%29
What specifically is slow about Yosemite? I'm sure there are plenty of Apple engineers who read HN and take note, even if they don't chime in.

As for Linux it looks like you're stuck with something that fiddles with/replaces EFI. Take a look at http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html.
As a Romanian who grew up in the '80s and '90s I also have to say that "Nu, Pogodi" was very much liked in these parts of Europe. Bonus points for this excellent Elektronika game on which I spent many, many hours as an 11-12 year old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGy14lwf_LQ .

Later edit: Damn it, because nostalgia has kicked in and we're talking about Eastern European animation, I also have to give a big thumbs-up for the Bulgarian National Television's opening sequence of its daily cartoon show from back in the '80s-'90s, an example (of many) being this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YLmLx53ZvM , the Polish Lolek and Bolek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiiULpdnVrY) and the Romanian Balanel and Miaunel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_F2IVgjasc)
> Even to take a niche, they need a remarkable positive differentiator

Privacy. And their history and non-profit status makes them hard to compete with for users' trust in that area.
I think what he meant was, had South Vietnam won, it would have become a second South Korea.
I'm writing this on the first Dell I've owned since... 1999: a new "Developer Edition" XPS-13 2015 (FHD i5 variant for max power savings, which are pretty incredible).

This is close the best linux laptop I've used, including various my various thinkpads and macbooks.

A couple years ago I met an enthusiastic Barton George showing off the first gen XPS 13 at the ubuntu dev conference. It was sexy but flawed. I wasn't interested in the machine, but I thought Barton was a guy to watch. His project Sputnik group is the only reason I have kept Dell on my radar at all.

They could be doing a lot in a better way: the customer outreach, ordering process, out of box experience: all include some (at times very) rough edges.

Linux on the desktop is happening and, as I've said for a long time, it's happening where it needs to: with developers first. I'm not super excited with their Ubuntu centric strategy, but it's minimal effort to get Arch up and running on the Dell dev units. If anyone is going this route I'm maintaining a kernel for the XPS 13 (2015) here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-xps13-alt/
I just bought refurbished XPS 13 with Windows because I wanted to save some money. Ubuntu wont work out of the box. There are whole bunch of issues that I'm still trying to resolve. So even if hardware is compatible, you may have hard time. I think it will take some time, because everything gets smooth. (afaik, hardware wise just wifi card is different)
Malone has been busy lately! Strategic thinker with an impressive track record.
I've dealt with a lot of overseas developers running Ubuntu, but other than that, not sure how often I've seen it in the wild. Compared with the dozens or hundreds of Android phones I see every day. Many spend more time on their phone than on their computer, so I think it's fair to call it the "new desktop"
If I understood your comment correctly; you say there are no (or very little) office politics in academia, right?

I have met a few academics that would definitely bet their paycheck on academia having much more politics than companies.
I am a happy postgres user for years, nothing special, just for personal projects. This site tells me so few things and sounds so flawless, that I am not sure if it is a parody or actually a product. Why would some random software be able to make my pg 8 times faster or more?
I bet he'll respond to emails. Seems like a nice guy from his writing style.
I just installed 14.04 on an 3-4 year old Inspiron. Haven't really pushed it, but it seems to have no issues, and I didn't have to do anything for everything to work; the vanilla install seemed fine.
Aspiring vim-like text editor written in Rust
Perhaps you see it that way because you have a strong pro-Western bias and have placed the fulcrum of "objectivity" thusly. For instance you use the word "tragedies" to refer to systematic civilian slaughter by U.S. and allied forces (the article notes the U.S. secretly confirmed over 300 cases). This reveals your bias. Compare this with someone referring to Pol Pot's actions as "communist tragedies".

The history of the war is plainly relevant to Vietnam's economy today. At the very least it is crucial to supporting the article's thesis that capitalism is providing an incentive and engine for the suppression of this historical memory.
Using the Oculus Rift to Revolutionize Education
Which is nothing for Microsoft. They would have made hundreds of billions if Android hadn't prevented them from transferring their desktop OS monopoly to mobile.
Do you need a patched kernel to run the XPS?
Science Has Determined Which Photo Filters Are the Best