skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, reading the comic another poster put up here:

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2339.html

... I think I've managed to get my head round it. Or, at least form an initial model.

It's like the old puzzle of the hotel with infinite rooms, each one labelled with an integer.

Then, another infinite set of guests turn up. The hotel manager asks every person currently in the hotel to double their room number and go to that one. Because there are infinite even numbers, this works fine.

Then, the new set of infinite guests sleep in the odd number rooms.

If I'm right, of course, then this only works because infinity is really odd - and you couldn't get an infinity room hotel in the real world.

Is this a reasonable way of thinking about it?
If anything, an employee could just move to a company with better perks.

Instead, their ambition and motivation appears to be large enough to accept smaller salaries and benefits to start their own company.
Still, don't they employ something like 100k software engineers?
> The only escape is total disability.

Why should there be an escape? You took the debt, and the terms are you pay it back as you earn money. It was never forced on you, you accepted it. But the dice didn't roll your way so now you want to flip the board?

The best thing we can do is teach kids/teens personal responsibility. Start with a negligable debt in their school years so they know the feeling of a repayment weight hanging over their head.

Education, not regulation.
I'm not sure why Zune keeps coming up as an example in these threads. It got rebranded to Xbox Music, but all the servers are still up and anyone who subscribed still has all their music.

An earlier Microsoft DRM that was used by a bunch of services (PlaysForSure) was indeed shut down, but it's not the same thing as Zune.
Having finitely many pieces is different from finitely many operations you would need to cut the pieces in real life.

For example, there is a curve that cuts the plane into just two pieces, but the line itself has infinitely small resolution [1] and hence you can't cut it. In fact, there is no segment of this line, no matter how small, that you can cut in a finite amount of time!

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function
What happens when I lose my car key? I have to provide proof of identity and ownership to a trusted and specialised business provider who then allows me access again.

What happens when I lose my client certificate? Should be the Same thing. Otherwise the value to me of the website being protected is worth less than that of my car.

Really most websites are using security in the same way the local bar uses human based facial recognition "oh hi paul, your usual?"

Since there is next to no value in a Facebook feed, I will make a rational decision as to how much cost of effort I will put in to get access back.
Exactly,"upcasts" can be one-way
Nice replacement for God and Bluepill, process management tool
Would love some insight and helpful advice on sales.

We have a product that is ready for paying customers and we have a landing page (only) that is to collect sign ups. We get 100 sign ups a week & up to 15% of those express interest in being customers, but once we get to talking ... after a few emails these talks taper off and even a follow up email leads nowhere.

We have had talks with small parties no one has heard to huge Fortune 50 to 500 companies (this week a VP from Lowes started talks, previous Black & Decker, Motorola, Samsung, Beats, etc).

It seems most people want to use our unique WEB technology for free, though once we put it on the web these potential customers may just show their true motives of wanting to know how we accomplished X and copy it.

Thus, I've been thinking of doing a freemium model myself where users can use part of the product that is not our secret sauce yet have to pay X amount of money to add our secret sauce into the product for their specified use.

What do you think is a better sales channel then we have it now and or does my next sales channel idea sound solid?
UpThere?
If one solid ball can be partitioned into two solid balls of equal radius, then can't each of THOSE be partitioned into four solid balls of equal radius, and so on ad infinitum?
Not really, most of their workforce are "geniuses" and the like
Yeah that's what I was thinking. Paying per article is absurd IMO. when I started reading the article I assumed the change would be exactly as you described, x free articles and then $1.99 for full version.
That doesn't fit any of the best developers I've seen.

Perhaps the people you've seen are not, in fact, very good?
That's not really an answer. Many companies offer just that and more.
It sounds like you're posting here in hopes that someone will affirm your suspicions and tell you that top devs are just luckier or play looser with the rules and overstate what they can do.

I'm not sure whom you've seen that you're referring to, but the top devs that I know are nothing like what you describe. To me, the defining characteristic of a top dev (though I will not go off on a tirade here, and so I will keep this short and sweet) is that they understand the systems they are building on and the problems that they are trying to solve.

Being a developer is NOT about the code, it's about how you come up with what you come up with and the strategy and approach you take to solve a problem. Computer Science is about algorithms, but software development is about coming up with solutions to the problems presented. You can't solve a problem - no matter how well you can "code" - if you don't understand the problem. And the better you understand the problem, the better of a solution you'll be able to come up with.

I've seen top devs that copy and paste code from StackOverflow and they get the accolades and the resounding praise. And they earned every bit of it. Why? Because it's not about the code snippet they copied from SO to convert a byte array to hex representation or to neatly serialize an object and transmit it, encrypted, over the wire to a remote server. It's about knowing what the code should do in the first place.

It's not about lines of code, it's about what that code does. A CS degree does not teach you to engineer software, it teaches you to write algorithms.
Two options. 1) My guess is these people care as much about problem solving as yourself, but their problem is bigger than the code they are copying and pasting. So it appears as if they don't care, but they just care about something else. Lazy makers/coders often worry about the final solution and reflection time rather than how every line of code works. 2) they suck. which happens, fuck 'em they'll be gone eventually when they can't cut it.

The ultimate answer to your question is to stop looking at the people you don't like wondering why they are the way they are. Find the inspiring people, even if they are few and far between, and latch on to them.
There is nothing wrong with you. You are working with the wrong people.
He's on to us.
Can you explain what an embedded (rendered) resource reference is, or maybe point to some code in TempleOS that demonstrates it?
I've replied to your email, but to reply here to your specific question:

> immerse it in water, in a bathtub ready
> to overflow, and start manipulating the
> pieces.

> At what point does the water level rise?

A lovely question. The answer is that the "water" isn't "water", it has to be the same infinitely fine "mush" that the ball is made of. As a result, as you move the pieces out so the "water" ends up forming non-measurable holes to fit them into, and the complement is also non-measurable. So in the same way as the balls kind of "fold out" to become two balls, so the water kind of "folds in" and takes up less space than it used to, exactly balancing the actions of the pieces.
I've had a keen interest in go but haven't used it for anything serious. My impression of it is that its a great replacement for languages like Python and is great at getting things running fast but I have to agree that it doesn't feel like the kind language I wouldn't want to write a large code base in. My huge interest in it is around the single binary deployment and its concurrency model. The language itself I find a bit quirky in some places (some data structures are passed by ref while other by value) and I like my languages concise and elegant.

This post got me to have a second look at Elixir and I spent the whole day going though its documentation and prototyping an idea I wanted to implement in go, specifically because of go's concurrency model. And frankly ELixir is exactly the right fit for me, not only for this case but generally as a language with the kind of elegance and expressiveness I'm drawn to.
Because Apple is not a webapp company, and webapps are the easiest and most common kind of startup.
Team Pangu is officially working on the jailbreak of iOS 8.3
They are synonyms. The field of economics (the only field that could legitimately claim to give exact definitions to these terms) uses them interchangeably, and tends not to care about classification or exact verbal definitions, but rather focuses on the implications of various mathematical models.

If there is ambiguity in a verbal definition, it can be clarified by writing down a mathematical model, not by endless debates about the meaning of words or classification of the economies of different nations.
You might want to write your rhetorical question in proper English. Also, what the hell is the point of your rhetorical question if it's not addressing anything relevant?

Why are you so stupid? Rhetorical question. Don't answer.
(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this)

My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”

It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.

I could be totally wrong about this.
The Babe Ruth Effect in Venture Capital
Maybe another reason why Apple spawned comparatively few startups might be that some of the areas of expertise for Apple and their employees are harder to do in startup-sized companies; namely hardware engineering and mass manufacturing innovation.

Apple does a lot of work in hardware and hardware manufacturing, both areas which are pretty capital-intensive and might not lead themselves as easily to the startup world.

Say, you are an Apple engineer working on the Ax chips for the next iPhone and have an idea for something great in CPU design, you cannot exactly rent a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS to try to build it on your own and sell it market.
The word you're looking for is 'resourceful' and, yes, the top developers are resourceful.

No one knows everything. Not even close. If that is what you are looking for, some Godlike mastery of the esoteric, you are in the wrong field.

If you are willing to be resourceful which means dealing with the inherently messy business of solving Real Problems blinds and dead ends the occasional short cut and all, well, welcome! This is chaotic, but we love it!

Writing beautiful code is important mostly because, in the long run, it saves time and effort. But the perfect is often the enemy of the good. All of the beautiful code in the world is worth nothing if it doesn't solve somebody's problem and, usually, sooner is far better than later. If that bothers you, there is always academia.

What separates the masters from the cut-and-paste programmers churning out garbage is knowing when it is ok to take shortcuts and when it pays to take due care.
Innovation in the context of big companies is a far different and more subtle thing than innovation in a startup context. A lot of the innovation large companies do is never really seen--not even in the sense that it isn't customer impacting, but rather in the sense that you never see the innovation that goes into simple functions that you take for granted.

For instance, Apple is immensely innovative in terms of designing manufacturing processes. Do you see the results? You might notice that Apple products have more fit and finish, but the results are measured in millimeters at most. The end result is not as earthshaking as a whole new product category would be.

Even more striking is any large web property. Any idiot could write a working version of Twitter, Amazon, StackExchange, or maybe even YouTube in a week. Scaling these to actually work at scale takes immense levels of innovation. But if you use these sites every week since they have been launched, you might not see any of that.
Mobile app startups are a big #2 at the very least, and what with apple being a manufacturer of a very popular phone I'd expect more from there.
For that kind of code analysis one wants more detailed information about the source file, like an AST, but Stallman has forbidden that level of detail to be exportable from gcc, and more recently squashed efforts at deeper emacs/clang integrations, both on ideological grounds.
having a collection of old receipts I saved from my grandparents home I was surprised at how even receipts for furniture sales were so well written.

I do know that my niece and nephew had to have my mom's letters to them read to them by my sister as the schools they attended never taught cursive

Penmanship is one failing I keep trying to remedy, I think a lot can be communicated through it besides the words a letter may contain
There is some truth in there... Too many cargo cult devs out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

But to answer your question: It depends on the business you're in and the dev culture your company established.

In the most consulting shops or early stage startups I've seen the situation that you're describing. Cranking out code because visible features / products is the only thing a customer cares about.

But in companies that build a sustainable product that needs to scale things are different. They embrace good architecture TDD/BDD. They embrace time for refactoring. Maybe you should switch your job :-)
> they 'get things done

Yes, that's the trick.

> guess about how code works

That's not a bad thing per se. Time spent vs. accuracy is a compromise. You need to figure out what is the optimal depth of understanding you need to achieve to get the task done.

> copy and paste googled code

Sure, funderstanding code is usually much easier than writing it, so if you find something on SO that does exactly what you need then yes, just paste it.

> If I want to succeed, do I need to stop caring about solving problems and start caring about getting as many lines of code out the door as I can?

No, not at all. You should care about solving problems, but the problems you're trying to solve should more or less overlap with your employer's problems. If you are developing a trading system where the expected throughput is 10 trades/sec, then designing something that can cope with 1000 trades/sec might be interesting but it is not your job. If you need to fix some bug in 20 minutes because many things (money, reputation, etc.) depend on it, then yes, it might be just fine to guess, hack together something and fix it later properly instead of spending a couple of days on the 'correct' solution meanwhile the company is collapsing around you.

In short: what you do is part of a larger context, you need to align your priorities with that.
If you’re really successful at bullshitting, it means you’re not hanging around enough people smarter than you.
Not sure if this is true - I would like to see some stats.

I think the problem is that the press will not write about some founder as "ex Apple engineer", "ex Oracle engineer", etc. It is not cool. The story will sell if founder are "ex-Google", "ex-Facebook", "ex-Dropbox", "Y-combinator", etc.

For example, if you are ex-Oracle, then you need to have significant revenue in order to be mentioned in the press as ex-Oracle fonder (PeopleSoft, Salesforce, Sibel, etc.). If you are ex-Google, you need to raise 100K seed and press will say ex-Google.
Show them that you can get things done faster in the long run by slowing down.

The emphasis on speed (getting things done) is always short sighted, and they know that. Help them see it.

https://ventrellathing.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/the-case-for...
Depends on how you define 'top'. If you mean the ones who rise quickest through the ranks of a company that's not technology-focused, then maybe you're right. In the long run, however, the cream rises to the top. People who genuinely don't know what they're doing are uncovered.

'Guessing' isn't always a bad thing, either - providing it's an educated guess. Of course, there's an argument to be made for understanding every last line of code, every component and module in a behemothic application, but in the real world, it's just not the case.
Truth be told, I didn't really "start" boycotting Nike products as I didn't happen to be purchasing much from them already. I included them rhetorically as the three-beat felt much more natural in that context.

I did tell Coke and Adidas.
Very astute observation that echoes the core message in Michael E. Gerber's brilliant The E-Myth Revisited [1]. I would add that if you're about to grow your business, you will have to find passion and inspiration in other areas in your professional life as you won't be doing the technical work you used to. Luckily, running a business means having the opportunity to explore many areas of expertise that are super interesting and rewarding, like human psychology, operations management, logistics, human resources, etc.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...
both attitudes have their ups and downs i guess:)
> What if I want to list all information about files with some mode? `ls` will still send 10^6 lines, carefully formatted, and almost all of them will be discarded with a simplest filter it could perform before reading all additional information from disc.

Indeed. That's probably one of the reasons PowerShell was designed to execute the commands in-process: The objects being piped are just the object references.

There's still the problem of using native indexes. That hasn't been solved elegantly yet. Reading all file names when wildcards would have eliminated 99% of them using file system metadata seems a waste. Which is probably why "ls" in PowerShell still allows a -Include filter and an -Exclude filter that take wildcards.
The reason those things are strange is that uncountable sets have absolutely no bearing on computable objects (== enduring in math and science) but everyone mistakenly applies their countable intuition to uncountable set theory.
A monthly newsletter for Firebase lovers
I dunno, that's weird we're getting different itineraries.
The pre-IPO bids for Facebook at SecondMarket were substantially higher than the original IPO (first-day trading price), less than a week before private trading was halted. Even the private market has no idea what non-public shares are worth. IMO, ask for an increase in salary, or tie the value of the stock to a conditional bonus payout. Keep in mind that even if the company goes public and the stock does well, you probably won't be able to sell for 12-18 months due to lockups, so the IPO price is less relevant to your compensation than the long-term stock price. If you are smart (and have the cash), a 83(b) election can be hugely beneficial for your taxes... unless the price at which you do the election is far above the eventual market price of the stock, in which case you are out quite a bit of money.

Edit: If the company truly feels that their stock can be substituted for salary, then it shouldn't have more than a 12-month cliff for vesting.
Letters from an American farmer, it radically shifted my understanding of early American identity and the rationalization of exploitation that still exist.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_an_American_Farm...
Not as many lines of code as possible - less is more - but as many issues closed as possible. Good developers are focused on the goal. The developers that I've admired the most over time just had a knack for thinking clearly and addressing problems in ways so that future code paths align well, too.
Funny how many languages' runtime on the TIOBE top ten are written in either C++ or C. Legacy indeed!
along with docker-machine (I haven't actually used it yet), docker-compose is nice too! https://docs.docker.com/compose/
Your looking at to low a level. Nobody can google how to solve the problems people actually care about. What people find online is basically just the manual that nobody writes anymore.

I suggest you pick a relevant book to read every month on your own time. But, while your working is generally not the time to be doing that kind of learning.
I just want to mention that there is a much deeper discussion to be had about the axiom of choice than the apparent impossibility of Banach Tarski, and it has to do with equality.

In mathematics is is common to change the equality between sets (form quotient sets). For example, the set of real numbers are infinite sequences of rational numbers (fractions) which approximate the value. But the equality which we place on this set is not the equality of sequences, which is too strict. We put a new equality on these real numbers which identify two of them iff they come arbitrarily close to each other.

The axiom of choice (AC) says that if for a ∈ A there is b ∈ B satisfying some requirement, then there is a function A → B selecting these elements. The axiom of choice is only problematic if we require that choice function it produces respects some quotient equality we placed on A and B. The confusion arise because ZF Set Theory cannot express the weaker notion of a function which does not express the quotient equality. Other foundations, such as Martin-Löf Type Theory, can express this difference and you get AC without the paradoxes.
There is definitely a growing sentiment in the USA that cursive writing is an anachronism. My kids (who just finished elementary school) learned it, but its use is not enforced in other schoolwork. They and most of their friends just print when they have to write by hand. Most writing assignments are typed on a computer now.
I am not so sure. I was CIO for a small/mid company and ran it well, but slowly got fed up with the politics. So I went back to contracting, and loved it for a while, just me and the keyboard.

But I still have to do the same "CIO" stuff - negotiating the trade off between "right" and "right now", project and risk management etc etc. but this time it's for me alone, with far less positional authority, far less face time with decision makers and generally less support.

It's called being a professional I suppose. But I simply do not trust that contracting or consulting without working on a client funnel and focusing on a niche and so on is going to provide the richness of work I want.

So despite having thought I was going to be happy, it turns out I need to work on the business in some fashion so I can later on work in the business - without worrying so much about the future.

Tl;Dr - if you are a consultant and want to keep on being one without constant fear of empty schedules or just being a cog in a giant machine you have no control over, you need to work on your business. Automate as much as you can, but if you are not marketing yourself and building some funnel then you are accepting whatever comes along - if anything.

Edit: Oh, and when you are just a solo operation, competition is definitely something to worry about - you are almost a commodity, pitched about by shiny suited agents or vaguely remembered contacts in past contracts.

Edit2: hmmm, and this is me after two weeks holiday. Might need a long look at things Monday Morning.
I agree with all that. That's in fact all my company does. However blocking ads is a brute force approach that's causing more harm then good right now.