skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had the iPhone failed it would have fit perfectly in that category. In an alternate universe nobody wanted a huge display with no physical keyboard.

When you introduce new products or services the market may or may not buy them, it's very difficult to predict beforehand. If your product is disruptive enough the market won't even exist, so you'll have to create it. If you fail it will be easy to blame it on "lack of product-market fit" but that will just be obvious. What else did fail? Why weren't these products able to create market demand?
Exactly. I have hired several devs who didn't finish college (or who hold a degree in something completely unrelated), but I do prefer candidates with the maturity college brings. I do think that maturity can come through other means (e.g., the military, or even travel/working), but some maturity level is required before stepping into this kind of work. Plus candidates need to remember that day after day more companies require degrees, so it only behooves them to get one now (better so via an affordable program).
Most of the discussion about fracking misses the forest for the trees.

Yes, there's a rather significant amount of groundwater contamination due to poorly operated and/or improperly abandoned wells.

However, the vast majority of the contamination has nothing to do with whether or not hydrofracturing was applied. It's far more frequently due to bad casing jobs, etc.

In other words, most of the contamination is due to sloppy work. It would happen regardless of whether it was a convention or unconventional well.

There are situations where fracking can directly lead to contamination. After all, you're deliberately creating permeability in an aquitard. However, these are not anywhere near as common as the cases where a bad casing job, etc can lead to groundwater contamination (every well).

In a nutshell, we're seeing an increase in groundwater contamination because of the spike in the number of wells drilled in the areas. It's not directly related to the completion method used in the well (e.g. fracking).

However, it doesn't help that there are highly variable state/local regulations and a huge number of sloppy operators.
Things have changed a lot since your experience, I think. For one, a different encoding called "JSPB" has become the de facto standard for doing Protocol Buffers in JavaScript, at least inside Google. JSPB is parseable with JSON.parse(), so it avoids the speed issues you experienced.

And looking forward, JavaScript parsing of protobuf binary format has gotten a lot faster, thanks in large part to newer JavaScript technologies like TypedArray. Ideally JSPB would be deprecated as a wire format in favor of fast JavaScript parsing of binary protobufs, but this would of course be contingent on the performance being acceptable.

Finally, JSON is becoming a first-class citizen in proto3, so protobuf vs. JSON will no longer be an either/or, it can be a both/and. https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#j...
Heh, yeah I would advise if you're the "find funding" type of serial entrepreneur to think long and hard about what you write there. It may come back to bite you.
Kauffman Startup Index 2015
Here in Sydney, Australia, the term "halvie" seems to be relatively common amongst those who discuss such things. It's not considered derogatory or offensive; at worst, slightly unsubtle or socially inept (like any labelling of a person by their race). Friends use the term lightly or playfully.

Australia is a predominantly-white country that is geographically closer to Asia than to any other white or Western countries. We have a long history of Chinese immigration.

Sydney, especially inner-city Sydney and the areas around the four major universities, have large proportions of predominantly-Asian international students, many of whom later settle here. White-Asian interracial dating is very common in Sydney. Especially at the universities amongst students in the Science, Engineering (including Computer Science, of course) and Business schools. And so, there are an increasing number of "halvies" being born...
> ...normal people, i.e. non-programmers who aren't free-software fanatics.

Those people are not replacing their PCs. They are buying mobile devices. PC sales have been in a multi-year decline, and sell at about one-fourth to one-third the rate of mobile devices.
If you're reaching out you must have some will to go on. I think a lot of people on this thread have given good advice. If you're in the Bay Area I would be happy to meet up for coffee and be a sounding board :) Email is in my profile info.
Alas, he won't.

To shed some light on this, one of the proponents of this bot also had "fun" by entering http://: in Skype the other day... that proponent was on a Mac, of course.
The thing I noticed many of these startups had in common: Awful names.
There are few best practices, and the ones we have aren't explicitly stated in one universally agreed upon place.

My advice to you is this:

1. Focus on learning Javascript firs and foremost. Kyle Simpson's "You Don't Know JS" series is amazing: https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

2. Best practices are hard to come by, they essentially are: Crockford's Javascript The Good Parts, The Mozilla JS docs, and some styleguides on Github. Also lint your code through JSLint or JSHint.

3. Don't worry about build tools like Brunch, Gulp, Grunt etc. unless your job forces you to use one. If you're building small sites and apps, you won't need one.

4. When it's time to use a Framework, pick one and stick to it until you know it quite well. Frameworks are very different from one another. Backbone, Angular and Meteor.js are all quite different, but in the end they all do one thing, serve a web app.
Another tip for OSX - the system notification center can put in "Do Not Disturb" mode, just like your phone. By default, OSX will do this automatically when mirroring to a TV or projector, and you can do it manually at any time by Option-clicking the Notification Center icon on the menubar.

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18740?locale=en_US
Not only they will, but I bet they will remain unaffected. Style and architecture of a mechanical watch will never be outmatched by its digital counterpart.

The mechanic of a watch is mind boggling. All those little pieces moving together in harmony. It's beauty.
You may be a bit too charitable to the ARC. This is not the first time that these kinds of questions have been raised about ARC disaster relief projects and gone unanswered.

>>$170 million providing shelter

>>the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.

I know their primary mission is not housing, but that is a large number for some tents and a vanishingly small number of houses. Where did the rest of the money go?
Why don't you just stop writing him? I mean, it looks like he's just not interested in chatting. Or did he do this to your client?
I'd definitely bump it up as far as I could. I'm pretty sure ol' trusty here maxes out at 8, so that's all it gets.
To paraphrase Michael Pollan: Write Javascript, not too much, mostly frameworkless.

I sympathize with trying to keep up with tools. I also sympathize with users who don't care about fancy interfaces nearly as much as they care about the information they're looking for. Load times and sluggish UI are killing the web relative to native mobile apps. We're offloading too much of the time-cost to users.

I won't make web apps any more. I use Javascript to add a little bit of ease to website functions, and I can do that with raw Javascript and if it gets complicated, jQuery.
I'm probably full of crap about this.

If you wrote "a = b/c" it would be silly to complain that this operation 'does nothing' whenever b == c happens to be true, so by analogy, it's not too farfetched to think it's useless to write code that does nothing when given a null object.

On the other hand, multiplication and division are standardized and familiar operations. Object semantics differ for each kind of object, and it may not make sense to allow null objects for everything, and if you need one, you can always implement it later.

So it really depends on what you think the tenets of OOP are, and that's not a cut-and-dry question.
OT: Somehow this "tell the school what your parents doing" reminds me of a professor. He told me, when he was young, he worked as a developer at Siemens and could come to work late. So he always brought his daughter to school. Soon there was much buzz in the neighborhood about him being an unemployed deadbeat.
Visual Studio Online Supports Cross-Platform Development
This Is What a Rocket Ship Looks Like in 2015
I picked a niche awhile back and basically ignore everything outside of that particular light cone. It turns out, this strategy is incredibly lucrative and as a bonus I dont have to worry about learning the tool of the week until it crosses that boundary.
I think this may be to maintain style conventions with JavaScript and previous versions of Google Cloud APIs which were all based in lowerCamelCase (not 100% sure though, don't quote me on this).

A benefit of this decision is that if you create JSON manually in JavaScript (ie. without a protobuf library) your JSON objects will match JavaScript conventions.
I judge design by how little thought I have to put into using it. I don't need to think through the process of using a hammer. Software tooling is a more complex process than hitting something, but the process never fundamentally changes.

The allure of using this is that it's faster, but there is a lot of text talking about itself and it really puts me off. It indicates to me that the author doesn't consider these factors, and possibly ignores others, too.

These tools should be concise, and I should be able to get started off a single README.md. Anything less wastes my time.
I'm typing on the highest end MBPr you can buy, but my first computer was a 286 with DOS and a handful of programs - this was just after Windows 95 came out, so it was quite shitty for the day. However, no computer has been quite as magical as that one. While I get paid good money to produce code every day, and I think it's damn good code, I don't feel nearly as productive as I did when I was learning to write QBasic and batch scripts for the first time.
Unfortunately the minigzip implementation used is using a very minimal codebase to implement the functionality, among these is a problem where it will read and decompress 1 byte per call to inflate(). A patch and pull request for this has been available since yesterday at least, and I merged this today.

In stock zlib this codepath is only used if you defined Z_SOLO, but in zlib-ng it is the default unless you run configure with --zlib-compat (or otherwise set the correct defines).

Please retest with the updated commit, or even better with --zlib-compat if you want to get close to an apples-to-apples comparison.

EDIT:
PS: This goes to show that minigzip can not really be used as a reliable benchmark, since actual applications linking to the library could be using it differently (for better or worse).
Glad to hear your experience has been positive! I do wonder though if perhaps your desires are a bit different than those of second+ generation Asian-Americans. Whereas you see yourself as Chinese, and thus happy to be introduced to American customs and be the "foreign friend", Asian-Americans would find it somewhat insulting to be considered less than American.
Just like someone under unix could always just use mono's xbuild to build a project using visual studio's .vsproj files. Course, people tend to get grumpy when you tell them that they have to jump through hoops to use your project, just like your suggestion...
Of course. They survived the quartz crisis, they will survive this.

Smart watches will eat some quartz watch market share and some mid-range mechanical, but the cogent smart watch criticism applies: that it doesn't provide enough of a functional delta over a phone. People who want mechanical watches want mechanical watches. Otherwise they'd already be wearing a more accurate, more functional and less fussy quartz watch.

As an aside, in an ironic development, a Belgian mechanical watch maker (Ressence) has produced the best design I have ever seen for a smart watch:

http://ressence.eu/collection/type-3/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGmnh0_UYAANb_j.jpg

Available for the bargain price of 20-40k...

If a smart watch maker ripped this design off, and made the bezel touch-rotatable... Well, I might change my tune a bit.
Help Iraq's geeks save their country
The worst part about the comments under any "JS" submission is the amount of time I have to spend to weed through all the "there are too many tools" comments.

Brunch is older than Grunt and Gulp, how is your comment in any way relevant? If this was a post about the advantages of Java over Go would you complain about the amount of time you have to spend investigating various language platforms?

The world is changing rapidly around us, whether we like it or not.
This is incredibly idiotic. They purposefully filled the airwaves with garbage packets, to collect bare milliwatts. And the "camera" took a B&W photo at tiny resolution and sent it nowhere.

They even used already existing (and not even the best) energy harvesting chip. The only innovative thing here is somehow getting this to get posted on HN
I don't know about you, but in the field of selecting new frameworks I tend to essentially just (mindless) follow celebrities. Some people call me a sheep, but so far, I've found following wycats (rails, emberjs) and his cronies around has paid off tremendously in terms of framework stability for frontend javascript.

On the other hand, the worst way to go about selecting a framework is, in my opinion, benchmark testing (or looking at some blogger's benchmark tests). Your framework might run a million hello world programs faster than mine as of last month, but you have no idea if the people working on the framework will even be around in the next 6 months when your MVP is actually complete. And if you wind up having to solo-support your own dead framework while concurrently trying to run a small business, good luck finding time to build new features, hiring qualified programmers, and not coming around to hate javascript.
Interesting question. I would say it really depends on company/location. HR doesn't always have time to look at a portfolio and the first thing they usually see/expect on your resume/CV is college. I'd like to see some statistics on this.
I'm going to stand corrected on this one. Time to learn some more stuff, it seems.
So you're saying infrastructure projects which definitively cannot benefit everywhere equally should never be funded by central taxation?
That's an excellent argument for making the negotiations public: if a country's representative is doing something that would embarrass it in front of its citizens, it needs a new representative or it needs to drop out of the negotiations.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant", and it sounds like this negotiation needs quite a bit of disinfection.
I haven't seen anything that matches what gulp can do to make both browserify and babel have working sourcemaps.
People say that it gets better. And sometimes it does. But usually it doesn't. The graph for the suicide rate monotonically increases with age. The older you are the more likely you are to kill yourself. In other words it tends to get worse.

You can take this as an argument to do it now and avoid the likely future suffering. But I interpret it differently: It means that if you are going to be one of the minority that gets better it's up to you to take action. Continuing down your current path is a recipe for suicide later if not now. To escape that you need to deviate from the standard. Do whatever it takes to break out of your rut. Even if it's scary as hell. Because any risks in making big changes are likely not to be worse than death.

That realization can be incredibly liberating.
Set theory is the heart of programming? I call BS. Can you provide a foundation for that statement?

And no, I'm not coming from "category theory is the heart of programming", either.
Now available: A catalog of OpenStack Apps
It takes a programmer to click on a "Ok" button now? I seem to recall the process on Windows being at least as involved.
Volunteers Sought for Software Complexity Study
One of jacquesm's central assertions is extremely broad: governments are inept at spending money. No qualifications. Brakenshire's contention is that there is clearly a broad spectrum of efficiencies (and offers an empirical example), which is a call for a more nuanced view of things. I think you may need to revisit your definition of ideological.
Yeah, my experience was similar in the countryside. But I don't consider being regarded as a curiosity as racism. They had no real preconceived notions as to how I would behave, and so our interactions were always cordial (though it helped that I was familiar with Japanese customs). I'd get invited to the local izakaya and we'd have a grand old time shooting the shit over sports, politics, etc. They'd want to know what I thought about pretty much everything (as would be expected when someone from an area you'd never seen before comes to town).
Part of education leading to a job requires you to actively seek education in a field that's hiring. The amount of young people I hear proclaiming how screwed they got by the system because they went to college and couldn't find a job (then you find out their major was art history) makes my head spin.

If you're going to school and majoring in something without a career path, don't whine there aren't businesses lining up at your door with 6-figure salaries just dying to hire you.
The human angle behind these stories transcends way beyond the business one.
Its uncanny how these two founders articulated about the pain in almost the same way as each other:

99Dresses - Nikki Durkin:

Many startup folk say that failure should be celebrated. “Fail fast, fail early, fail often!” they all chant, trying to put a positive spin on the most excruciating pain any founder could experience..Let me tell you — failure fucking sucks..I travelled to my parent’s place in the countryside of Australia, locked myself away in my room and cried for what seemed like an entire week.

Critica - Jason Huertas:

You’ll hear the phrase “Fail fast” or “It’s good to fail”. Which is true. You can’t learn without failing. But what they don’t tell you is just how utterly devastating failure actually is for an entrepreneur. To sacrifice your personal relationships, finances, and health to the dream, and to still come up short. How could this happen to me? It was a very frustrating and dark place to be in.

The case of 99Dresses was an eye opener. I would beg to differ with the general sentiment in the comment section here about how co-founders lacked sense of product market fit etc.

Nikki Durkin had oodles of determination, immense grit, was a YCombinator alumni, had great product-market fit, managed decent seed funding, had good traction which many startup can only aspire to in the initial days, a team who were behind her most of the time, still..

All things being equal (actually the case showed even if they are not) fate, right-time-right-place is a factor which nobody can control, and which has decisive play in the scheme of things.

I can only wish good luck to Nikki Durkin, and I’m 100% sure that she would come out with something amazing in future.
It can work, at least for some time. And that time will often be enough to get them past the immediate crisis.
There's a lot of validity to this, and it's quite wise advice, really.
As I mentioned in another comment, the minigzip used is very suboptimal due to reading and decompressing only 1 byte per inflate() call. Please retest with --zlib-compat or the fix that was merged today.
How many parents buy their kids expensive MacBooks because "they need a good computer for school" when the truth is they just bought them a $1300-$2500 Facebook machine.
Thank you for the gold kind stranger.
When asked about paper vs e- books, lots of people will comment about preferring the former because of the "smell" etc. But...nobody walks into a bookstore and buys one because it smells nice. The linked article says similar about watches: lots of obsession about preserving the elegant mechanical essence...which has practically nothing to do with the reason a watch is bought, that being to tell time. Sure, given a desire to buy a book, or a watch, one may opt for the embossed leather-bound edition printed with a movable-type press, or the 300-component hand-carved self-winding watch, but the driving point is to read The Hobbit, or tell when to leave work.

We went thru this with music and photography. Tape & vinyl gave way to CDs which gave way to MP3 & AAC & FLAC. Film gave way to terabyte hard drives & multi-gigabyte flash cards. Sure, there's an occasional nostalgic resurgence of vinyl and film, but those technologies are largely relegated to artisan use. I was at Kodak when the photo industry pivoted; it's little more than a brand and a mostly-sold patent portfolio now.

There's the old line that when a news headline asks a yes/no question, the answer is invariably "no". So...no, the Swiss watchmaker won't, on the whole, survive the digital age. The Movado on my desk and the Apple on my wrist cost about the same, but one's on my desk and the other is used every few minutes for a variety of purposes (from accurate-to-50ms-and-50m time to up-next calendar to notifications to backup telephone to exercise monitor to mapping to ...). Yeah, the mechanical version (even a mere quartz movement, akin to an old literal-pulp novel) appeals more to the base senses, but given which will actually get near-constant use, well, ask Kodak how their film business is holding up.
Yes and now enjoy methane concentrations 17x higher(I view that as the difference between being potable and not)...http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-for-natur...
“The ‘quartz crisis’ killed off so many Swiss watchmakers that by the end of the 1970s, the number of workers in the industry had shrunk to 30,000 from 90,000.”

Define “survive.” The article doesn’t state what to what extent the industry recovered, but surely not to pre-seventies levels.

[edit damn but that Ressence is dope]
“Have you read the source code?”
Great Summary of the Beacosystem
> there’s no better example of a life fully realised than the one of Hunter S. Thompson.

I wonder how much more he would have realized if he hadn't killed himself.
Add it to the terms of funding.

When you get a drug trial approved you're obligated to publish the findings no mater what happens. By analogy, investors could require a post mortem when they provide funding.
Don't forget French métis, e.g. in Canada:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Métis_people_(Canada)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Métis

FWIW, I learned the word in French speaking Africa.
I would love to have an e-Strap that coordinates with my $1000 mechanical Robert Weil watch.
If the e-strap came from Montblanc, Google, Apple, or pebble I would not mind. As long as it matched and gave me usable functionality. Also, when I sent it in to Robert Weil for service, they respected the e-Strap, even if it was from Montblanc.
Right, James Altucher, in his other writings on the subject, he specifically mentions those careers as the only reason to go to college.
Go and Java are two entirely different languages so I'm not sure what that comparison was about.

Furthermore, the age of the tool has nothing to do with the fact that there are literally 10 tools that do almost the same thing. But are syntactically and dependency different. It's a huge pain when someone new is hired or you leave for somewhere else. Too many cooks in the kitchen type of thing.
You mean the mechanic of a timepiece is mind boggling, right? ;)