skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The non-fundamental shift about software is not that it's creating quality jobs at the cost of medium-quality jobs. It's also not that we are creating robots that will replace low-quality human workers. Because we still believe that as low-quality jobs go, higher-quality jobs will somehow appear. (you may not agree with this, even I am personally sceptical, but that's not the point I'm about to argue)

But to get to the higher-quality jobs, you generally need experience. Not many employers are willing to hire someone and put him in a responsible position based off their potential alone. It follows, then, that we need substantial number of entry level positions to, so to speak, open the door for future potent workers.

But those doors are closing at an alarming rate.

Consider law firms. Discovery work(going through past records to find cases of relevance, law clauses of relevance) that used to be the "first year" work, is almost exclusively done by software. It's cheaper and more accurate. We may still need more quality lawyers, but as we remove the uses for inexperienced lawyers, we are decreasing the number of future experienced lawyers.

Translation used to be a very non-trivial work. Not just for heavy-publishing prose or fiction, but even for simple phrases, if the need was great enough, we would hire an entry level translator. Now we would generally use Google translate for a phrase or two because it was "good enough" at a marginal price.

The problem for prospect high-earning society isn't that software is eating jobs. As long as we are vain and greedy to aspire for higher quality, we will have those sophisticated jobs. The problem is that we are eating entry-level jobs, and in turn, creating an artificial scarce supply of "experienced" workers.

And those "experienced" workers, now that they have put their foot into the door, and with the huge demand for work to be done, will enjoy the job market(aren't we all, as developers?), but what of those that are left, for no fault of their own?
For a Free University Degree, Go to Germany (That's What I Did)
Seattle municipal broadband too risky and expensive for city to build alone
Source code: https://github.com/chinchang/picssel-art
Usually I downvote or ignore snarky comments on HN as the site tries to keep things on topic and somewhat constructive, but I have to admit I had a good laugh at this.
Regardless of the qualifications of the average ADP programmer, they spend what we in the business would refer to as "a cubic fuck-ton" on application security. I have no idea if they get it perfectly right, but when ADP makes an argument premised on security, I take it seriously.
Not All Engineering Is Equal
Thanks for your support Bryan!

Meld is certainly interesting; manufacturing is going to be a challenge for them with a lot of moving parts, but in any case, it may work for some soups/stews types of dishes, but it won't be compatible with most of Pantelligent recipes (asparagus, eggs, crepes, pancakes, bacon). And a Meld-style internal temperature probe alone would be significantly worse than Pantelligent for foods like steak and salmon; I know that at first glance it seems like internal temperature is the temperature to measure and optimize for, but you also have to control the external/surface temperature or else it's "unobservable" and will lead to either undercooked or overcooked meats! You can not simply do feedback around the internal temperature. (That's one of the key engineering insights of Pantelligent.)
> The article artificially divides people into two camps: people who understand and don't care, and people who care and don't understand

Yes, and that's unadulterated bullshit, which is why I said the first half of the article was eyeroll inducing.

> You say that as though there exists a unifying driving force behind technological change that could choose to change direction, rather than a million people all acting independently or in loose groups.

Actually nothing I said assumes that, because I don't. However, tech does have change in aggregate and each of the people involve bring whatever push they have to that soup. Which is why it's important for people who care about things, say, more important than money, to be involved in the field.

> If you want to see technology used as a force for "leveling the playing field", start a company or a charitable organization to do exactly that. Or, failing that, pitch a convincing vision and to a lot of people who have such organizations. Or join one of the many organizations already working on that.

No shit.
Every blockbuster movie released ever: "This movie made X millions of dollars!" Ticket prices keep going up, so...
The chart on the first page of his link is "Job openings rate" which graphs the number of job opening by percentage of the population per year. How is that not per capita?
"I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip."

The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.
Yes - just to clarify, my intent was to merely hypothesize at the idea that perhaps people ought to proceed with caution whenever some sort of behavior is categorized/stereotyped as "Indian", since in the case of India, even a minority is a very significant number of people.
In the previous post I started with in theory.

One thing I've found is that what would help tremendously with large production projects results from epiphenomena in code, and is sometimes not what is sexy from a language design standpoint.

I am part of a team that develops a very large .NET (with C#) product with hundreds of projects in the solution. So far the primary use of tests is to be maintained. They caught a few bugs, true, but nothing that our QAs were not going to see anyway.

I was a fly on the wall when Extreme Programming was being formulated in Smalltalk. (Not part of the Chrysler C3 project, but I was working for a Smalltalk vendor and heard about what was going on.) Test Driven Development, or at least good Unit Test coverage, is essential for an agile style project in a language like Smalltalk. I'm not so sure unit tests are as essential for languages like C#. TDD does produce more testable code, but it has considerable "cultural overhead."

Two important questions to ask are: What aids refactoring? What stops refactoring? The answers to these questions are also different for large codebases as opposed to small ones. I have noticed that Swift's enums are tremendously useful in this regard, but they are not "sexy" so this doesn't get discussed very much.
Heh, apparently it's going away. Again.

https://github.com/laravel/framework/pull/9161
> The startup violated the T&C of ADP

Here's a fun question... Did Zenefits ever agree to the TOS?
iOS 9: iPhone will now track sexual activity
I'm unavailable for anything non-trivial, but let's connect anyway? You can shoot me an email - just reverse this address moc.gnukemllac@nairb. Happy to provide this kind of feedback whenever and give more detail about why I'm concerned about the social dynamic.
> I'm not sure how we really get to the point where technology is a force used for leveling the playing field and not a force used for exacerbating it.

Technology is like a stick. You could use it to sow seeds into the ground, or to beat people up with it. Its purpose is entirely infused into it by its user. The nature of the stick is irrelevant, it's the wielder that really matters.
I absolutely think technologists should try and change the world.

I just think far too many of us aren't doing it. We're focused on things like... growth curves.

You sure we haven't already started to roll over and do whatever the politicians and bankers want?
That is just the analysis I think about doing every time I play Chutes and Ladders with my daughter. I think "I should just simulate this game, it would be much more fun."
Microservices-infrastructure 0.3 is released
Comparing the US with other countries is useless. America subsidizes medical care for the entire world. (Specifically research, by paying higher prices for new treatments.)

There might be some efficiency to achieve in the US by single payer, maybe, but cost for the government will still go up. The only way they could do it is by raising taxes. People would save some money by not having to pay insurance (i.e. employers could increases wages by the amount send to insurance). Some people will win, some will lose.

But it's never going to happen, raising taxes will never happy, increasing spending will never happen, and Americans prefer to handle that kind of thing themself.

Also, reducing medical expenses means firing people, which is another no-no.
This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill):

kill -STOP 1234
kill -CONT 1234

killall -STOP -c "Pandora"
killall -CONT -c "Pandora"

A more nuanced control is to throttle down the CPU, via cputhrottle[1].

If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to work smoothly.

It's easy to call:

sudo cputhrottle PID cpuUsage%

ex.

sudo cputhrottle 12345 400

1. http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html
> “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” [...] It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.

I think this encapsulated most of it, followed by:

> In each arena, he writes, technologists ignore “the unavoidable role of social forces.”

Yes. In my early-career, I think I had bought into this foggy notion that somehow everything could be solved if you just made a clever-enough technological solution that somehow realigned people's incentives and desires.

After working in a large company for a while, I've gradually come to believe that a lot of sub-par technology exists because nobody faced the social/organizational problems first.
8 file based backup solutions for Linux
I love this!!! The pause button was incredibly useful when trying to figure out what went wrong with DOS boot sequence. I wonder if it would be possible to include support for it in Linux kernel? Sometimes I would like to read those messages that fly over the screen (no, dmesg is not enough)...
Developing for Android: Introduction
sounds like capitalism is broken.
Blog post announcement: https://lassekarstensen.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/introducing...
I don't think you can learn what excites you in an overt process whereby you research a broad range of topics and then pursue whichever one entertains you the most at the end of some period.

You should already be reading things that interest you, and you probably have a few topics that routinely intrigue you, right? Learning about what interests you, and then working on related projects, is an organic process.

As Peter Thiel says, you should think critically about why you're doing the things you do, and be careful not to fall into the trap of prioritizing style (appearance, status, prestige, novelty) over substance.
Do you have some data on this?

Also, this is a perspective I've not considered or heard of before. Thanks for that.
For those that are curious about this, sudioStudio64 is talking about "Project Westminster", which is one of the four "Universal Windows Platform bridges". The other three let you essentially port Android, iOS and Win32 apps to the new UWP platform and app store.

https://dev.windows.com/en-us/uwp-bridges
> They capture your calls to actual real-world interaction and turn them into a list of operations that can later be queried and verified

The author's point is to avoid interleaving logic and side-effects (as much as possible) in the first place. Yes, we can use dependency injection to send mocks deep into the bowels of our application where they get called. Alternatively, we can have the bowels of our application return values, describing what to call, back up to the top of our application. These are exactly dual.

The nice thing about the latter is that every action gets reified into a concrete value, on which we can perform any kind of computation we like. Dependency injection can't do that, since a method call is not a value (it can return a value, but it isn't itself a first-class value).

Mocks allow us to inspect which calls have been made, etc. but mocks are for testing. We can't use those interfaces in our real code. If we use a list-of-actions we can, for example, run optimisation passes before execution.

> they do all that without requiring you to create a new DSL for capturing and describing effects.

Mocks do require a new DSL for capturing and describing effects; it's normally called a "public interface", but it is a DSL (an algebra) for describing effects.
+1 stb_image.h it uses a good interface for an image loading library, something nobody seems capable of even in the "good ol' days"... just a shame it doesn't support more of PNG (16-bit channels would be nice, and support for bigger images too)

using libpng, libjpeg etc. however is a massive pain with lots of work required even if you just want to do what everyone does pretty much and load a file into RGBA buffer and get back the width and height. :)
Wooow, thanks a lot! I'm going to test it now.

Edit: Not working as expected :(

Run python script that allocated a couple of gigabytes of RAM effectively causing my machine to freeze. And OOM killer figured out the best thing it can do is this:

[2889118.406439] Out of memory: Kill process 11878 (SpotifyHelper) score 302 or sacrifice child
[2889118.406442] Killed process 11878 (SpotifyHelper)
An experiment in gratitude
I don’t know about you but most of my software projects would have been impossible without heavy reliance on open source software.

Over the years, every time I npm/brew/cpan installed a package, I also wished I could somehow thank its author/s. The had just saved me days/weeks/months of work. Of course, I never got around to it.

With the launch of my last project, I decided it was time for change.

I tracked down the authors of the packages that were critical to the project, sent them a nice thank you email and snail mailed them a box of craft chocolate as a token of my gratitude and appreciation.

The response has been so great that I am inspired to carry on.

So, I plan to send a box of chocolate to ~100 open source authors over the next year. Roughly 2 authors / week.

I want a low key, yet tangible gift so I have chosen a “year of chocolate” boxes from Askinosie Chocolate [http://bit.ly/1HpQGrH]. Chocolate is informal and easy to share with others. The folks at Askinosie are awesome in their own unique way. They share their profits back with the cocoa farmers and I figured their award winning craft chocolate would be a hit with most people.

I am aiming for lone/small team authors (eg petka / bluebirdjs) vs the more established projects that are already well recognized (eg react, backbone,… as awesome as they are).

Has there been a library that was critical to your project and you’d like to thank its author(s)? Feel free to suggest ideas. I will post my progress on HN every few weeks.
>For C, I'd say the biggest benefit is that you can absorb a clearer picture of how parts of your project are using other parts, because your .c files have to directly include the headers they use.

It may just be that this is the specific way in which my mind works, but I find it easier to get a clearer picture of the file if I just read the .h. It would have a summary (in terms of comments and code, like function declarations) and a list of includes.

>it is often very useful if you can immediately see a short list of .c files that could possibly access the interface exposed by a particular header file.

If you wanted to see which files use the interface in that header file directly, you can scan your headers for ones that include it explicitly, instead of working backward from the header. And a similar thing with the autocomplete problem: only load the header files mentioned in thing.h (assuming you're editing thing.c).

The increased compilation time is a good argument. I don't know any good way to mitigate it, but all these three problems sound like engineering problems to me, rather than a problem intrinsic to this approach.
The ultimate winners here would be the software employees in my opinion. The money flows from investors/public to the geeks. Dont know how the economy is going to work out with that though.
Migrate MongoDB database hosted on Meteor.com to another host
Racing drones through a forest is the sport of the future
Also, the people who make the decisions are experienced and so don't directly profit from changing anything.
Founder Jack Ma Lays Out Alibaba’s US Strategy
This article is written in such a pompous style that I can't immediately tell if it isn't tied to some form of public relations press release.

The shortage of software developers is well-documented and increasingly discussed.

It's certainly discussed, though its ostensible documentation is a subject of dispute [1]. The role of poor hiring practices is also often omitted.

Far more than just a fad or buzzword, references to analytical and data-oriented skills appeared in 4 million postings over the last year – and data analysis is one of the most demanded skills by U.S. employers, according to Burning Glass data.

That it is commonly cited as a term doesn't necessarily contradict that it's a buzzword.

The aforementioned in-demand skills areas represent more of a structural shift than an issue du jour or passing trend. It is precisely the rapid, near daily change in software- and technology-related skills needs that necessitates new approaches to human capital development. While traditional long-term programs such as college degrees remain meaningful, new software platforms, languages, apps and tools rise annually.

This is the classic equivocation of tools and techniques in action. New platforms and tools indeed do arise annually, but our techniques have remained in stasis, and are only being painfully reinvented in a rat race. See David A. Wheeler's essay "The Most Important Software Innovations" [2], and perhaps mentally add in CRDTs, I suppose.

Who in the mainstream a few years ago had heard of Hadoop or Ruby?

Many.

Finally, it's curious to note given the assertion of software eating the job market or world, that many of the examples listed are media companies or companies whose business models are augmented by software (often via data entry, really), rather than engulfed by it. Fintech's an exception. But I didn't find any examples of technical infrastructure or CS and software research.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...

[2] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html
You might want to look at the lectures given in the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium. They are available in the Stanford Channel on YouTube and through the Colloquium Web Site, http://ee380.stanford.edu. While at only 30 lectures/year the Colloquium cannot be comprehensive, it does try to touch on technologies which will be important in the (near) future.
From reading over the blog post, it seems hitch is a forked and patched version of stud. Nice and all but difficult to see what possible advantages it could have over using haproxy for termination?

From skimming the github page the only thing that stands out is shared memory-based SSL contexts and UDP peer communication across processes/machines. Not sure, though, if this is something haproxy can also do? Never had a need for that level of performance so have never looked.
Ahhh. Thanks! Very cool of you to drop the link!
Well, the author's example is actually an applicative.

Monads are only needed when the output of one action determines the next action to take. If you already have a list of which actions you're going to take, you don't need a monad.
JS is overwhelmingly edited in text editors, see Sublime, Coda, VIM, Emacs. Comparing to C# in this regard is not a good one. I find code completions / intelligence for JavaScript is very basic compared to something like C#.
Gah. I thought this was a library to do Automation in Windows using Javascript. That would have been a dream compared to what the Windows ecosystem currently has.

Autohotkey et.al are impressive in terms of functionality, but holy hell is the syntax and structure awful.
They're dependent on the Windows Runtime API's from Windows 8.1 or 10.

You can't use WinJS with Windows 7.
Now open source the data. :)
haha is this really happened ?
Absolutely, but isn't it interesting how giving the entire world sticks doesn't always lead to equality?

First off, we aren't equally giving everyone in the world sticks. And second off, I think I agree with the point that even if we did, those sticks would likely end up being used to accentuate divides, not smooth them.

Believe me, I'm not saying we should go backwards. I'm just saying real effects come from our work and it makes sense to concern ourselves with them.
"You never have the right to withhold knowledge."

Of course he has the right to withhold knowledge. He's a free individual, not the property of his employer.

But I agree with everything else you said - knowledge makes you more valuable to your employer, so it's usually in your best interests to share it. And if you think you can get a better deal elsewhere, by all means look for another job.
I think we need this to happen. We need McDonald's to move to an entirely robotic store. We need every store to mechanize every thing they possibly can.

That way we can increase our efficiency as a country by multitudes and get on with the nasty part of Universal Base Income.

It has to happen. And for America, as a competitive nation, the sooner the better.
Still, if you have brains, it is much easier and less risky to make a decent living by becoming a doctor, or a lawyer.
Installed it, will give it a try. And I appreciate the '3 goals try for free' mode for now.

Exporting the data seems to generate somewhat readable json. Nice and simple.

1) Can I import that again, somehow?

2) Will you try to make sure that this json import/export format will be understood in versions 4 month from now?
Universal Basic Income is the best post-labor system I've read of.

Everything is still based on the same capitalism we have now, and the ~20% of people who work will still be able to make income (meaning there will still be incentive for enterprise).
You know what? I see what you mean. I just found that...it's using a windows store app as a test harness.

They should also publish a sample website demo project for the rest of the planet that isn't using 8.1.
Advantages are that it is faster, and that it is a small and simple program that does a single thing well.
Interestingly this was the first thing that came to my mind when reading the headline ... Great minds think alike, as they say :D
Gives you options. If you have an existing web app, you can likely reuse the bulk of it to quickly get a Windows app.
What happens when brain implants get hacked
I read a story about a guy who changed his password into his next goal. Every day he had to type it and was reminded by his goal.

This button might also be a great goal reminder...

Edit: https://medium.com/@manicho/how-a-password-changed-my-life-7...
The net production capacity of humanity (per capita and absolute) is constantly increasing. Why would you ever run out of consumers? Just because fields occasionally become irrelevant doesn't mean that those workers and their descendents will never find work ever again.
Sexting, exes, and the Google Photos conundrum
Every thing Python
There's also Mellow, which seems to be further along than most of the other noted options: https://cookmellow.com ($400 first pre-order run)
Free? Nothing is free.

Somebody is footing the bill, just not apparently the student.
What possible applications?
I don't see how you can possibly just do feedback on the external temperature. How could you possibly guess if the meat is cooked through just based on the surface temperature? You really can't unless you make some assumptions on initial temperature and thickness at minimum.