skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah right, forgot about his Bane talk. For those who haven't seen it, also great: https://vimeo.com/95066828
Is Freelancing the Wave of the Future?
I was immediately put off when the author trotted out Sapir-Whorf; and, not even apologetically: in its strong form! Everything in the article became suspect. S-W is not correct, end of story.
That is a risk, which is why you need to block all signals using the sigprocmask syscall before unmapping your stack.
Mercurial is also an interface to a directed acyclic graph. If the graph is cyclic, Mercurial would also not be an appropriate tool to model it.
This research spawned CityEngine from ESRI http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine and there are also a few more awesome papers from the same author, Pascal Muller, ex ETH and now at ESRI.

- http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/CS285/PAPERS/Parish_Mul...

- http://www.fdg2013.org/program/workshops/papers/PCG2013/pcg2...

- http://peterwonka.net/Publications/pdfs/2014.SG.Lipp.PushPul...

- http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/faculty/vision/zeng/pdf/MullerZWG0...

See also Rome Reborn, a procedurally generated model of ancient Rome http://romereborn.frischerconsulting.com/
http://lifebyexperimentation.com/2013/08/learn-dvorak/#.VJRl...
I'm fascinated by the drift of teaching and its limited span. How in 20 years people will have forgotten about fringe or non mainstream ideas and will probably have them again thinking they're something new to dive into.
Thankfully you are being downvoted. Reading between the lines you are arguing that poor people are simply genetically stupid.

I counter that by saying that even though only a few can win a marathon most people with some training can finish it within a reasonable time.

Getting a doctor degree is the exact same thing. Sure, there are a few geniuses but you need not be one to become a medical doctor.

My point is that most people are intelligent enough. Hence most poverty is no because of the lack of it. Other issues are at play. Birth lottery is a strong one.
i have to say, i failed miserably the first few times due to always looking up what i needed to write:D
Maybe it was because of the random stuff you need to write instead of segments you can interpret,
it's actually a funny statement given the definition of a product manager... it's like saying the CEO has a lot of sway over company policy. well, yeah.
you had me at step 3...lol.
The startup world has pretty much destroyed future chances of making a living from an application. Sure, the top 10 apps in the apple store might be making good money, but most apps that charge $1.99 will most likely not pay a living wage to the people that created it.

The same thing happened to the music industry. The total amount of revenue has dropped 10 fold since 1999. I know a few independent artists and they can't really make a living on just music anymore. They need to sell t-shirts or have a day job. So in the end, free music and file sharing has decreased the overall cost of music, but it really only hurt the small and independent artists.

Even look at things like Spotify. 1,000,000 plays nets an artists something like $100.

It has forced many artists to go with large labels because the large labels will take all of the risk and actually pay them some sort of a living while they are touring.

Software is going the same way. With all of the open source out there (and more coming out every day), it has allowed companies to hire software mechanics for pennies instead of software engineers for a living wage. Why? Because all of the parts that need to be engineered are given out for free. Development now in most businesses is mashing frameworks and libraries together. It really doesn't take a computer science education to get the job done.

Business owners are also becoming more tech savvy as the older generation retires.

I've never seen so many smart communities of people put themselves out of a job so quickly.

To me, apps are just an interfaces to a paid service, not the actual service itself. So, I might have a service that you pay X amount of money to use and the app is something free that is thrown in as a benefit.
The author of this article fails to incorporate two relevant prior explorations of this topic: (1) from the Buddhist perspective and (2) from Wilfrid Sellars' work, in particular "Empiricism And The Philosophy Of Mind". The remarks below pertain to the first; the second is beyond my philosophy-fu to say anything meaningful.

Take the idea, "We see with our brains, not with our eyes" as a criticism of the "naive view" that sense data / fabrications are neutral, that they are just "out there", and it is only when they come into contact with the mind that the mind infuses the raw sense data with desire and aversion. The idea that we are just passive observers of phenomena.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu critiques this idea from the Buddhist perspective:

"040920 Disenchantment & Dispassion \ \ Thanissaro Bhikkhu \ \ Dhamma Talks" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8M-_Msav1Q

He says that on the contrary, desire and aversion are involved a priori in the formation of the fabrications (sense data).

So this is not a new idea. It is a very old idea. The idea that the technology of ML can confirm this particular critique of the naive view is novel (although I'm not convinced it is wise to draw conclusions about the mind in this way, just as I'm not convinced it is wise to draw conclusions about the way evolution operates based on artificial life simulations).
What's the average age of a Nobel Prize winner?
> considered to be the top developers

The important point here, considered by whom? My guess would be the management who in this case cares about "getting things done" without much consideration for technical debt, which usually ends up biting them back.

So, you've learned that this one company has different criteria for success than what was true in school, but there are many companies, with different cultures and different criteria. Don't get discouraged -- instead, actively seek good quality developers, go to meetups and other events, and even change companies if necessary.
Steve Jobs on Swift
Seems like these guys were more focused on buying rather than fork new businesses.
The kind that uses logic and reason instead of rhetorical appeals to emotion. The 'personal is the political' is part of the culture in california and is common throughout the state. And if you don't believe me, you should go on a job hunt and tell every interviewer who talks to you that you're a republican.

Now that I think about it, I want to do just that and document the results. Should be interesting.
Don't give up on oranges! There are many different varieties out there and you may not have found one you like yet. Also tangelos can be sweeter. While oranges are usually sold year round in grocery stores, they actually have a harvest season. In North America oranges are in season November through May. I use find the best oranges around December to February. Valencia oranges are best for juicing rather than eating and navel oranges are easiest to peel. A good orange is hard to beat!
You're accepting a number of premises there without questioning them, including corporatisation, labour/management/owner caste splits, and the fact that a silly science fiction movie is the best of all possible worlds.

I suspect none of those are a given.

>There will always be more people of merit than there will be jobs of merit.

Which explains why it's so hard to hire good people, I guess.
It depends a lot on management and culture.

One of the best developers we had at my first company was a guy who could literally "fix" almost anything. If the dam was leaking and the village was threatened he could come over and stick his fingers in the holes and save the village in no time.

But someone had to come by afterwords and fix the dam properly.

Was he awesome? No question! Were we all glad and grateful that he was part of the team? Yep, everybody loved him (well, he was an awesome guy as a person too). He saved projects in trouble, solved customer emergency bugs etc. But we had a bunch of developers who kept up with the literature, could conceptualize solutions to complex problems, work together to get crazy-hard problems done, and they were clearly the "top developers".

Some management only appreciates the short term, and for them the "copy and paste googled code" guys are the best.

BTW there's nothing wrong with looking up a solution in Google. But consider it like the kitchen: when I am making a dish I often look up several recipes or techniques, then use the tools and materials I have at hand to make a meal. The more understanding and experience you have, the more value you get out of looking things up (and the less often you end up doing it).
Nice. In 2005 the artist Allan McCollum made software to design 31 billion shapes, with the intention to have at least one shape per person for a long time.

Not usable the way identicons are, but the shapes are pleasing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shapes_Project
I'd be interested to know what percentage of ex-Apple startups eventually produce actual goods or services which people pay money for, vs. what percentage of ex-Google/Facebook/etc. startups are just buzzword-bingo crap piles that collapse within the year due to not actually having any product or service.
hey, you'll be surprised, but LiveJournal is still popular and widely used in Russia and other ex. soviet countries ;)
I posted a link to this in a comment earlier today [0] but after reading it over again I thought it might merit a standalone HN post. Berlin is probably most famous today for his short book "The Hedgehog and the Fox" but his essays are really spectacular examples of the form in my opinion - intellectually demanding but always concrete and straightforward; learned but not pretentious. He's arguing here that historical reasoning is basically a form of advanced common sense rather than something which can be founded on scientific principles; there's also a digression about "electronic brains" that might be of interest:

"Such a model or deductive schema is not much in evidence in normal historical writing; if only because the general propositions out of which it must be constructed, and which, if they existed, would require to be precisely formulated, turn out to be virtually impossible to specify. The general concepts that necessarily are employed by historians - notions like state or development or revolution or trend of opinion or economic decline or political power - enter into general propositions of far lesser range or dependability (or specifiability) than those that occur in even the least developed natural science worthy of its title. Such historical generalisations turn out too often to be tautological, or vague or inaccurate; 'All power tends to corrupt', 'Every revolution is followed by a reaction', 'Change in the economic structure leads to novel forms of music and painting', will yield, taken with some specified initial conditions, e.g. 'Cromwell had a great deal of power' or 'A revolution broke out in Russia in 1917' or 'The United States went through a period of radical industrialisation', scarcely any reliable historical or sociological deductions. What is lacking here is an interconnected tissue of generalisations which an electronic brain could mechanically apply to a situation mechanically specifiable as relevant. What occurs in historical thinking seems much more like the operation of commonsense, where we weave together various prima facie logically independent concepts and general propositions, and bring them to bear on a given situation as best we can. The capacity to do this successfully - the ability to 'weave together', 'bring to bear' various concepts - is a skill, an empirical knack (sometimes called judgement) which electronic brains cannot be given by their manufacturers."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674876
I would argue the object approach limits the universality of the PowerShell way as a general purpose computer interface because it binds it to the necessity of a particular flavor of object system (e.g. .Net) and mutable data which is venom to general purpose pipe and filter systems.

jq looks very interesting though note that it builds upon an underlying notion of text to serialize JSON.
Open Sourced Social Network Prototype
AngularjS/C#/Code First/Responsive Design. Looking for contributors.

https://github.com/deltadreams/SocialNetwork
Cool stuff! I'm wondering: are there other fun things people have done with Git repositories?
Things that come to mind are:

- Family trees, genealogy

- Electrical circuit schematics

- Storylines for books, movies, RPG

- Accounting, ledgers

- Jurisprudence

etc.
Must be the dry rot.
There's an interesting song based on the moral conflict faced by the three aliens in "The Gods Themselves", by Bob Kanefsky, and sung by Julia Ecklar: [1].

Kanefsky may be familiar to many HN readers for his song "Eternal Flame", about the superiority of Lisp to other languages, also sung by Julia Ecklar [2].

[1] http://www.last.fm/music/Julia+Ecklar/_/Meltdown+(Julia+Eckl...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54
True or False, the guys running Pixar were ex-disney cartoonists?

What does it matter if they were a division of lucasfilm when Steve Jobs became majority shareholder?
For some reason the only Apple-spawned startups that come to my mind are the ones that ultimately failed, like Be, Inc.
There are tools and data available at the Science of Science (Sci^2) site [1], part of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, funded by NSF.

I haven't looked closely in a couple years,
but my impression is NSF hopes such tools can help show the effects (and "ROI") of research grant money, connection with PI's and institutions, and their impact both on publication citation and economic impact (development of technology etc.).

Ideally this could also be used to measure growth in technical fields to determine whether more (or less) funding is required to answer bigger questions in basic science (which may not have economic incentives yet), methodologies, public policy, and education (will there be enough Ph.D's in the pipeline to meet demands for fields that will exist in ten years?).

Scientometrics [2] (the journal) has been around for nearly 40 years, and I assume people were thinking about such issues then. Sci^2 looks to me like a more "big data" approach to not only understanding this, but seeing if it is possible to "push" the frontiers
(but I admit I don't know anything that goes on at NSF or how their decision-making process works).

Another tool, Publish Or Perish [3], is aimed at individual academics to understand their (or another's) impact in terms of citation metrics that are used in the games for academic (and other) hiring purposes.

I stumbled on Sci^2 when trying to learn some new fields
(computer vision, hpc / parallel computing, network science, sensemaking)
and wanted to quickly find seminal papers (ie highly cited, or literature reviews)
to quickly get a broad overview. Not having the patience or time to read lots,
playing with interesting tools and trying to extract data from Google Scholar and the like was more attractive.

Being impatient, I wanted a way to process knowledge like data.
To measure something like growth of a field, it seems something like scientometrics with some natural language processing and ontology engineering is needed.

The Google paper seems to be more about an analysis of Google Scholar data and what can be gleaned there. Maybe an update of Google Scholar Metrics is coming? I am surprised no reference to scientometrics in the arXiv paper (maybe they aren't familiar with the literature?).

1. https://sci2.cns.iu.edu/user/index.php
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics_%28journal%29
3. http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
This. When I review resumes and see a portfolio, I check out the quality of code. One high quality piece speaks volumes in a positive manner, whereas lots of negatives speak volumes in the bad way.
customer discovery should probable come first. before you waste time building something talk to some people and see if they would pay for it. then, completely ignore everyone's advice and build it anyway. ;)
PMs who have no technical, design or marketing skills have used their free time time monopolize the time of executives with process loops in order to arbitrage credit and "responsibility".
Fair use can apply to commercial or for-profit enterprises. You'll find that commercial enterprises are often disadvantaged by some of the factors.

For example, the first factor (purpose and character; transformative nature of the work) is often less transformative in commercial settings. The fourth factor (the effect of the use upon the potential market) is also often more challenging for commercial enterprises to get past.

However, there are plenty of commercial enterprises that rely on fair use regularly. News media is a very common commercial product that relies on fair use.

Copyright and fair use law is pretty much the same for commercial and personal products. If you can make a compelling case to a judge around those four-factors, it can be fair use.

However, when taking clippings from SO and using them directly in a software, you're going to have very hard time making a fair use claim — wether it's for a personal or commercial project.
I am sure someone famous once said: it's not about knowing something, it's about knowing where and how to find.

Typical scenario.
- Product owner: can we compress images before upload?
(I have not done it before but after a quick analysis I know we can)
- Me: sure

Two hours later we had a new feature. I am not a top developer b/c I am not sure if my copy/pasted lego pieces have some serious security issue or will fail a test I did not see (I do read ALL comments and answers on SO to avoid obvious holes). But the problem was solved.

You judge.
Cute answer, but I, along with the entire non-toddler population, don't ingest toothpaste. HN's propensity for "don't like it? Just buy this gadget/start your own company/move to Somalia"-style rhetoric also makes an appearance.

I have no idea what you meant with the carbohydrate comment if you wouldn't mind explaining.

Oh and thanks for the down vote, but this isn't reddit.
But you do understand Steve Jobs != Apple. In the argument about whether or not Apple has produced startups you said Pixar was an example, but that is not true. It's an example of Steve Jobs being entrepreneurial.
My experience of economics as a social science is the opposite - that it does not relate specifically to mathematical models. For example, the distinction between a mixed economy and pure capitalism is very clear.
Amusingly enough, my straight (well, maybe a little bi) girlfriend enjoys wearing ties on occasion. But she looooves scarves so there's not terribly much
Of a jump there IMO
PMs of old were supposed to be the smartest or most experienced people in the room. Now, mostly due to microsofts export of thousands of poorly trained politically savvy, they are infecting other companies.
Oh are they? Your edification would be most appreciated in that case.
“advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased...”-Google (1998)
"That’s $14.17 a month. In other words, we could replace the entire advertising industry with a 10–20% bump on our internet subscription fees either on our cable or cell service bill. In fact, it wouldn’t even have to be this high, since we only have to replace the revenues received by publishers, and not all of the expenses of the existing ad industry, which could be entirely disbanded."

So..how will a tiny Wordpress site get their cut of this revenue? I thought net neutrality was supposed to de-couple content from the Internet provider (IE: it's just the highway). But this article seems to want to put them together again.

If there was some kind of revenue sharing, it would basically put all of the money into the hands of the top 10% and the rest would need to survive on scraps.

The unintended consequence would be making it more difficult for startups to survive and making big companies, even bigger.
I'm starting to realize that what I like about web development is creating visual experiences. Sadly, that job, at least around here, seems to be limited to web agencies with all the crazy deadlines and crazy hours that implies (I know because my last job was in an agency).

So, here I am, making admin panels and customizable charts. I have learned a lot though (ElasticSearch, Angular, etc), even if it's not fun stuff.
Irrelevant, but to entertain - they're considered too young to consume an alcoholic beverage.
Freemium could potentially work here with better calibration. I suspect some of the things that might be important for you users:

1) Unlimited usage or unlimited usage per month -> Managing credits is an annoying experience for when I just want to share an article: I'll have faster ways if the actual transaction is a hassle. Paying once and forgetting about it adds a lot of value. This could work with your original paid model or with a freemium model that includes an unlimited tier.

2) Better analytics to calibrate the use cases: How many articles were people using. Did you have a way to detect how many of the articles were actually being read? I suspect that 1/day might be a very high free tier if people are switching to a mindset of: is this worth being my 1 article a day? Or converting the cost of a paid article and asking "do I want to pay X for sharing this to my kindle?"

Other have made the point that a key aspect of freemium is viral growth. Do you have any social sharing features that people would want to use -> Could you share an article to Kindle and/or Facebook + Twitter? Could you get shares of your app in exchange for additional article shares to kindle?

If freemium was the right model it might end up at something like:

10 Initial Free shares
1 share/week free
3 shares/week free to device if also shared to a social network
A Paid credits/usage tier
A Paid Unlimited/time tier (monthly or weekly unlimited use pricing?)
And Possibly a paid outright unlimited tier.

You'd want to measure and track analytics on how you get users. Something like web bounce links through your own analytics package on the way to the app store.

Here you actually have an interesting tradeoff: You get less money per user which you hope to balance out by driving down CAC through large amounts of organic growth.

The purpose of freemium is seldom a try before you buy value proposition that makes sense for the company, it's the ability to generate viral growth even out of users who never spend money. If the app won't get substantial viral growth then freemium is almost always wrong.
An introduction into JSON.
... and destroy its propaganda value ? Have you forgotten the basics of Hinduphobia 101 ?

@adevine:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suhag-a-shukla-esq/how-the-nyt...
Of course the proponents of these other foundations claim that they are suitable for universal use. But sets came first, and is good enough for most purposes, and mathematicians in general are more concerned with mathematics than foundations. Actually the recent movement of "Homotopy Type Theory" is gaining some traction among non-logicians, giving easier formulations and proofs in category theory and topology.

Also in computer science type theory is becoming more usual, since all results are constructive (provides algorithms) and is in fact a programming language in it self.
Skype for Web opened up in US and UK… with plugins
Students from Harvard, MIT cycle cross-country hosting science workshops
Also JLG's Be Inc (BeOS)