skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have read similar perspectives before[1], and I am not sure how I feel about them. On the one hand, much of the industrial pollution /is/ in response to consumer demand and reducing personal consumption has some impact on that. But on the other hand, it seems very clear that by and large the public will never change consumption patterns to be more environmentally friendly ( sometimes because they cannot financially, and often because they do not care ). So it seems systematic changes are necessary.

[1] https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/
How do people do that? I'm fairly new in the game, but right after Christmas I had to work 3 weeks, about 70 hours each in a row. I was _exhausted_ after that. By the end of the third week, my head was just spinning and I went on a low morale and creative drought for 3 months... I could barely code deserialisation functions without losing focus..

So basically, how do you do it and keep sane?!
Wish Upon a Sea Floor
My favorite (== most hated) example of this was some soy milk I saw at whole foods. In big letters on the front it said "NO ADDED SUGAR!". Flip the box around and the #2 ingredient was "dehydrated cane juice."

It's no surprise even the CEO of whole foods says most of the stuff they sell is crap. I used to shop at their original two stores in Austin before they decided to expand and they sold a very different class of product.
I bookmarked those posts a while ago in the hopes that I'll get a chance to rewrite VC's unordered_map in the future. We've taken the first step towards doing so by deprecating the non-Standard hash_map (which shares its guts with the Standard unordered_map) in 2015, so I can remove it outright at the beginning of the next development cycle. Then the unordered family can be changed without fear of breaking the hash family.
I bought the flying toasters screen saver, now owned by infinisys in Japan, a few years ago:

http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml

It's an appropriately bizarre way to get the best screen saver ever made going on your mac.
Aren't we already there, though? This is one of the reasons I left Silicon Valley three years ago. My personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work. Luckily, SV isn't as large a percentage of the tech industry as it likes to think. It's just over represented on tech news sites.
> Cute answer, but I, along with the entire non-toddler population, don't ingest toothpaste.

You do ingest toothpaste, albeit only small amounts. Much like you ingest mouthwash, you just try to keep it to a minimum.

> 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.

What else can I suggest? In a democratic society that is your choice. You can fight to change the law, or you can work around it.

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

Since humans developed agriculture and started consuming large amounts of carbohydrates, they have experienced tooth decay. Fluoride is necessary to prevent it.

> Oh and thanks for the down vote, but this isn't reddit.

This discussion is completely off-topic and your comments are unhelpful. A downvote is justifiable.
So, you have an application in niche that makes the software secondary,
with acquiring users being the hard part, and you wrote that application with
a stack that one needs very carefully select where to deploy (will it run
decently on cheap Linux VM? I doubt it), and now you expect people to give
a single line of code for you?
How hard can it be to write a slackhq client?
Never skip Aaronson's comments on his blog posts. They're often as good as the posts themselves. Here's a great example:

"Whenever I hear this style of argument, I’m reminded of Marcia Clark’s closing argument in the OJ Simpson trial: 'We have proved that OJ Simpson is a murderer. The defense has proved that Mark Fuhrman is a racist.'

"Likewise, in this case: 'We have proved that climate change is a grave threat to the survival of human civilization. You have proved that rich, do-gooder liberals can come off as annoying hypocrites.'

"Unfortunately, the human mind is wired in such a way that, just as 'Mark Fuhrman is a racist' actually worked to get OJ acquitted for murder, so 'Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio are smug elitists, flying around in their private jets' is considered by millions to be a strong argument for climate inaction."
Depends how good you are and how good you are at negotiating. I've heard of $120-130k being common for midlevel developers, although I was once offered $120k for a senior frontend position at SF from a YC startup.

I would not settle less than $150k if I was going for a senior position. Definitely not under $125k for a midlevel developer.
> with MSVC's built-in memory allocator

... which has been a trivial wrapper around HeapAlloc for a long time, and the HeapAlloc implementation varies by the Windows version. In particular, Vista+ versions are low-fragmentation heaps and W7+ versions have an outstanding multi-threaded performance.

In other words, deferring to a "MSVC's built-in memory allocator" doesn't make much sense.
In many companies, Product Managers act almost entirely towards their own self interests (launching innovative products, stamping their name on major initiatives, and generally one-upping each other along the way). Any leaders who push an agenda which would jeopardize their aspirations (like re-architecting cross-product infrastructure, addressing long standing technical issues, or improving customer experience) are quickly squashed by the cabal.

With the right top level executive strategy, Product Management can be leveraged for the greater good and keep the company's products fresh and exciting. However, when left to their own devices, they often shift focus towards their own self-interests to the detriment of their company's overall success.

Microsoft is often the most cited example, largely because of how the culture changed after Bill Gates stepped down from the CEO role.
Ask HN: Is anyone in Rhode Island?
I just moved back to RI from the west coast. I have only found a single JS meetup (once every other month) contrasting with nearby options almost daily. There seem to be no other programming meetups or tech companies here.

I am about to start looking for a job, just curious if anyone on here knows of any companies/hackathons/meetups etc in the state of RI.
It's not science and just because you know a little bit about computer science doesn't make you qualified to speak about water fluoridation. Several countries have banned water fluoridation for the very reason that after decades and decades there is no causal link between water fluoridation and tooth decay.
Unfortunately, Apple offers a very short menu of business models to the (iOS) app developer, most of which are absurd for the developer. The very sensible approach you suggest is called a "demo" or "free trial" version by Apple and explicitly forbidden. As you should know, clarky07, since I've learned quite a few interesting things about the life of an Apple dev from your much appreciated blog posts.
Oh, I was thinking of the earlier one. I suppose it's often conflated with Zune, because of the spectacular flop of the Zune devices/rebranding thing.
Public water fluoridation has well-understood health benefits (a reduction in cavities that cannot be achieved through brushing alone). It also has well-understood drawbacks (tooth mottling in high concentrations, toxicity in high concentrations).

Someone participating in this discussion would either know this from general knowledge, or could look it up.

People aren't that ignorant.
Archaeological news is always frustrating due to the lack of pictures. I would love to look through dozens of high res photos of this find, but I doubt I'll ever get the chance.
I see the where confusion is coming from. We do in fact deliver the food. I stated that in the above comment. It's also in our AngelList profile and I alluded to it in my first response ("let the good food come"). You don't seem stupid to me. But perhaps you are reading too quickly?

The image of people printing out emails and eating them is pretty amusing, though. :)
Author finished a Ivy League, Columbia University and write for Times but refuse to pay back loan that gave him all that?? I have no words for this person.

In economy nothing disappear. If he didn't payed next generation will. Increasing cost of education is mostly because some lousy liberal arts graduates choose to cheat their way.
I have a 40 year old TV, works fine (except for a Y2K bug), a little dim but good enough for what I use it for.

The point is that the codec is so widespread, used in so many places, there is zero chance it will ever not be supported.
It took me a while to understand why there was such a tricky character as semicolon in the first unit. On a Swedish keyboard, I think it's equivalent to typing the < key on a US keyboard (and the left shift key on a Swedish keyboard is tiny).

We have QWERTY though.
Three things seem true to me.

1) The debate around climate change is the worst piece of rhetorical garbage that has ever been foisted on mankind in the last couple of decades. Look at the terms in this essay, which is admittedly a more balanced judgment. We have environmentalists and anti-environmentalists. Who that breathes does not like breathing? Are there folks who wish to poison themselves? Please, spare me the "rich folks are out to destroy the planet on the backs of the poor" argument. Everybody is an environmentalist, at least when it comes to being a living human. Political groups which have no logical opponents do not add productively to the public discourse.

2) The more energy and freedom poor people have, the better we all are. Poor workers with cars can drive to find jobs. Poor people without water can use energy to extract water from deep in the ground, the air, or the ocean. Poor people with cheap energy can rebuild houses, move, go to school, live a better life. More freedom and cheaper power to as many poor people as possible.

3) Intelligent carbon-based creatures that exist in dry areas of the habitable zone of solar systems will evolve into their intelligence based on the backs of millions of years of built up hydrocarbons. These creatures will release this energy by burning -- this is as natural as a fish swimming in the ocean. Is such a release part of The Great Filter? Or is such a release part of the inevitable journey from the swamp to the sky? I don't think we have enough evidence to say one way or another. I am concerned by those who feel otherwise.

I think worst-case scenarios around climate change emphasize the need to productively develop all of mankind as quickly as possible. That probably means hundreds of new nuclear reactors being built. Worldwide. I see no effort anywhere for that to happen. Instead I see various proposals that always end up with expensive energy for poor people. This is only going to make the problem worse. We are going to take away the tools that poor people and nations need to grow capabilities to deal with things when they change. And while we're doing it, we're going to rob them and their children of a better future. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.
I think prioritizing and focusing on the right thing is one of the skills senior developers have. You don't normally have one isolated problem to solve. You have a problem and it branches out into multiple other problems. Over time you just learn to estimate the importance and the time you can spend on each problem to get things going. So you do have to have a deep understanding of the important part, but you cannot go into too much detail for every single sub-problem you have, otherwise the productivity will be very low.
Nobody force you to take loan.
"Sola dosis facit venenum". The dose makes the poison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

Water fluoridation is at safe levels. Other fluoridation is not. Completely agree.
His latest history as of now if full of slurs:
http://www.reddit.com/user/TempleOS_Terry_Davis
There's a risk/flaw/gap with that plan. Modern consumer electronics depend on humongous volume discounts- 10x or even 100x- on parts, plus tremendous economies of scale on design & assembly.

JIT small-batch assembly seems roughly analogous to other low-volume electronics, which are obscenely expensive. For example, specialty bench equipment like spectrometers can cost as much as a house.. There are many factors at play there, but you can bet one of them is very low volumes.

This is why, at least so far, the kind of play you describe is accomplished with large batches of a generalizable platform that can be sold into many different devices.
> Why does a degree have to be financially wise?

It doesn't, and I didn't suggest that it does.

> Do people become social workers for the money? Do teachers get into teaching for the money?

I don't know, but I suspect that most full-time social workers who are not independently wealthy do consider wages when deciding where to work. The trouble is that you seem to be implying a strict dichotomy between "doing it for the money" and "not doing it for the money." In reality, many people pursue careers that they enjoy to some extent, but they also require some level of compensation for survival and quality of life.
Similar to the agency problem except it's not a misalignment between managers and shareholders but between "operators" ie journalists and consumers.

The journalism suits the interest of the journalists and their managers and not the reader.
Really? I get the strong impression (what with people throwing the word bubble around and making regular comparisons to the dotcom era) that VC's are far less picky today then they were 10 years ago.
Skip to 8 Appendix A for the discussion about advertising, motives, and bias.
While true that hardware companies were also once start ups, they were also startups at a different time. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't they start ups when there were no existing hardware companies that operate at the same scale the current big hardware companies do?
Not sure yet. I'm exploring. It is a compile-to-js language and not just a framework though. So far, the static typing has been addictive. The time travel debugger is also intriguing. So far, I don't see any particular reason to not use it for big apps ... except maybe the compiled size, which you can expect to be minimum 100k compressed as a thumb rule.
Assume that I am. Sources, please.
That comic is right on. I remember being shocked when I met the lead engineer on Pringles. He was understandably quite proud of the engineering problems they'd solved.

I shouldn't have been shocked. He is a food engineer. Sounded like a joke title, but the supermarket shelves have more engineering in them as the shelves of Best Buy.

I threw in the towel and pretty much buy raw food, bread from bakeries that can't afford all the soy supplements etc. The manufactured stuff I guy (bread, butter etc) costs a lot more because the labor content of the food is higher. Luckily I can afford it.

I am morally unclear on the value of the engineered food. On one hand it's true, we have calories and vitamins, fibre etc in the hands of people who in an earlier age couldn't afford it. On the other hand the nutritional value available to poorer people is still lower than the wealthy.
Anti-trust on their whopping < 8% marketshare? You'd get laughed out of court.

All this because osx doesn't do a thing that apple never claimed osx did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
I think this is tasteless and unprofessional writing; anything that makes fun of other people's efforts and presentations of themselves just feels very... childish.

If this was an article on ideas for creating a better web portfolio, totally different beast; that's an article that could be worth something. Something that improves the readers perspective or abilities.

Pointing and laughing at people is not cool, writing it up as an article is even worse.
Clearly hardware start ups aren't impossible, but we are talking about relative difficulty. The article is only comparing them to software companies (Google, Yahoo, Paypal).

I also think its right to compare now with the 1980s when F500 companies didn't know how to compete in the new tech hardware space. Companies like Samsung rush into new product spaces very early in the adoption cycle.
Not only that, but software startups used to not be so cheap either. 15 years ago you need to raise millions just to buy servers. Granted that wasn't the case in the early days of software (Microsoft didn't need servers when they were a startup), but it's an interesting dynamic in the internet age.
It's a good question, and a difficult one for me to answer as I'm still trying to figure it out.

One possible defense against this is to regularly refresh talent, and encourage high performing individuals to swap between contributor and manager roles without any career penalties in between stints.

Even if it doesn't work out for a contributor to manage people or a manager to write code, the cross pollination of talent could strengthen the technical capabilities across the organization. Contributors and managers would build trust with each other, and ultimately empathize enough with each other to act as trusted partners.

I've seen this play out in the startup ecosystem as you see VPEs leave to become early stage startup CTOs, get their hands dirty to launch ideas, and then ultimately bring in trusted contributors once the products have found product-market fit.
Wikileaks crowdfund blowing the whistle on TPP
Interesting.

How can deeper integration between any language and tools then be compatible with rms's and/or GNU's and/or the FSF's ideology?

(Maybe the answer is, "Use Lisp since the syntax is the AST." I'm okay with that. :)
It's breathtaking to consider the amount of shelf-space that Pepsi products occupy. Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Doritos, Tostitos, Gatorade, Aquafina, Tropicana, Quaker Oats, not to mention Lipton, 7-Up, Mountain Dew and Naked. It's a planet with its own gravity and atmosphere.

It takes a special perspective to sell $66B worth of product while blaming consumers for their inability to discern healthy food.

On the plus side tho', their production requirements oftentimes bring state-of-the-art processing facilities to areas lacking in, or in desperate need of, clean water and filtration. Parts of India come to mind.
Great point about value. The true ceiling to your price is the perceived differential value of your offering.

So, if your client perceives that you will create $1M in value, you may be able to charge $300K for that. However, if the client perceives that someone else can deliver the same $1M for $100K, you can only charge $100K.

However, too many people get caught up in the $100K vs $300K, or, even worse, the $100/hr vs $300/hr, rather than the "here's why you get $1M in value instead of $200K in value."
Programming isn't computer science, so that can be misleading coming from that into programming/software engineering.

Also, programmers may write a blog article that represents a perfectly crafted solution and present it as the norm even though they really have to settle for hacks in their day job.

And people will often present themselves as being experts in a subject when in reality they just found out the technology existed two days ago. No one can be an expert on every new system or even most of them. The most relevant technology is often something new to learn.

Also, different jobs vary wildly in terms of schedule, how much time there is to experiment with solutions, how much actual factoring/testing/engineering is expected, etc. Most project phases or jobs in general fall short of the ideal in this regard.

Also, people may have just plain misrepresented to you what effective engineering actually is.

I think to be effective at solving tech problems you _have_ to guess and then see what happens and then adjust. That's what engineering is. Its based on the scientific method.

Physics is complex, especially information technology. And you can't develop everything from scratch. You have to take advantage of other people's work, guess how it will fit together best. But it is always a guess because the laws of physics make it impossible or impractical to figure out what the system is going to do without running it first. So you try out different ideas or designs and adjust. In a feedback loop.

As far as getting lines of code out the door, you want the fewest lines of code that are practical given time constraints on factoring. The ideal might be no lines of code sometimes when you can use an existing solution.

Anyway, yes, they are guessing, because of the laws of physics.
You don't, it's just that cuz EVERYONE is doing no one sees the insanity.
The Tao of Programming - "Thus spake the Master Programmer"
Advertisers have the money though, not common folk (wealth gap is only getting wider). The business model would be difficult to do but could be realized in the years to come.
10 commuter apps I wish someone would make
In my experience (Economics PhD) the term "command economy" is used to describe a theoretical extreme where the government dictates all consumption and production decisions, while "free market", unqualified, refers to the situation where the government only enforces property rights.

"Pure capitalism" would be a synonym for "free market" although it's rarely used academically, I guess because the term capitalism is a lot less descriptive that "free market".

Terms like "mixed economy" just refer to somewhere in between these two extremes.

As I said, economists are not particularly interested in giving things accurate names, or classifying them. They mighty do this occasionally, as is necessary especially when communicating with people outside the field, but the field itself relies mainly on mathematical models, not sociological categories. That is why I feel the need to correct someone who, speaking with an authoritative tone, claims to know that "free market" and "capitalism" have precise and different meanings.
You're Canadian, totally different.
Think Algorithms Equal Accuracy? Google “What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs”
Claris? (FileMaker)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris
The hardware companies you know today weren't founded in the 2000s. The golden age of hardware startups was the 70s/80s.
Apparently that's not true as their average tenure is only 1.1 years, at least according to

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-google-employees-ranked-...
The first one sounds like a very healthy attitude, or at least inoffensive. I’m not sure why you would think you would offend anyone with that?

That said, people actually working for Apple do seem to put in a lot of (and consequently inevitably) unhealthy and unproductive hours.
IBM perhaps? Of course most everybody pales in comparison to IBM when it comes to startup children.
I think someone killed this thread.

Admin could you please explain why?
This comment is spot on - I'd like to add that you have to be ready to potentially switch jobs if you are in this situation.

To add to this, I thought I would be at one company for years - I did interview around at one point to test the market, and found that I could easily make at least $50k more than I was. One day, I was all of the sudden fired for a mistake that was exposed from bad QA and bugfixing process. At that time, I had already started testing the waters again because I started to be dissatisfied with the processes and the lack of interest in fixing the fundamental problems.

The things I learned is to not get complacent and that employers truly are not loyal to their employees.
Indeed. As the cost of software startups has come down dramatically, hardware startups have become relatively more expensive.
Instaphotos – Instagram user feed using PHP and JQuery