skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you don't understand is that Bill Gates is from the future. I don't wanna talk about time travel shit. Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. It doesn't matter. The point is, Gates grew up in a dystopian world and traveled back in time to divert money from the assholes that created it towards charitable enterprises to fix the parts of humanity that were breaking down. Only time will tell if this strategy will work, but we have all the time in the world (and then some), thanks to time travel.
Yes, but this is the central advantage of distributed information: while your carrot-farmer buddy is a higher-bandwidth and possibly deeper source of carrot information than google is, that guy doesn't know so much about goat husbandry. Or fishing. Or roof construction, or car repair, etc.

So if carrot info is all you ever need, great -- but otherwise, you are going to need nearby buddies who are experts in many, many other things. In fact, you're going to need far more buddies than you can ever actually have, due to the limits of the number of social connections any of us can have (not to mention the limits that time itself imposes on the conversations we'd have to have in order to maintain those relationships even if we could keep them all straight in our heads).

Google's primary utility isn't in making you a perfect expert on anything in particular -- it's that it allows you to become sufficiently expert at anything at all in a really short period of time. Even an army of friends, with the most varied experience you can imagine, cannot come close to matching the breadth of expertise available via the net.
My company (Newisys, under Sanmina) helped with hardware refinements because they were having cooling/airflow problems. They then contracted with Compal to manufacture the servers and then us to do system assembly. Compal's QC was horrifically bad -- we had about a 10% failure rate of servers they sent us. I'm happy OpenCompute is starting to receive traction, but it's not because FB is awesome at hardware. They've gotten a ton of both raw engineering and also DFM assistance from the pros.
I partially agree. Much of MS' recent moves are admirable, but they're clearly revivals of sidetracked projects and desperation moves to stay relevant as desktop OS dominance alone is beginning to lose its grip.

I wouldn't be all that snide about them. However, I can't say I find their platforms particularly palatable in general.
Eh, people also benefit from water management. The alternative is pouring all that fresh water into the ocean.

You'd be paying for these guys to do it less efficiently, or paying more to the other guy who farms it in the Midwest or S. America because he doesn't have the competition.
It could be the trigger. Other things to look at is Greece, China's economy, Europe's quantitative easing.
Link to the original article that BBC gleaned from:

https://archive.is/BkuMM
Me, too !!
If you're talking about individual developers looking for work, and not an agency or team package deal, let me know.
Sounds like a very interesting class. Are there any lecture videos available or a way for those of us not at MIT to benefit?
I don't understand how Amazon can afford to maintain so many projects given their revenue is so low (https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN&annual). Someone care to explain?
> When people say "Oh, you are really good at this." The Chinese response would be "No, I'm not good at this at all!" But I would look like an idiot if I say this in the U.S. I knew it, but it really needs some mental power to correct it, because conversations happen so fast and sudden, you don't have time to think.

I find it amusing, as I live in Seattle, and the culture here is very much (at least with people I associate with) that if someone said "Wow, you know a lot about that!" you'd respond with "I know a little bit" or "I know a reasonable amount". It seems to be a weird cultural mash-up of the ideas of accepting the compliment and of denying the praise in the compliment.

> The first problem is lacking feedback. Nobody would correct you, if there is a difference, until you find it by yourself too late or in a nasty way.

As someone with a lot of immigrant friends and colleagues (the uni I went to had a lot of exchange students, and I now work as a contractor to a tech company with a lot of visa workers), any tips on sensitive ways to bring such things up?
I've been a WebStorm fanboy since I purchased a license during a sale two years ago. The biggest selling point for WebStorm for me is its smart searching abilities. "Find In Files" doesn't just do text search, it's also smart enough to allow you to include or exclude matches in strings and comments. It also has a great parser that understands the structure of your code well enough to do legitimate "Find References" searches with really good results in spite of Javascript's dynamicness.

Obviously Python is a very dynamic language as well, so PyCharm has most of the same strong points. I'd been using the Community edition for a while, but finally picked up a Commercial license a couple weeks ago. In this case, the feature that finally convinced me to pay for it was no-kidding Remote Debugging. Drop a .egg next to your deployed app and stick an extra import and connection call into your code, and then PyCharm's debugger (which is another great feature in and of itself) just flat-out works over SSH.

Ultimately, both these tools have saved me enough time and effort to pay for themselves repeatedly.
That's a non balanced argument. Lots of stuff that grows only in such a climate is way less resource intensive than other stuff being grown that could be moved. For example cattle are far more water intense than even almonds (which are water intensive) yet have no requirement to be in CA. Rice similarly. Plus diversity of food is not only healthy, but increases quality of life.
This is an old debate that has been resolved (at least back then) since what is called "the Treaty of Orlando" at OOPSLA 1987; here is a public paper written afterward:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Publications/Treaty-of-Orla...

Abstract:

> For the past few years, researchers have been debating the relative merits of object-oriented programming languages (OOPLs) with classes and inheritance as opposed to those with prototypes and delegation. It has become clear that the OOPL design space is not a dichotomy. Instead, we have identified two fundamental mechanisms, templates and empathy, and several different independent degrees of freedom for each. Templates create new objects in their own image, providing guarantees about the similarity of group members. Empathy allows an object to act as if it were some other object, providing sharing of state and behavior. Smalltalk, Actors, Lieberman''s delegation system, Self, and Hybrid each take differing stands on the forms of templates and empathy. Some varieties of template and empathy mechanisms are appropriate for building well-understood programs that must be extremely reliable; others are better suited for rapidly prototyping solutions to difficult problems. The differences between languages designed for each of these application domains can be recast as the differences between support for anticipated vs. unanticipated sharing. One can even ascribe the ascent of object-oriented programming to its strong support for extension instead of modification. However, many kinds of extension still remain difficult. The decomposition of an object-oriented language into template and empathy mechanisms and the degree of support for extension provided by the forms of these mechanisms provide a solid framework for studying language design.
Global collapse. We'll be reduced to different factions struggling to survive in the wastelands.
Agree completely. I understand the deeper issues and concepts being discussed - because I'm the kind of person that happily takes time out of my weekend to re-read Stallman essays from 2007. However, as a SaaS startup trying to communicate with non-geek end users about our AGPL-licensed FLOSS product, we have found the misunderstandings caused by the term "free" insurmountable.

Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.

Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.
The article itself was shallow. I found it interesting that the featured startup, Abra, is a company that relies on Bitcoin Blockchain technology yet the article makes no mention of Bitcoin or the Blockchain -- and neither does their site.
Can you short sell a company that doesn't have a public offering?
Not only that, but the US, Europe and Japan printed a lot of money that is floating in the system (quantitative easing). If interest rates rise, it will mop up a lot of that.
Followups since this was posted in November: http://www.bigmessowires.com/category/68katy/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...

I'd say its #5 honestly :p
God watches out for drunks, fools, and people who build multi-MHz logic circuits on solderless breadboards. :-P

From a signal-integrity perspective, he should not be able to get away with that.
> fools, and people who build multi-MHz logic circuits on solderless breadboards

I think you may have just repeated yourself there.
Absolutely. The problem, however, is that the experiment has been used in popular culture to make broader statements about other social settings.
I think bubble will not burst but it will start to deflate, when bunch of companies with 1B+ evaluation fail to give the investors huge promised returns. This will dry up seed funding and Series funding for startups. Investors will loose their money and series of layoffs at startups. This may impact the growth of big giants but nit sharply.
Lastly, Silicon valley crazy rental could be see decline too.
.."the Russians and the Chinese have all this information and as a result of that our spies are having to pull people out of the field because their lives are in danger."
If the Russians and Chinese didn't previously know their identities (allegedly via Snowden) by subsequently extracting thespies we are confirming who they were and thus the ability to identify their former networks.
Dammned if you, damned if you don't.
Borland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.
That's pretty weak - its not a process, its an idea of a process. Whatever. Applying this idea of a process often fails, obstructs senior engineers and does nothing to enable the rank and file as advertised.
>Apple Company

Huh? I thought they're Apple, Inc.
I guess it's not really any scarier than 80s-era wire wrap prototyping, at the end of the day. Still, my hat's off to him just because he had the guts to try it!

He should send it to an FCC/CE test lab as an April Fool's joke.
Your description of C#/.NET sounds like it might get me to take another look at C# in the future.

I learned Windows programming on-the-job using Delphi and then thought I should investigate a "more common" C++ environment (I already knew console-based C++). Learning that _Visual_ C++ had no similar RAD environment was really shocking. My resource editor isn't attached to an an automatic code generator? Say what?

After that experience with Visual C++, I'd assumed Microsoft did roughly the same thing with "Visual C#" and never gave it a more than cursory look. I also had the fear that this new .NET thing would be yet another technology they hype then deprecate. What's the official Windows GUI framework this month? Is it Win32 Or maybe MFC? Or was it WPF or WinForms or some new XAML thing? (Sorry, went off on a tangent there...)
There are a multitude of processes for getting feedback; Agile is a contender but by far not the best. Please don't be disingenuous - Agile processes are often strict and brittle - anything that doesn't fit into the Agile round hold can't be done, and the 'sprint' is the worst of the awkwardness.

Strawmen are different from examples; its lazy to call any explanation a strawman.
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but what's the point you're trying to make? I can't quite figure it out.
The title bugs me. I don't think this story describes a standard experience working for a tech giant.
my 2c on that list.
1): It's questionable whether or not Uber has a network effect that sustains it as a leader in any market. The taxi industry is catching up, and so is regulation, and I suspect that some markets will become very competitive. This is not a defendable monopoly.

2): Dropbox is under attack from free/cheaper equivalents but defending well. It is still the easiest to use and have an incumbency advantage, but has made a few too many missteps (photos) to be comfortable.

3): AirBnB is under attack from booking.com and the like, but is a pleasantly strong business for now.

4), 5) and 6) all are fashion (or nightclub) businesses where the crowds happen to be, and the more they try to monetise the more they upset the crowd. Crowds can leave at any time.

7) Square face competition from Apple Pay and the like for payments, and payments is where they make their money. Out of the USA payment systems are far more advanced.

8) Judgement day will come for Apple when they successively fail to launch things that have an edge on everyone else, and as with RIM the decline could be fast. For now they are well ahead but my own pick is that Huawei will become the giant to beat.

9) Google is fat and happy, but their core revenue base is advertising, and when crashes arrive advertising falls.

10) Microsoft is resurgent, and I believe on the early steps of a long term turnaround program. The switch to the cloud means we are less reliant on any particular OS but Microsoft Office is dominant for business.
Ask HN: Are there any angels investing in the marijuana industry?
Marijuana will be completely legal in my country(Canada)within 2 years, and it is already a multi-billion dollar industry. I would love to speak with anyone interested in investing capital in a marijuana production facility. I would like to capitalize on my programming skills by developing systems to automate production and increase quality by precisely monitoring and controlling growing conditions.
It's an anti-democratic currency.

Its proponents push it as a currency without a government to rule it, and that's fair, but it does have its economic assumptions baked into the code itself. And if it became widespread, there'd be no way for people to vote on making changes to those economic assumptions. They're baked into the code, and into the network.

Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? I'm not comfortable with that; the general arc of history has been to give people more power in the political and economic realms, and this is definitely a step back from that.
> It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.

Someone already did write that book, and that someone is RMS! If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend "Free Software, Free Society". And in the spirit of things, it of course available Freely: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

(Though I do have a hardcopy which I'd never part with.)
Agriculture uses about 20% or so.

But all those people need to eat, so it's not like you can pretend twenty million people don't add to the demand for agricultural products.

Besides, if population was steady urban use would be 5.5%.
I wasn't aware that it was an American weirdness, but phone carriers here can, and mostly do, charge us to tether our phone to another device [1]. There is at least one legal exception, where consumers whose data is transmitted via the 700 MHz frequency band can not be charged for tethering [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethering#United_States_of_Ame... ; It looks like the U.K. has similar tethering charges

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_sp...
Who's ballsy enough to message /u/SuddenlySnowden (https://www.reddit.com/user/SuddenlySnowden).
I didn't go through the whole thing in detail, so please correct me if I got anything wrong, but I think I understand enough of the structure.

There are some acute problems that could be solved in code, for example the use of str_replace() in download.php should be replaced by urldecode(), and you should be aware that the following couple of lines after that do exactly nothing to prevent access to arbitrary files on your server. I don't mean this in a rude way, but it looks like you still have a ton of reading to do on how webservers work until you can tackle any of these problems with confidence. So no, it's not remotely secure, and maybe something that focuses on security is not the best project to get started in the first place.

Besides the security aspects, the problem I see is that the script doesn't fulfill its own core promise: to regulate file access. You can just circumvent it by taking the filename sent as an argument to download.php and use that to access the thing in the files/ folder directly if indeed .htaccess isn't used (which would automatically apply to, say, any NginX server and which is indeed a scenario you explicitly advertise). If you want to prevent that, you have to either store the files in a place that isn't browser-addressable, or at least store them in a way so their names can't be guessed.

The problem with PHP is that it's deceptively easy to make something that looks like it works, but in reality doesn't. It's an environment that makes it very effortless to shoot yourself in the foot. Personally, I love working with it (as opposed to many other programmers), but it requires that you really know what you're doing. I don't want to discourage you from using it, but it's something you have to be aware of - and if you plan on doing only casual web development, I would highly recommend going with a framework instead.
If I could go back and remove one word from my post it would be the word "Haskell" because at the time I wrote it I suspected it would incite a reply like yours.
Recent trends in economics leads me to believe the accumulation of wealth and capital from gains in productivity and technology is amassing into huge piles of cash that want & need to invest in something, so now the question is what?

There are other more volatile economic "bubbles" out there to be concerned about.

If you're assuming starting a business based on delivering over priced telegrams or selling rolls of quarters at a 180% markup will lead you to your "exit" than okay be afraid of "the tech bubble".

Start a real business that makes sense, and the bubble is irrelevant.
Well, as I like to say: "because we can" is a awesome reason to do things!
I still wouldn't want to try to debug such a system, though.
Snowden's passphrase[0] advice is pretty bad - perhaps they came up with a list of phrases based on what they know of him and successfully cracked it.

> “The best advice here is to shift your thinking from passWORDs to passPHRASES,” Snowden recommended. “Think about a common phrase that works for you. It’s too long to brute force and also make them unlikely to be in the dictionary.”

(emphasis mine)

0. http://rt.com/usa/248401-snowden-oliver-password-protection-...
Mark Cuban made some interesting remarks http://blogmaverick.com/2015/03/04/why-this-tech-bubble-is-w...

"If stock in a company is worth what somebody will pay for it, what is the stock of a company worth when there is no place to sell it ?"
>If you GPLed your application, there's no licencing headaches.

There'd be way less special snowflake implementations of security protocols, login mechanisms and account systems if this wasn't the prevailing attitude in the open source community.
South America is the most sparsely populated continent except Australia and Antarctica. The Amazon and Patagonia regions host very little human population (thank goodness).

So South America would always show up as a few big coastal cities with vast emptiness inside, even with huge search penetration on Google's cool visualization. It really doesn't tell you much either way without raw data.
The Company currently expects that the impact of this business withdrawal on its corporate earnings will be immaterial.

I guess I don't know much about this company - is this line shocking because they are such a prominent player, or is this line more of a "We really didn't do much in this area thus nothing will really change"?
Yes but you would have to make that deal with the private investor(s).
Are people also not technically allowed to use a prepaid credit card registered in someone else's name? A parent could activate the card and then give it to the child.
I also don't quite understand why there's an apache htaccess file inside `files/`, when the readme says:

[...] without the need for a database or a .htaccess file.
Interesting points. Anyone know any counter-examples? Startups delivering real value which were wiped out regardless?
OP suggests Haskell's type system interferes with productivity. GPP disagrees.
It's getting really silly with these government sources speaking under the condition of anonymity. You would think journalists would have read, under the assumption that they lack the minimal intellect to see through the charade, some of the Snowden documents that clearly speak of using anonymous sources for more or less sophisticated psyop.
My point is that when you say that system X is superior because of unique feature Y, that "unique" feature should actually be unique.

Bitcoin is a system with rules just as much as any other financial system, so the point that was made about "not needing permission" is factually wrong.
Every time I've bought one of those cards, it has me go to a website to register/activate it (set a PIN, associate it with my email address+password, and most importantly, assign it an address and phone number) before it'll work.
Proliferation of SPVs. Retail will get in on it. Eventually will spread to non AAA deals. Private market bust.
Indeed: https://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-dl.slide
90 billion is low? Or are you talking about income? They can afford so many projects because they're making an enormous amount of money and shoveling it all back into these projects.
Annnnd Treason.
I managed to use J at work. Kicked the crap out of a 240 core spark process on one thread.
It really is an amazing technology, and people ignore it and lessons of the past at their peril.
Yet you seem to think that Russia and China would never try to do just this...huh?

The world isn't just this peaceful and happy place where only the USA is the big bad wolf.
> the reason for the "are you 13 years or older" checkbox question

I thought all the age-of-13 stuff, specifically, was because you can't legally enter yourself into a contract when you're younger than 13. Which is to say, you can't accept EULAs or Terms of Service (or you can, but they'll have no legal force.)