skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 3rd party logistics service can do the same thing. If my business is to connect customers with web developers, but one particular developer turns down nearly all the jobs I offer him, I'm going to stop wasting time sending him offers.

If I don't weed out people to make the connections as efficient as possible, I'm not doing very well at my job of handling the logistics.
Didn't these guys just close a $30 mil funding round (putting them at ~ $1.2b valuation now?)
It absolutely does happen at the scale I'm describing because part of my job is trying to place guys from India on L-1 visas :) I try to be ethical about it (i.e. only bringing the actual team leaders who are acting at least somewhat in a management capacity) but I see some of my less-ethical competitors abusing the L-1 process to an astonishing degree for grunt-level QA and development resources. Also, you only need to prove the "managerial capacity" thing when the visa is initially issued; they're usually good for a few years and they don't check up on what you're doing after the first time.

And I'm not questioning the work that CIS does; I'm just saying that it's very, very difficult to say someone is not working in a managerial capacity based on false documentation. There's no way they can tell false documentation from real documentation. But for L-1 visas there is no salary parity requirement, only a requirement that the company cover all expenses for the employee while they are in the US. So the IT body shops take advantage of this, and it leads to entire divisions of large companies being laid off and replaced by cheap labor.
A Personal Study in Diversity – Startups and Venture Capital
ECMAScript 6 is officially a standard
WebAssembly will be more readable than asm.js, so it is an improvement over the current state of things,

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#wil...

I do agree though that asm.js is less readable than handwritten JS. However, as others pointed out, when handwritten JS is minified, it also becomes quite unreadable.

Overall, I think WebAssembly will keep the web about as human-readable as it currently is.
Anyone who has hired contractors knows where the line is. The damning part is the drivers have Uber provided iPhones in their cars. You have to provide your own equipment to be a contractor.
The magnitude of the changes that are possible now are so far beyond what was available with selective breeding, it's nonsensical to consider them in the same league. I wish people would stop trotting out that argument.
How significant is the performance impact on a mid-large Ruby on Rails application?
You can't do it that easily.

If you just take total_spend/conversions the question that leads to is what spend do I measure over what timeframe and what conversions do I measure over what timeframe? For example, if I want to know cost-per-conversion for my Facebook traffic then which conversions should I consider in your equation above?
Harry Reid is due to retire from the Senate and whoever replaces him will not wield nearly as much power as he did when Senate leader. I think it will go into operation in 5-10 years.
Also reminiscent of the old Dutch East India Company -Citigroup sabal park campus in Tampa, Florida rents out floors from nearby Hyatt Place hotel for h1bs. There are roughly 5 h1bs per room.
Every language these days has its "stack" for development. Sure you could sit down with vim and javac and write a "simple app". But once you use Gradle/Maven to handle dependencies and build process. Once you use a nice unit testing framework... Why on earth would you not just fire it up and tune it for every project? Ruby, C# and every other language I've used has this "development stack" mentality, and now when I try out new languages, I research setting up the stack first!
That's a weird situation to be in. If they can't reproduce it now they may not be able to produce it at all effectively they've just said they lost your contract which for any self respecting HR department is an absolute failure in their duty. Imagine, if they don't have it, what could have possibly happened to it?

Of does 'unable to produce' translate to 'unwilling to produce'?
It seems reasonable to make it based upon the value they charged vs the value they provided on a per customer/month basis. If you did a calculation I bet it would come out a lot higher than $100 million. They have 72 million wireless customers. But I don't have the numbers infront of me (e.g. number who enrolled to unlimited data, for how long, how often it happened, how long this was happening, etc) to do the calculations myself.

Then multiply this difference in value provided by some number greater than 1.
>you should receive commensurate coverage from the safety net

It's going to be hard to make that stick when the entire business model of these companies is based on avoiding as much personal, social, and corporate responsibility as possible.

The real question is political - should we consider this kind of entrepreneurial activity a good thing, when its effects are so uniformly negative for most of the population?

And that's an old question - who should benefit the most from the social value created by work, and why?

At the moment the game is rigged to reward those who are motivated primarily by greed and self-importance. I'd suggest that's not just an unintelligent way to do these things, it's also a really expensive way - because the value of the missed opportunities created by lost economic activity and lack of broad spectrum prosperity is almost unimaginably huge.
Tips for building your company’s brand ambassador program from scratch
> It should be pretty obvious it's a joke.

Uber has delivered kittens before, so we need a bit of a Poe's Law for startup concepts.

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a startup idea in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."
[edit: additional context: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#wil...]

I think this argument is sort of a nostalgic one, especially with the advent of mobile apps. Mobile apps, their quality and responsiveness, are the standard on which software is judged. For the web to be a positive, competitive, open platform going forward, it's extremely important that user experiences (as in end user, not software developer js user) are the priority. As Brendan points out, parsing to turn something that's actually bytecode into bytecode becomes a hotspot, so this is a way of removing that hotspot. ASM.js has enabled webgl and canvas to have the ability to compete with native experiences... so progressing this out seems like the best way for the web to get better.
>In the latter case you will probably be forced to cough up the decryption keys.

Not if you make the users password the key.
A good friend of mine once said: If you have to criticize something, start by saying something positive. Then say what you want to say, without hurting someone.

I don't know what you are commenting on, but I could imagine you're getting down-voted because things you say are basically right, but maybe hurting peoples feelings about what they programmed/created/crafted in hours and days and maybe even weeks or months of their lives.

my 2cents.
Why the downvotes? I am genuinely curious also, but there is next to nothing in terms of details (uses cases and such) on their site!
"Kittens-as-a-service. Now with 9x availability"
The Enduring Appeal of a Meal in a Pill
AirBnB raising $1B at $24B valuation
Yeah, too bad the taxi business is rife with semi-legal business tactics (or outright illegal ones like slashing a competitor's tires). Local cab companies have gotten away with it for years because the scale is small enough at the local level that no single company stands out, but Uber is perpetrating these schemes on a national level. I expect them to get smacked down at some point.
Reading, watching and in depth analysis might be necessary conditions for true greatness but they do not constitute the biggest part of improvement/greatness.

The biggest part is the ability to move a large part of the necessary skillset to your unconscious mind. As a joke Capablanca said "I only see one move ahead, but it is always the best one", this is how every strong chess player thinks, they can instantly evaluate the position. It is just like once you have learned to drive well, you would recognize a potentially dangerous situation(a child playing with a ball on a sidewalk) without actually thinking about it consciously.

I believe this is how the best programmers work too, they have an immediate grasp of possible techniques they can apply without necessarily thinking about them or looking them up in google.

You become great at your craft when you internalize/obtain unconscious mastery of a large number of techniques in your craft. You become truly great when you can combine these techniques in novel ways.

I will mostly speak about chess, because I am an average programmer and average mathematician but am a pretty good chess player near IM strength FM (2350) and have spoken to various strong chess players (up to 2700) on this subject.

There have been players who have become very strong with very little reading (GM Flohr is a famous example from 1930s) but with a lot of playing, however I am not aware of anyone who become good without practice.

So let's start with a simple example. You must absolutely learn how the pieces move, this would be equivalent to what loops and conditionals are in a programming language. If you have to think how the horsie jumps when playing, you are not going to get very far.

A more complicated example, it is very useful to be aware of the standard h7/h2 sacrifice. As you get stronger, you develop a better sense on when this sacrifice will be strong and when it will be likely fail, even before starting to calculate consciously.

How do you obtain this knowledge, the best way is iterative by playing and applying in practice what you learned.
I think the service itself is a great idea! I especially like that doing it this way doesn't screw up the design of the page so any article is unreadable, which sometimes happens with some ad-blockers. Unfortunately the 'enter your email address; no wait, also give us a username/password crap' flow felt like a bait-and-switch sort of thing and I almost stopped right there.

Maybe prompt for a username when a user starts making groups of ads? Curating a bunch of pictures doesn't sound like fun to me (I'm sure that's just me though), so I'll probably never do it, so setting a username for that seems like extra friction.

Big Plans are nice, but optimize for little plans so they can take hold first.
I know many people who would not only subscribe to this service but actually attempt to create it, or even drive for it. So I did not for a minute think it was a joke... But I'm glad it is.
Or it's a prime reason to use keywords, a functionality built into modern browsers, such that I only need to type "sd" to search Science Daily.

http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
#RobotLaunch has great prizes for startups, but you can’t win if you don’t enter
I have always found it interesting that helium leaves the planet when it escapes into the atmosphere. Something cool about letting some out of a balloon on the ground and knowing you have just launched something into space, to rise up and then get picked up by the solar wind and sent flying.

Romantic notions aside though, it is pretty common in space being the by product of the star's initial gas load. At some point I wonder if collecting it there will be economical.
> APIs should be designed based on a language-agnostic ABI, not based on JavaScript.

Has there ever been such a thing?
So, is this the long way around to get us Java Applets all over again?
You might not get to pick the cab driver themselves, but you can pick the cab company you are willing to patronize (even more so where there is increased competition). If I have a terrible experience with Company X, I probably won't use them again unless they give me a good reason to change my mind. This is a powerful incentive for companies to ensure their drivers are providing a quality service (or at least it is in a competitive market).
Great post. A quite similar pattern is common in ES6 React: https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/mixins-are-dead-long-live-hi...
You could write that code to be a little more human readable. That appears to be complicated for the sake of being complicated. Elegance doesn't have to be complexity, or trying to write as few lines as possible.

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/4/b/c/2/600_436...
A bytecode cache is unlikely to affect runtime performance; only load times.
Indeed. Thanks for the kind words.

Glad your friend got through it. Terribly traumatic but a good outcome looking at your other post. Happy to know someone who got through it against the odds.
Of course, several of the people working on WebAssembly are actually from the PNaCl team. And others, like the Emscripten people, have lots of LLVM experience as well. WebAssembly is being designed while taking into account previous approaches in this field, including of course using LLVM bitcode for it.

LLVM bitcode is simply not a good fit for this:

* It is not portable.

* It is not designed to be compact.

* It is not designed to be quick to decode and start up

* It has undefined behavior

* It is not sandboxed.

* It is a moving target (see recent big changes to LLVM IR on geps and loads/stores)

Each of those can be tackled with a lot of effort. But overall, better results are possible using other approaches.
Am I crazy to think this could actually work as a real business? The other day I was telling a friend how I love the idea of having and walking a dog - once in a while. Unfortunately my life doesn't allow me to have a dog in the traditional full comitment way. But maybe there could be a way to get that dog-owner experience the few days or weeks each month you would have the time. It's obviously super important that the animals are treated well, so that is probably difficult to do without making it too expensive to be viable.
This idea is significantly less dumb than many that have been funded (people like cute furry animals, so they're ahead of advertising-supported iOS app #213742 already). It's been 1999 for a while now. We're just waiting for the Fed to raise interest rates like they did from June 1999 through May 2000, with the killer blow being that last 50bp jump. Until then, you are cleared to party on.
> unlimited data at the throughput promised

I'm with you, but I've noticed that ISPs generally state speeds using "up to". Eg, AT&T's lowest U-verse tier gives you "Speeds up to 6Mbps".

Which is exactly the worst guarantee possible. "Don't worry, we certainly won't give you more than 6Mbps!"

Of course, if you pay them more, they'll guarantee not to give you more than 18Mbps.
Mailgun + Cloudflare + Gmail
An absolute must! I wish there was something for real.
Meet Nest Cam
Who here would pay ~15$ to rent a healthy cat for an hour or two? Seems like an interesting idea.

Guaranteed no toxoplasmosis!

On a second thought, getting a cat is really not a problem, but this would provide entertainment without the responsibility.
And maybe they could have been like the OTHER Android OEMs. I know which I think is more likely. And even being Samsung isn't all that hot:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-takes-89-percent-of-all-s...

Apple is, I think like 20% of the smartphone market worldwide? But about 90% of the profits. And Samsung has to make almost all of its profits at sale, with Google making all the ongoing profits from stuff like Maps and app stores; if Microsoft cut Nokia in on any of that money (Nokia shipped mapping and music apps for their Windows Phone, for example), it may have looked like a better deal than Android offers Samsung currently.

Compare the sale price of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo (after Google stripped it of its patent portfolio) to how much money Nokia's handset business sold to Microsoft for without patents attached. What Elop did with Nokia's phone business may have been the best case scenario for it.
The Sharing Economy Just Got a Whole Lot Messier
That's a good point, but asbestos used to be in everything from pipe covers to shingles to oven gloves. I don't see any proposals for such bulk deployment of graphene.
I wish the headline was s/600%/from 1.5M to 7M in 2 years/

No less impressive, and so much more informative!
Thanks for the uplift; appreciated.
> Searching for "devise", a popular ruby gem, yields several unrelated results before the actual Gem on DDG, while Google has the Github page as first result.

That's probably because of the lack of tracking. "Devise" has meanings outside of the Ruby world that are - arguably - more significant than the name of some authentication/session library. Google knows this, but - since it's able to profile you and stick you in the "Ruby programmer" pigeonhole - it knows to promote Ruby gem stuff. DDG has no such information, so it focuses on dictionary definitions first, since those are more commonly-useful than the Ruby gem.
It is a silly convention, really. Algol-60 didn't require them, and neither did any language in the Algol family (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, etc). It used to be something peculiar to Fortran and C, but today every language imitates C...
I agree that the web is far from the full ideal of "open-by-design", but it's still the most significant platform providing it to some extent.

The problem of uglify can be mitigated if someone invented a binary format for JS that was interchangeable with the current text format. The format would reduce the code's size, while keeping it readable (you'd just have to run it through a binary-to-text decompressor).

I should also say that you can read uglified/obfuscated code. It just takes more patience. Example: if PS was written in JS and then obfuscated, how hard do you think it would be to find out how their color transformation algorithms are implemented?

You can't say the same thing for asm.js code though.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...
Well, colour me surprised and I'll take your word for it. Take my word for it that AoI's are routine in companies big and small and that, in fact, nothing bad comes of them, statistically ever.
The moon is chock full of it. Would be hysterical if we went back to the moon just because kid's balloons.
Looks pretty, but you need to simplify the experience:

99% of us play ONLY standard tuning. So give us the EADGBE notes as the default and please don't make choose from 12 notes. Guitar players rarely tune to C# or Eb.

Also, "4th Octave C" is an accurate but not a useful description for guitarists. (It is, to pianists). We just need to know "High E or Low E".
> It turns out winner-take-all doesn’t apply just to [...]

I'd like to see someone knowledgeable look at Vilfredo Pareto's 80-20 ratio and do a modern update.

Did anyone do it sort of recently?
As others have already stated the web today can be quite hard to read. WebAssembly doesn't make that situtation worse. WebAssembly, however, is and will continue to be well defined and openly documented. I am confident tooling will come that will help humans understand this format.

It might be time for a WebDwarf debug format, though, to help us. Source maps aren't quite robust enough.
‘Anonymous’ Claims Takedown of Canadian Government Websites
First time I'm seeing Swift.

Are there use cases where Swift is a better fit than Cassandra?
Shit, between my full-time job, commute to work, trying to feed myself, generally dealing with life, I barely have enough time to get 6 hours of sleep.. I'd love to dip my feet in the water, but doing that with a full time job is just not going to happen.
> Its likely an H1B has an undergrad degree for a foreign university that's little more than a diploma mill anyway.

Yeah, this is unfortunately the case. There are only a few internationally reputable universities in India, so if they were unable to get into one of the top schools in the country, they usually have to follow up with a masters from a reputable US university if they ever want to work outside India. I just view someone with an undergrad degree from India and a masters in some technical discipline from a US school as being about the same as someone with an undergrad degree from a US school.
LiveIntent effectively doubles the amount it has raised with $32.5M investment
> It also includes moving the goal posts: that is, mining the data for results first, and then writing the paper as if the experiment had been an attempt to find just those effects. “You have exploratory findings, and you’re pitching them as ‘I knew this all along,’ as confirmatory,” Dr. Nosek said.

Why is this a problem? If the experiment's design is not in conflict with the new findings, why complain?
Or better yet: "!github devise".

Or, even better: "!rubygems devise".
everkitten.com was a similar fake service. Subscription to have a jung kitten. https://web.archive.org/web/20140218072828/http://everkitten...
Top 5 Trending Weird, Funny and sizzling news of this week
Show HN: MindTap – trivia game with riddles and pictures from around the world
My cat stood on the power button for too long on my keyboard today and killed my work-in-progress. I think renting might be better than owning as I could be without a kitty when working.
Oh, this is just excellent.
It's like a Cat Cafe that comes to you. But without the coffee and food.
no, even before the antitrust fun they were always separate business divisions / orgs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUd9rRSLY4A
Show HN: Atlasify – The Geography of Everything
yes, but he didn't bring office with him to windows.
Should be lesser of a problem once we get further along with fusion.
>As an example, imagine you're building an application that you know uses sockets. And it's in the requirements that your application must be able recover and re-attempt set of operations. So you look into what kinds of network and socket exceptions exist in your platform, framework, and libraries. From there you decide which ones you should trap and attempt to retry.

You need to decide where you're going to handle them, and this depends on how much context is required to handle them appropriately. Sometimes this may require doing it right at the point where the method is invoked that triggers the exception. Even if you decide to not handle the exception, you may still want to know the exceptions so you can rollback/adjust state/invariants before letting the exception continue unwinding.
"My favorite is how they think you should teach programming without teaching “coding”, as if that’s how they learned it."

I often wonder about this. In the UK, with the drive to get every child 'coding', there are a large number of teachers that constantly talk about how the main skill that we should be teaching is 'Computational Thinking'.

I wax and wane back and forth over this topic, in a very chicken and egg way. However, I usually end up coming to the conclusion that learning computational thinking is great, but you need to know how to code (i.e. learn the basic syntax of a language) before you can possibly learn how to think computationally.

I would be very interested to hear the opinions of actual developers, as to their opinions on the topic.
This is false. I use the pattern in the linked blog post everyday so that my code must deal with the errors I want to deal with and can ignore the rest.
Synthetic fuel is not exactly new, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process