skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I (begrudgingly) use Facebook today precisely because of that market share. I agree that there are services that perform the tasks of Facebook more competently (or at least ones that I personally like better) but due to how it's set up, it doesn't do me a lot of good if just about everyone I want to communicate with (in the manner of social/sharing networks at least) is on Facebook.

Facebook managed to grab a huge share of the potential userbase that previous and subsequent services have not. I might like Google+ better for sharing links and photos with friends and family but Facebook is the one that finally got everyone to sign up. There's probably a good portion of Facebook that just won't bother switching to any similar service no matter how much nicer they make the interface or features because it's just too much "friction" for them.

And unlike email where you can host your own or choose from loads of providers, there's not a common protocol that allows you to use a different social sharing service and still communicate with everyone on Facebook. It's not like when I switched my personal email to Gmail in the mid-2000's and could continue to email the same friends and family even though most of them weren't interested in changing providers for more storage. They kept their @aol.com or @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com addresses and I could still send and receive emails.

I honestly don't think anyone's gonna upset this by building a "better Facebook" at this point. If Facebook falls by the wayside I think it will be because the current social-media-type activities are replaced by something else entirely.

Nobody's going to pull up their stakes for some new Facebook+ and maintain two accounts/profiles since half of their contacts don't want to bother. But when more of that sharing and communication starts taking place on a different style of service, whatever form that may take, people will start using FB less and less until it becomes more of a hassle to maintain your account than to leave it.
> I would argue that the outcome of hiring an Unemployable Programmer might in fact be better overall, because we're motivated and we get stuff done - as opposed to the hipster "rockstar" programmer we actually do eat and breathe code.

It's odd that the author seems convinced that they are more productive than 'hipster rockstar programmers' who aren't motivated and don't get stuff done. Isn't that what they do by definition? And what's truly strange is how he seems to think that those types of people don't "eat and breathe code", when the prevailing sentiment on HN is that these 'rockstars' have poor work-life balance and don't do anything except code on evenings/weekends. It feels like he's lashing out at 'young people' in general who seem to be able to get jobs.

I seems that the author's lack of success obtaining a job stems directly from a lack of effort - or knowledge of how much effort is required. He seems to think he is entitled a job just because he's been doing it since he was a kid or because he's had a job for ten years.

I can say from experience as someone who was looking for a development job with no experience, much more is needed than passively posting on a job board, listlessly browsing oDesk, or even sending out a few resumes. Every intern hiring season, my classmates all end up disappearing from class and social life for a few weeks - sending out hundreds of resumes and applications, dozens of emails (cold or introductions), spending hundreds of hours studying for interviews, tens of interviews - pounding the proverbial, virtual, and literal pavement - resulting in most of us receiving one or (more often) multiple job offers.
Except for all the 20-somethings who started programming when they were 14.
Losing 30 million sounds like a much better (negative) indicator on whether to invest in someone than how many companies they started by 18.
People are downvoting, but I'm just asking: what was the actual behavior? Did people run after you saying pedophile? Did they follow you around the park watching? Did you feel uncomfortable?

I'm confused how someone would not want to ask those questions.
How do you track time that you spend on the project that is not done inside the editor; for example research?
Interesting. Unfortunately, it looks like only imported electricity is counted as a net import. It would be great to see diagrams that show all imports—many states lack coal mines but still burn coal for generation.
From watching the video the two main points seem to be the seamless integration between other Autodesk tools and this one and how you don't need to be a big programmer. Maybe also the live preview.

(I don't know if this is the case with Unity etc. as I am not a game developer).
Not even some fiber?
I have friends who are devs and hiring managers (several of whom have no degrees, even) in many cities -- Detroit, Columbus, Portland, Chicago, SF -- and the same thing is true in all those places.

If you live in a small town, I can believe that the opportunities are limited, but in basically any metro area of any size, it's a developers' market.
To be fair, they really aren't using the internet when milling around inside of Facebook's network. The internet is about connecting autonomous computers, server, networks, and systems together ... precisely not simply circle jerking in Facebook land.
> So it's a matter of skilling oneself up, specialising or searching carefully. But I 100% believe there is no better industry to be job searching on our 40s.

I do agree with both of these statements which is why I try to level up on a constant basis.

You are correct, apps and closed appliances are definitely the wave of the now, possibly continuing into the future. VR is about to hit the market, video games are going strong, people still think they need phones, and websites are still going strong. So yes tech is a great industry to be in, and what else are you going to do? Swing a hammer?

But the more saturated the market gets with developers (and they don't have to be good as long as they're cheap and get the job done fast... something that is harder to do as you get older) the less value guys like myself or you will serve.

Sticking with a company and one technology is of course a slow form of career death, but getting strangled out by all the new growth and an abandonment of the old (be that human or technology) is also a very real problem that isn't just going to vanish by cramming knowledge into your brain.
I would even go so far as to say for some people, Google is the only way they know of to find things

Totally agree. I watched a family member Google "budget rental cars" to get to budget.com. Seriously. She wasn't searching, she needed customer service in order to keep a car a few extra days.

To her, Google is the "internet" (web, actually, but you know what I mean in this context).
Cotard delusion: Being alive, but thinking otherwise
I saw nothing about games on that page. It was a lot about 3D rendering, but nothing about actual interaction.
Many people in the AOL heyday of the 1990s didn't go outside of AOL's garden, either. You could chat, talk to friends, play games, do some online shopping, book flights, all from within the AOL client and without firing up their built-in browser. And many people didn't use that.
Charting the Complex Relationships among Energy, Water, and Carbon
It's probably a case of "innovator's dilemma' but I don't understand why all company making 3D software for industry haven't try to enter this market twenty years ago (maybe they is too much technical difference that I'm not aware of). It's seems too late now, they haven't a huge technical advantage any more. But competition is always good, so good luck to them !
ugh, would much rather work on an older car - more space, less electronics
> (nice idea for a browser plug in, take the css loaded by the page and remove all unused rules)

I believe Chrome's devtools can do that. (See the Page Audit functionality).
> Now, that's not fair. There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". If you are building a thing and you want people to come and use it, you have to advertise in some form.

I stand by my statement: the best way to do this is to build something awesome, show it to people, and have them be so excited about how much it helped them that they jump at the chance to show others. Bonus if you build something that gets more valuable the more people use it (even if only by having more people share related tools and tips for it), so people have an active incentive to share it with others.
The shortage of developers with clearance is exacerbated by the number of people with clearance who want to exit the defense contractor ecosystem, because it's a military-industrial clusterfuck from top to bottom. They hire us for our brains, and then tell us not to use them.

Except we can't get out because of two factors:

1. The non-defense ecosystem won't fix their insane hiring processes.
2. If you do actually get an offer, it is 80% of what you currently earn, or less.

There is not a glut of highly qualified engineers in the private sector. There is a glut of barely adequate engineers, and the employers out there seem unwilling to pay reasonable rates for anyone better, aside from some exceptions in the tech hub cities.

I'm stuck, too.

I would jump ship in an instant if only someone would offer me 102% of my current pay, 40 hours a week, and the opportunity to do more fulfilling work.
400 MW not 400 MWh. The power generated by the wind farm is enough to power 400,000 homes at peak. The link you provided talks about energy generated.
I find the hardest thing for me related to ad blindness is finding the download link for a software.

We get spammed with so many fake "DONWLOAD HERE!" buttons that it becomes impossible to see the real one.
Strong typed, autocompleted resources (cells and segues) in your Swift project
You need to watch the video which has all the details.
Torvalds 2.0: Interview with Patricia Torvalds
This story sounds like the person started as a programmer, started a small company, and then did more Business Development and running the company than programming. He mentioned having to fire people, so I wonder how many people he employed.

So it sounds like he already made a career change (from software development to business executive) and is now trying to change back to software developer, after a decade out. Most of the stuff that was common back then is "considered harmful" now, ranging from GOTO statements to <b> tags.

And also this sounds like my poor mother, who labored as a secretary and transcriptionist, left the labor force to rear children, then lamented that her skills had become useless because computers had come along and taught everyone to type. It's each person's responsibility to make sure they're still useful to everyone else in society.

And so the author's other options might be continuing on as an executive at another software company - but that almost always comes from the human network that is developed by going out and meeting people at various events. Which it sounds like the author did not do either.

I guess the moral of the story is that the author got spoiled during the Dotcom boom or shortly thereafter, got to continue living life in super-easy mode, and is having a rough awakening to the way life is for everyone else.
This is why some people use the "offline" applications like GnuCash[1] or cli-ledger[2]. These programs can be used in such a way that they don't even know the financial institutions you do business with, never mind usernames/passwords.

However, as others have stated, they view the convenience gained to be worthwhile enough to sacrifice the security of their accounts. Plus, I'm sure they asses the probability of Mint (and their employees, contractors, etc) using this information in any way other than "read-only" (at least intentionally) to be very close to zero.

[1] http://www.gnucash.org/
[2] http://ledger-cli.org/
A call to policy makers: Open source is where innovation is happening
Some people are terrible at interviews. A few months ago I interviewed a developer in his thirties who had a great looking resume. Worked on lots of big projects in positions of both making decisions about software architecture, technology to use, etc.. and also being a programmer doing the actual work. His resume was really awesome.

When we received him in our interview, we asked him to tell us a bit about his past projects, what he liked, disliked, etc. He didn't talk much and it took us a lot of questions to dig up helpful things.

Then we asked a couple programming related questions and he bombed them all. He couldn't put an algorithm into words, write code that compiles or gives the proper results. Our interview programming questions start very easy and we slowly iterate by adding more constraints that shows if a dev has a deep knowledge of the language and framework.

I have a feeling like this developer was good when he's working alone on a project with no one to talk to. He would have never fit in our company culture and we couldn't evaluate his skills in an interview.
Here's the article I was thinking about:

http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm
THIS! might be THE answer how people works. My life changed significantly when I read this article [1] and realized this is so True. It basically says the same: everybody looks what can you do FOR THEM and that's the main thing that matters.

[1]: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...
So they continue the trend that is my main gripe about Unity and Unreal: they lock everything up in unsearchable, unskimmable videos.
No, it is a bit more complex.

Within the Warsaw Pact, there were essentially two levels of utopia: "socialist" and "communist". "Socialist" countries (Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia) allowed limited private ownership of land and businesses (private businesses could not employ more than 50 people). IN "communist" countries (East Germany, USSR), no private ownership was allowed at all.

Yes, crooks ruled in both systems. But everyday life was much easier in "socialism"

I should know - I grew up there.
> big problem

I can imagine worse problems.

Certainly, it's economically suboptimal. We do need storage or some other kind of energy consuming business that can absorb energy that's nearly zero-valued on the spot market.

But having so much excess renewable energy that it has to be pushed on other countries - and possibly forces coal plants to throttled back there - is not all bad.
No, this is a correct figure. I think you are confusing power with energy. Also, the consumption of the average US home is a lot higher than in Europe.
I think the converse also holds:

Millions of internet users have no idea they’re using Facebook
I think that was the point. Referrals has to go through HR, who reserved the right to review and reject the candidate. The hiring manager was not allowed to bypass the HR filter and pursue a candidate they wanted.
Firefox JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey, improvements in 2014
>I don't believe I could ever afford American ones.

Most PhD programs at American universities cost nothing for most students, i.e., if the university accepts you into a doctoral program it almost always comes with full tuition remission (i.e., you pay nothing) and a modest stipend (i.e., they pay you, somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000 per year). The stipend can be in the form of a teaching or research assistantship, in which case you will work 10-20 hours per week helping a professor, or in the form of a fellowship which requires no work (but fellowships are highly competitive and you likely would not receive one).

Does that change if you're an international student? I honestly don't know, but it would surprise me.
I'd say it goes deeper than this: there's a greater emphasis today on the candidate being productive from day one.

I don't know what is causing it (too much exposure to efficient software?), but in many industries hiring managers would rather keep looking for an absolute perfect candidate while leaving behind several that have the skills but need the training.

I have heard the stories about managers spending 100 extra hours looking for a perfect candidate instead of hiring the best available and dedicating even 50 hours to train them to speed.
This is something being glossed over by most of the responses. Age discrimination (or rather, age preconception, if that's a less loaded term) is frighteningly real.
Ask HN: How do you learn to use AWS when you are terrified to being overcharged?
I don't get any money from programming, and I would like to learn to use AWS but I am a very risk averse kind of people and I don't want to be overcharge in case I do some silly thing in the web. I would like a service that guarantees that no matter what happens you don't pay more than a small amount for learning, I don't mind if my code disappear from the server or the application is no longer working when the money is over. I imagine that working in the cloud is about being at risk but, just in the learning phase I would like to have the minimum risk when learning. Any ideas?
Folks in the UK may have to use Iranian or Chinese proxy to access international contents from BBC. 58.240.238.218 may be the one.
This would equate to a constant 1kW load per home which looks about right on the face of it. In fact that's probably a bit high.
It can mean a number of things.

1. Truly there are not enough trained people for the jobs available, but I don't necessarily think that is our core problem in the US based market right now.

2. There is a shortage of new graduates to fill the entry level jobs available to do the grunt work on projects, and paying a senior engineer 6 figures to write programs or utilities slightly harder than Hello World is a bad investment (obviously a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea).

3. Employers are not willing to pay the wage necessary to hire the people that are available in the market with the capability to do what the employer needs. e.g. they want to pay 70k/year for a 10 year senior engineer instead of a 6 figure salary. Supply and demand issue basically.

4. Employers are not willing to invest in an employee with 75-80% of the skill set to get them to the 100% they need. This can be because companies are so focused on quarterly numbers that they don't want a carrying and training cost or that they are fearful the employee will just leave once they are trained. I have heard both fairly recently.

Personally, I think all of these are true at different times and in different places, and I think there is some type of "shortage" now depending on the market you are in.
HN may be an echo chamber, but look what you're saying: Employers are desperate for developers, including entry level ones, mostly using older tech stacks, and they'll pay solid money for them.

It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right?
> Do people actually get value out of conferences?

In terms of skill development? Yes, although it's value you could get for free if you read the right blogs, keep involved in the community, and are a self-motivated person.

In terms of networking? Yes, although perhaps you could get that for free too, if you go to enough hackerspaces and meetups etc.

Ironically, a lot of the people I meet at conferences are the kind of driven, motivated, outgoing people who are well suited to getting those benefits for free. But not all of them!

I certainly derive value from going to conferences.
Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life.

I've clicked on hundreds. Thousands probably. For me clicking an ad is a win-win - the site I want to support gets a little money, and the advertiser gets to find out that online ads don't convert to sales so eventually they'll stop buying them. You can support the things you love and drive the ad model off the internet at the same time.

I realise this isn't a workable long term strategy. :)
So would OS/2, but we all know that isn't going to happen.
Let me show you a model of a decent web news paper that could get by with ads and no paywall:

|----------------------------------|
| MY AWESOME NEWSPAPER |
|----------------------------------|
| category | links | cool | topics |
|----------------------------------|
| Article Title | Ads |
| | |
| Article content arti | A bunch |
| cle content article | of static|
| content. | not |
| | annoying |
| |---------------| | ads |
| | A cat picture | | |
| |---------------| | |
| | |
| Article content arti | |
| cle content article | |
| content. | |
| | |
|----------------------------------|
| footer links & copyright notices |
|----------------------------------|

Simple as that. Just don't shit on your users. If they have ad blockers, kindly ask them to whitelist your site.

> Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

What content quality?
How do you show it to those people in the first place? I'm working on VR software. None of my friends care about games that much, say nothing about even know what an Oculus Rift is.
http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm - which is quoted in the Wiki. All lean meat leads to 'Rabbit starvation', you need some fatty meats to supply necessary vitamins and minerals.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990881

Other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9989884

Canadian hitchhiking robot destroyed on trip across US
(globalnews.ca)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990213

HitchBOT destroyed in Philadelphia, ending U.S. tour
(cbc.ca)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990215

HitchBOT destroyed in Philadelphia, ending US tour
(gizmodo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990881

HitchBOT destroyed in Philadelphia, ending U.S. tour
(cbc.ca)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991824

Hitchhiking Robot Found Decapited
(hitchbot.me)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9992506

HitchBOT destroyed in Philadelphia, ending U.S. tour
(cbc.ca)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9993561

America proves too tough for hitchhiking robot
(theverge.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994123

HitchBOT scientist: 'Sometimes bad things happen to good robots'
(bbc.co.uk)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994125

HitchBOT scientist: 'Sometimes bad things happen to good robots'
(bbc.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994216

Hitchhiking robot meets end on streets of Philadelphia
(thestar.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995516

Hitchhiking robot that relied on human kindness found decapitated
(wired.co.uk)
I too have visited it and can highly recommend visiting as well. My dad worked on its construction.
>What worries me is that soylent is 20% based on soy. Some studies indicate that eating a heavily soy based diet leads to increased estrogen levels

Here's what they have to say about this [1]:

>There are some public concerns about high consumption of soy, but Rhinehart is quick to dismiss them. "Because we’re not using whole soy, we’re just using the protein isolate…the isoflavone levels are much lower than what they would be in soy flour or tofu. There are some levels, but they’re well below any that have shown to have an effect," he explained. "There was somewhat specious research in the past on what impact soy can have on testosterone levels and those have been widely debunked. We’ve certainly done our research here and we’ll be posting our analysis on the Web as well."

[1]http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/soylent-2-0-is-coming...
Well, I live in Dallas. I have been fishing in Dallas and Austin over the past several months and can't get any interviews. I would like to know where all these "desperate" companies are and what domains they are in.
How would an employer even know about that?
Free porn websites could be shut down within months, says David Cameron
There are free micro instances, last I knew.
A/B Testing for App Store and Google Play