skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This deserves a much longer reply than this, but it'll have to do for now. There's very much a different tone and structure to content on the internet today than when it was younger. Much of that has been a transition toward more commercial content and more "bite-sized" content, a lot of which has been encouraged by the tools we've come to use to interact with the internet. Social networks, mobile devices, etc. Each of which reward or encourage a shallower level of interaction on shorter timescales. I remember using usenet and forums where a conversation would typically last for days and sometimes for weeks or months. And where it wasn't unusual for a single reply to be several paragraphs of text and perhaps have involved several hours of work and/or research on the part of the poster. And on the web there was much that was similar. Blogs and personal sites full of essays. Blogs having conversations with one another via essay, and so on.

That sort of thing still exists in pockets here and there but it does seem much less common. And it doesn't feel as though the younger generations coming online have a predilection toward that mode of communicating. And too all of the communications tools we use from day to day tend to discourage such individualistic content. There's a sharper dichotomy between content producer and content consumer than there used to be. But you see people chaffing at the separation. You see people posting 20 part tweets, or posting an essay in image form to their facebook wall.

I don't fear that individualistic content will disappear from the web, but I fear that it is becoming less common, and is being actively discouraged by the tools and platforms we've come to rely on. Part of it comes back to the ad supported nature of much of the web. Just as in all other ad supported media to date there's always a pressure towards shallowness and laziness. Shallow content is cheaper and easier to make, and when you're just counting eyeballs it's often seemingly just as profitable.
Yes, we agree a long way. I'm sure the video works well in its intended greater context, as you describe here. My points are about taking the video at face value out of context, which is probably what lead to clear-as-muds comment.
White crab and chokes
Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good reading platform

I think you're going to have to explain what you mean by good here, given that you mention there was a good reading platform and it was killed in favour of the monetizable web by the chief web monetizer.
Anyone have any insight as to why Disney would build a separate rending engine when they own Pixar and could use their renderman engine?
Why 3 car giants just bought Nokia’s mapping business for $3B
Somewhere in here is a pop culture reference that I can't quite put together.
AutoBot+Automated+Marketing+Software+Tools+Custom+Design+Creation
> The original implementations were very bad: pass-by-name was not visible at the calling point, so any function call could suddenly break due to aliasing issues (or change the value of a local variable, which is also the case with pass-by-reference). I am not aware of any widely used modern languages that implement it outside of macros (including C preprocessor macros, LISP, etc.)

Scala. Call-by-name that is invisible at the call point. It doesn't cause aliasing issues because it's treated like getting passed a lambda, but if any of the code has side effects you can be very surprised about when they occur.
I wrote a blog post a while back about how dropping out of school has impacted me professionally and personally. I feel it's relevant, even if my story did not involve exiting the industry for an extended period, because being self-employed for a decade puts me in a fairly similar position, along with lack of a degree.

http://www.likewise.am/2015/07/too-cool-for-school-a-retrosp...
Yes, that's a good explanation (I suspect your first paragraph is at the core of Fermat's little theorem's demonstration), it's just a shame it was left out of the video - but maybe because this part would require its own video.
The UI got a major overhaul recently (switched to material design) which made some things nicer. I also saw/see the UI as a problematic part of OsmAnd however I recognize it's not easy to pack all the features OsmAnd offers into a GUI and both please beginners and expert users.
I would look too into jobs where programming is an asset. I wasn't initially contracted as programmer (caption reviewer of all things), but managed to bring code into most problems, automate away lots of repetitive processes and create tools and workarounds for whatever we didn't have yet on our main app, or even to help customers integrate with our API. Conditions may not be as good as a plain software engineering position, but you may have a bit more freedom.
It's really hard to argue with the basic idea. For my blog[1] it'd generally be about 6kB for the html + 1.5kB of CSS that'd be cached for return visitors (typically 15% of pageloads) + Google Analytics almost always from cache.

The "Recent Tweets" part of this site feels somehow at odds with the principles though. It's got nothing to do with the actual page, and has a really bad ratio of markup to content. Those 20 tweets are still 11kB uncompressed! It's also a very heavy visual element.

[1] http://www.snellman.net/blog/
Actually I had never heard of this made as a political argument before. It was a family friend who had to sell off assets in a small manufacturing business to pay off the taxes due on their inheritance. So yeah, it happens.
> Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good reading platform, which is why the death of Google Reader was so mourned.

It was mourned, but even then there were people saying it's a good thing. And they turned out to be right, we now have more and better RSS readers to choose from than ever before.
It is in principle a violation of the separation between structure and presentation, but it is not a violation of the semantics of HTML which is a bigger issue. Since div's are semantically neutral in HTML, a multitude of "presentational divs" will not confuse screen readers and so on, as the use of <table>-elements will.

That said, separation between structure and presentation is desirable, and the necessity to use multiple divs to achieve a layout effect means CSS 2 is not as powerful as we could want. The grid model in CSS 3 is much more powerful, and allows things like separating the presentation order from the structural order.
"When I first put video on 'the web' I got a really nasty email from one of the backbone maintainers that what I was doing was 'improper use' of the internet"

not trying to pry but i can't even imagine a context under which that is an appropriate response.
There is also Krita. Definitely worth a try for anyone thinking Gimp is the best Photoshop alternative the FLOSS world has to offer.
I do think startups are the key. Startups generally don't have the money for silly hiring processes so they actually take the time to talk to people that apply for positions.

That and the money they save on stupid HR process goes to my salary so that is great too.
Mark Zuckerberg talks openly about miscarriages
How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you.

After his breakout success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr Bushnell made several missteps that eventually led to some entrepreneurial failures and financial ruin.

That's fine, I wouldn't invest in you, either.
If you can find some spare time, perhaps invest in open source? It's an easy way to diversify your CV.
Actually, inline styles are a fad now in React.[1] I've been trying them in my latest project, and am loving it; really solves some of my old pain points with CSS. Haven't been doing it long enough to figure out the new problems it causes, though.

Of course such a project won't work with most non-React web projects. Idiomatic React projects tend to have a large number of small components with extensive re-use. (~5 lines of HTML not counting closing tags per component is my metric)

1: http://projects.formidablelabs.com/radium/
"OpenStreetDatabase" is probably a more accurate name, since it's more of a Database than a Map. But there you go. OSM doesn't have much (anything?) about traffic. But it has lots of stuff for routing, and POIs and so forth.
Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet
Is your physical location also having an influence here? There's no doubt programming jobs have got harder for a lot of people to get and I never believe articles about a shortage of STEM candidates (just there's a shortage of them at the right price). However, I know a few people in the UK who don't struggle for programming jobs (London area) even though they've got no university degree.
> handing your competitors all your work for free

Yes and No. The OSM licence is similar to the GPL. If you make a derived work, you have to share your changes back.

If OSM got a big cash bump, and was improved, then if (say) Google wants to put that improvement in Google Maps, they would be forced to release all the data that's in Google Maps. Unlikely to happen.
This site was made after reddit, so I guess some of the design decisions were to copy the good things of reddit but not the bad things.

Some design decisions are written in code, like no downvote for submissions.

Some design decisions are distributed in the community, like no oneliners or jokes. (Unless they are really original and interesting.)
Ya know, I can't help but think of MTV. Back in the late '70s all of the radio stations in the US were turning corporate, being bought up by chains and switching to boring, top 40s styles, playing the same songs all the time in order to rack up the ad revenue. MTV was launched at this same time but when it hit the air it had a problem, most songs didn't have music videos. So they ended up playing a lot of songs they wouldn't have otherwise, and accidentally played an eclectic mix of music. Which was like a breath of fresh air to the youth of the day, who had been abandoned by radio. MTV became hugely popular and helped gain popularity for a wide variety of different music that might not have become nearly as popular otherwise.

In general, corporate interests will result in less risk taking and thus less diversity and less eccentric content. You see the same thing in hollywood, where there is massive risk aversion.

Which reminds me of the Space Shuttle. People thought that the Shuttle was well tested near the end of its run of 130-odd flights, but it really wasn't. Because those were operational flights, not test flights, every single one of them attempted to stay as much in the center of the performance envelope as possible. So the performance envelope of the Shuttle was not actually well known, despite having flown over 100 flights. The vast majority of content producers who rely on ad revenue make the same estimations about risk, and try to stay away from the edges of the "risk envelope" for profitable content, with obvious implications for diversity and quality. The only real solution is to greater enable individual content creation. In some respects the modern web is great at that, but for content such as existed back when the web was young and weird it is less so.
I have a bachelor degree in EE and have been programming since 2 years, and also doing penetration testing since i love security, yet i have not even managed to get an interview at any company i applied to , don't even know what is the problem .
I can empathize. Perhaps getting involved in open source would help?

The OP was a little bit light on details of the exact work under-taken at the 'company' but I'm guessing it wouldn't be interesting enough to pass the sift of most recruiters.

That's tough but with Open source you could get involved in anything you felt like, make a contribution, get recognition and reboot/re-skill that way?

Still, it's not an easy or quick solution though and YMMV.
Just PR content, too little, too late.

now wait and watch if someone will dump this on pastebin or some torrent.

compare it with what slack posted under similar scenario

http://slackhq.com/post/114696167740/march-2015-security-inc...
I think they may be getting at something, but at least partly it reads as someone who lost their popularity after several years and is upset about it.
Continuous Integration for Dockers
Google is a US company, bound by US constition & law. Which doesn't extend a right to privacy to non-USAians outside the USA.
Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it.

I think the peak of this was when P2P filesharing took off, and everyone started sharing almost everything. Books, music, video, software, anything that could be digitised was uploaded and shared. It really felt like a massively distributed global library that anyone could access, for only the price of an Internet connection. Too bad most of it was killed off by antipiracy interests...
Having used gopher a bit before the first browser it was inline images that made the web revolutionary imo. I remember being amazed by the pages with layout and images. So at least for me the web has always been a very visual medium.
One thing that might help is to stop selling yourself down. Like me, you are a giant risk because you have no degree. However, risks are taken all the time if somebody decides that there is a good chance that the risk will pan out.

Show to them why you are a worthwhile risk instead of showing them that you are more of a risk than you are.
I sympathize with your trouble but what you describe seems exaggerated to me.

If within a year you made only a thousand dollars, why didn't you spend more time working on a side project, or sharpening your skills? Maybe the ones you currently have are not much in demand?

Also, freelancing sites do have a lot of low quality jobs, but if you spend some time digging around you can find decent jobs; e.g. I, a poor country resident, have found jobs that made me in a week as much as you claim to have made within the year.

And btw, I'm thirty-something, university drop-out and with a couple of huge holes in my CV. But that's not what I bring forward when asking for a job. Instead I project the most confident image that I have for myself and that's my advice to you, too (i.e. don't focus on the negativity of your current situation, it's not going to help you find a job).
Fundraising Explained Part II: The Seed Round
> I think the other map providers offer competition (BATNA), and would probably want to feature in vehicles

Yes, today. But what if Google Maps wins? What if all the other options go bust? Here the car companies are ensuring that Google Maps has a compeditor.
The goal was not 'minimum size per se' but 'minimum size while retaining all the elements of the old blog'. So yes, the 'recent tweets' (and the older posts) sections are at odds with a total minimalist style. But the whole idea was to not simply strip but to strip while maintaining all the old functionality.
* cue PagerDuty "sad trombone" alert sound
cue PagerDuty "sad trombone" alert sound
You have both. For the $25/month, you can enable manual or automatic scaling. I said a mistake on the pricing, their 1GB memory is at $50/month. Are you thinking to add 512MB instances ?

The load-balancer pricing is still confusing. Why not showing that as an option ?
The developers we hire in their 40s don't all have degrees, but what they do have is relevant experience. Now that relevance may be domain knowledge in the industry, or it might be experience with particular part of our stack - the classic example is the very experienced Oracle developer. You'll all too easily lose out to the young, hungry graduate who will also need to learn lots of things on the job, but doesn't come with as much baggage.

The OP might well have lots of relevant experience but it hardly comes across in the post. Neither does any appreciation, or indeed even an active lack of appreciation, that "knowing people" is the way to break through the HR process. After 20+ years in development there's a degree of expectation that you have built bridges along the way with people who can recommend you - because they want to work with you again. Because that's the flip side of being the experienced hire, you need to have the soft skills to utilise that experience - be it coaching and mentoring, writing well, negotiating and influencing etc.
OP's age might (will) still work against him even with a diploma. There is still a perception in IT that anything to do with technology is for the young and hip (even though the Internet is 20 years old and digital gaming even older, but ho hum). It's ridiculous and annoying and there are too many young people willing to be taken advantage of in return for grok-only-knows-what they think they are getting.
> I'd expect in-lining the css to be a slight net loss once the data is cached

I expected that too but it didn't work out that way. I'm not sure why, possibly a cache lookup is still slower than reading the style info out of the same page. I don't know enough about the guts of a modern browser to make the call but the numbers aren't there.
Thank you very much for your work. One question: I've never used PowerShell cause I'm UNIX user but isn't PowerShell capable of doing something similar (piping the objects)?
The Seiko 5 is a great mechanical watch at the same price point and has been around for many years. This Salon article is half ad for Swatch and clickbait for Apple fans.
top abstract = human readable overview of what paper/code describes. the other abstracts are paper/code specific - which often deviate allot. The aim is to give you an overview at a glance. If you have ideas on how to improve, please post them on our github issues page, always open for great suggestions!
> When companies find out I don't have a degree that's usually the end of the road.

I have a difficult time believing this. I've worked for & know of companies through connections that care 10x more about your portfolio than degree. We've passed on Stanford grads & even a guy who worked at NASA, because they just couldn't physically bring themselves to code when we needed them too, they couldn't sit in front of a computer & actually build out a test feature despite loving to talk intelligently about the problem. It's not nerves... Degrees/ credentials can create these terrible comfort bubbles that prevent programmers from actually diving in & being productive. When you've been around enough it's easy to spot this type.

In my experience, portfolio is the #1 factor, and I think most companies would take you seriously if you have one w/ at least a couple full, impressive projects.
Hehe. Challenge accepted ;) Let me know when you beat mine, I'll update the post.
I think a/v vs text is the wrong dichotomy. I think it's more about passive content and "commercial" content vs. active content and individualistic content. The web used to be about conversations, it used to be about individual passions. Some of that still exists, but it's being pushed to the margin as click bait, memes, sharable bite-sized content, and "hands off" content has risen to the fore.
I feel I can relate to this general life story. A lot. While I'm currently only vaguely looking for a job, I also share the same suspicions about general job options for freelancers - although I have to say that I have been extremely lucky in finding work so far. But I agree it sometimes looks like our work isn't very valuable.

In this context I have to say though that the HN freelancer thread, while yielding uneven results, has mostly been very good to me. (YMMV)

The deeper problem as far as the actual hiring process is concerned, however, might be - as hinted at in the article - the amount of work and hoop-jumping necessary just to earn the privilege of showing up for work. I found this astonishing, too, especially given the fact that most programming positions probably have a high turnover rate, and I believe it does have to do with hundreds of applicants showing up for a single position. The ensuing filter process is not only a drain on the applicants, but also on the companies that are paralyzed with making this decision.

I believe the mere existence of TripleByte and SmartHires shows over-supply is a problem, and it's underscored by the fact that they have no problems turning people away.
In that case, the question should be, why am I attempting to convert one concrete type to another concrete type?

If you're writing a program, you should use the same type, std::vector<char* >, everywhere.

If you're writing a library, the API should avoid including container details in function parameters, and const and non-const T should be allowed.

template<typename Container>
void foo1(Container const& c);

template<typename Iterator>
void foo2(Iterator first);

template<typename Iterator>
void foo3(Iterator first, Iterator last);

template<typename Iterator>
void foo4(Iterator first, std::size_t num);

template<typename T>
void foo5(std::vector<T> const& vec);

void foo6(char const* const* first, std::size_t num);

foo6 is a pretty good alternative here, imo:

std::vector<char*> vec(...);
foo6(&vec.front(), vec.size());

It would be cool if the compiler could figure templated type conversion out, but the crux of the issue is, as I understand it, that T<A> and T<A const> are not necessarily implemented the same way.

Also note that std::vector<std::string const> won't compile -- it wouldn't be copy-assignable -- so these issues mostly seem to arise specifically when dealing with C strings and/or C compatibility. And reinterpret_cast is amazingly helpful for porting from C.
Interesting, because my experience has been exactly the opposite. I used to read so many web articles via rss, but that's reduced month on month since the death of Google Reader. One of the main reasons is that I've found it hard to read on tablet, phone, laptop and desktop and know what I've read and what I haven't.

I'd really like to get back into reading RSS, but found it really difficult to manage.

What suggestion would you make for a good, free, cross-platform rss reader?
TDD best practices
A large number (majority?) of people who are proponents for american-style capitalism, advocating for less government intervention, are from big universities around the U.S, and will often earn a relatively high wage. Although it's very hard to quantify, I feel as though these people are very disassociated from the everyday life the claim to be studying. If you live near Harvard earning ~300k a year, how easy is it to imagine (pretend?) that everything is fine and that the skewed income distribution is actually a positive thing. Boiled down - can people who are part of such a skewed system really produce unbiased studies and theories about the system?

They back up their claims with various arguments as to the nature of the average consumer and echoes and remnants of trickle-down economics theories.

Why don't people instead look at the actual world for more accurate evidence? The U.S. is a pioneer of creating highly divided cultures, with the top 1% earning ridiculous amounts of money and living in relative luxury, while having a very large population of people struggling to make ends meet, or even get healthcare due to the associated costs.

At the same time, countries exercising a highly socialistic economic policy (welfare countries), such as the Nordics and Germany to some extent have a far higher "average" quality of life, as well as (arguably) a happier population. Being a taxi driver in Norway or Denmark doesn't mean you live in near-poverty and have to work 80 hours a week to make ends meet.

While I'll try to not get into details of economic theory, and so forth, one question that has always irked me is the following:

Does the evidence not speak for itself? In what country has pure capitalism (or at least as close as we can get), actually worked to produce a happy and harmonious society?