skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening? <<

Yes, unavoidably, as the internet gains popularity and prevalence.

Early adopters are by their nature more erudite than those that follow. Early internet was was filled with people with big ideas promoted on complex platforms. Their ideas couldn't be expressed in 140 characters or a funny picture, and often they had to learn HTML and server management to express them.

But the numbers of users grow, we're going to have a dumbing down of the majority of the content. Like television, we'll need the "Hee-Haws" and "America's Funniest Home Videos" as entertainment for the masses. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just the nature of humanity.

There will always be blogs and good ideas to be found, just like you have PBS on TV. It's just going to be in it's little corner the world. It's not going to be popular beyond a select group.

So I don't think you need to save that part of the internet - it will always exist. But it will lose its power and relevance in a sea of mediocrity.
Some people only care about eating as far as subsistence goes, soylent saves you time and money in this regard.
I feel like i'm in the opposite camp. Every time i see a Soylent post in any non-Soylent corner of the web (HN, non-Soylent Subreddits, etc), there's always 1 (x100) posts of:

"Why would you do this!?"

I feel like i need someone to describe this to me. Why is it so hard to grasp? "Fast food" makes its living off of ease and price. You could argue taste, but many (most?) people feel that a good homecooked meal tastes a lot better than a McBurger - so i'm going to ignore taste.

We have isles and isles of meal replacements and frozen foods. All with the purpose of giving you food on the Go, and food on the quick.

We also have people constantly skipping meals, for reasons other than diet. I myself often skip breakfast or lunch because i'm busy, and eventually 9am turns into 10am turns into 11am turns into "Welp, i may as well just eat lunch".

So it seems blatantly obvious that meal speed, ease and even price is an issue for many, many, many people. So why is it so confusing to see a liquid form of this that aims to be an even healthier meal replacement than existing meal replacements?

We already have meal replacements. We have had them for ages. They're just incredibly unhealthy. .. I just guess i can't fathom why so many people (not you specifically) are so confused at Soylents existence.

</rant>
96 won't get you a month. Each bottle is 400 calories, so you'd need five per day, assuming a 2000 calorie diet. You'd need around 150.
I actually just started it last week and was put off by all the scripted events and lecturing in the beginning. I even tried wandering off and was stopped and told it wasn't time to go that way yet. I put it down. I'll probably pick it up again soon and see how it is after things open up. But I can't figure out what compels the designers to offer such a bad first impression.
Analysis: European tech companies raised €3.47B in venture capital in Q2 2015
You might take a look at this article from the New York Review of Books on "STEM" jobs and all the noise about the talent shortage.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/frenzy-...

My take, as an older, very experienced software engineer (with 25+ years of professional experience): it's basically bullshit. Big employers just don't want to pay for American citizens, especially ones who want to be compensated appropriately for their degree of skill and experience, because they have a track record of getting stuff done. These employers want H1-B warm bodies to fill seats at half my salary. These employers can go !@#$% themselves.
It was less than a week ago that someone here proclaimed loudly that 'security is just as bad as premature optimization'. I wonder how the pagerduty folks feel right now, but I'll bet that 'premature optimization' is not the first thought that comes to mind.

A good start-up fires on all cylinders and strikes a balance when it comes to features, user friendliness, performance and security. Ignore any one of those and you'll lose the game eventually.

Let's hope they pull together and up their game then manage to survive, I'd trust them much better after failing like this than before assuming they learned their lesson.
It's a lot easier thank cooking or preparing most foods and very portable. I doubt many people are trying to live off the stuff exclusively.
Of course it's my opinion. That is an Internet comment, not a research paper.
Doesn't render nice in desktop browsers either. Once upon a time, at least that page would actually be a little easier on the eyes (and a bit uglier) thanks to Netscape's gray background. But the real kicker is that user stylesheets have gone the way of the dodo. There's no reason that page (as is) couldn't look better than most pdfs generated from LaTeX or what not. Sad, but true.
ask and ye shall receive:
http://lennasinception.com/
FTFY empathize :)
To get insight into their budgets.

I have tried one or two services similar to mint in an effort to get more control on budgeting. The typical bank provided online banking interface is like something from 10-15 years years ago with a painful interface and no real facilities to either analyse your income/spending on the site or to easily export data.

The promise of these other services is to scrape at your data, gather it into an easily viewable/filterable format and allow you to group it semantically (i.e. this payment every month is for rent, food, socializing) The idea being that it can automatically analyze the accounts give you more control over your budget.

My experience was that for personal accounts the analysis was no better than I was doing myself and they cannot account correctly for cash withdrawls which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. Finally, my bank recently updated their online banking site so that it's just as good as that offered by these external services.
I was thinking the same thing about location. If you can, move to a city where there is less competition for jobs. Midwest cities have a lot of jobs in banking and insurance that aren't as competitive.
There is DIY Soylent.

I have not personally tried any recipe from this website. I did, however, recommend it to a friend who is into this type of stuff. He tried a chocolate recipe for bodybuilding (most likely the the top rated one). If you're that interested in Soylent, you can always try one of these.

https://diy.soylent.com/
Those 3-4% of respondents are still mistaken. It is a common misconception that the Internet is the same thing as the Web. You can use Facebook and not the Web, but you can't use Facebook and not the Internet. This research is trying to figure out how many people hold that exact mistaken belief.
That's an easy bet, if it was AWS there will be much higher visibility targets than pagerduty, the fact that that is not the case makes it seem as if betting against you at this point is a losing proposition.
I read a bit of the content first and knew it was the inimitable Hitchens before I saw his name.
> but we haven't yet mastered the nutritional content of real food to the point where we can confidently say it's safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly.

I'm not aware of any ill effects from consuming meal-replacement shakes like Ensure regularly, and they've been around for quite some time. In some instances people have been sustained on them for fairly long periods.

Would I want to consume them exclusively for a long period of time? No, like you, I would start becoming concerned about nutrition. But drinking them regularly for long periods of time or even exclusively for short periods of time seems like it would be fine. People eat lots of less nutritious foods just as regularly.

The real question for me is what is Soylent supposed to offer over older equivalents.
I sympathize with anyone that have convinced themselves they are stuck even though conditions for success is at an all time high. Chin up and either network or build something usefull yourself.
Selling bottles is really terrible from an environmental perspective. It's sort of the same problem as bottled water. Now we have a lot of plastic bottle trash instead of the pouches that pack down flat and provide much more product/waste ratio.

Plastic bottles are more recyclable but recycling bins are still not common in my area of the country (although we recycle at home).

There is also the increased fuel costs of shipment. One more question is where is the bottling happens. If it's in California like the development labs, is it contributing to the drought there a la Nestle water-bottling?
This is goofy and a little insulting. At my clients, I write more code than plenty of developers. Turns out it tends to be necessary when you're developing (key word) build pipelines and tooling. I also get to touch a lot more of the stack.
Mark, the founder, asked him to be CEO[1]. An incompetant current CEO, who isn't giving details to someone who he asked to be CEO.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_b...
I want the advertising industry to die.

And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.
Enterprise guide to Windows 10
Right! Even if you don't like to cook, not having the time to is symptomatic of overwork.
As someone currently using soylent to replace my lunch during the work week I can tell you the reasons not to eat "good food". I cook every single one of the my breakfasts and dinners and strive to make a balanced, healthy meal. But I struggle to consistently bring a healthy lunch. My preparation methods don't keep up, I get bored, it turns out to not be a very balanced meal, etc. So instead I use soylent to avoid eating out every day, which the high majority of the people I work with do. I also save around $10 a day doing this. I eat plenty of good food, I love food, and I love cooking. I just also enjoy my soylent method of lunch.
Let's Understand Amazon Machine Learning (Full Course)
Hitchhiking robot that relied on human kindness found decapitated
Yes, I've been a mint user since well before they were bought by Intuit.

I didn't think it was a bad idea, because it is clearly explained that Mint can't make changes to your accounts. It is only used for query. I am under the impression that the banks only allow Mint query capabilities. They've lately released a new service called "Mint Bills"-- which does make changes but that is separate from their main "Mint" service.

I've recommended Mint to friends and those who've tried it like it.

Things are changing lately, however. Banks are providing more and more "Mint-like" analytic services for their customers. These days, if you have your stuff at one bank there's little need for something like Mint.

I think there will always be room for a service that can work with multiple financial services/banks/accounts at the same time and with a uniform interface. Unfortunately, this is an exceedingly hard business for start-ups to crack (my opinion). To do it right (without asking users to literally surrender control of their accounts), services like Mint need to negotiate with multiple financial institutions-- not fun at all, just to get to the starting-point where one can compete with Mint.
As stated in another comment, cutting them out can be an hypothetical ad cutting machine I 3D printed.

The implementation detail of how i'm cutting out the ads is beside the point. The point is that I can offer my ad cutting services for free to anyone.

I can tell all my friends - "Hey guys i'll come to your house and cut the ads out of the free magazines you're already receiving"

Which is definitely not the same as "Hey guys I've received this magazine, and I cut the ads, here's the PDF"

The reprint and redistribution parts are non-existent in ad blockers. the content is not hosted on adblockersite.com.
There's a weird psuedo-religious aspect to it too. It's right to spend an hour cooking, and wrong to have a convenient pre-made meal, even if it's nutritionally as good or better.
I use Mint, and of course I don't think providing your bank credentials to a 3rd party service is a good idea. That said the company backing Mint currently (Intuit) also does TurboTax, so at least they have some experience with handling sensitive customer data. Also in the event that they did get hacked, there are a ton of other people also using Mint which hopefully will give me time to change my passwords before any real damage is done. Overall it's something I'm not super comfortable about using, but I really enjoy the convenience of having all my accounts in one place, automatically updated, etc, that I'm willing to accept the hopefully small risk of getting hacked.

That said, I still have a hard time convincing others of using the service due to security concerns. I also personally wouldn't really trust a startup/smaller company with my data either since they don't have as much on the line as a larger established company does.
> Even more counter-intuitive: this holds even when loading multiple pages on the same site that share the same (small) CSS file.

Did you verify that the cache headers where correct, and that the CSS file was only loaded once? It's certainly possible, but indeed surprising (to me) if the actual overhead of parsing the html (and then the css - 2x render time) is that big?

[ed: Did you see the same pattern using local static files?]
Interesting, I didn't know decent bassoons were available cheaply. I played on a couple of old Fox bassoons in school (a decent brand but nothing incredible) and found even these instruments to cost at least $7,000 used. More palatable, but still quite expensive for a musical instrument that might need repairs. I'll have to take a look at these Puchners some time!
Accessing undefined/unitialized global or instance variables (like: @i) is not an error and nil will be returned. With -w a warning will be emitted. The weird class variables must be initialized. Local variables (lexically scoped) must be defined and are default-initialized to nil. (Global and class variables are usually not used.)
you could hand the magazine to a 3-year old who can't read, and he'll cut out all pictures for you.

Nitpickers, these days...
I'd criticize the methodology of such survey.

Asking 'Is FB the internet?' has different meaning in these countries.
I've interviewed people like this though not as extreme. Basically person gets a job. They learn the job in about 3-6 months and now repeat the same job for years without ever learning anything else. So on paper it shows 5-10 years experience, but in reality they still have about 3-6 months experience.

Part of the blame lies on the company for not giving the employee a growth path, but the largest part lies on the employee for not continuing to grow on their own. Software as a profession is one where you have to constantly be learning. People need to know going in that it is ultimately their responsibility to keep their skills growing and up to date.
Three Ways UI Testing Just Made Test-Driven Development Even Better
Stop telling other people how to live their lives.
I really enjoy trying to make things as bloat free as possible but also retaining some styling, unlike motherfuckingwebsite.com.

Many of my posts use images and I use Google Analytics so I made a text only one and disabled GA to see how it compares. With your trick of the inline stylesheet I got a massive speed improvement[0], down from about 100ms to between 60-70ms.

I too use Hugo. I host the site on a $10 VPS from digital ocean located in London, but I also use Cloudflare to speed up image delivery.

I'm not sure where your site is physically hosted but testing from Amsterdam we're pretty much the same given the 1KB page size difference.

Very cool post and thanks for the tips!

[0] http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bvkhPp/http://josharcher.uk/...
Lovely piece. I liked this bit:

> the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks

In a crowd environment or mob mentality (which is driven by social media) people can often refrain from airing an opinion that might be divergent.

From observing friends, less and less are interested in reading beyond "140 characters" or whatever is considered byte size.

But even more concerning is people are too quick to "like" or "me too" something without considering source or veracity, or taking due consideration.

Personal investigation or research into an issue, before dishing out invective is becoming rare.
So what's the alternative? If you've got an app that loads slowly, what are you supposed to do?
Because they use OFX for read-only transactions and an HSM to store the passwords:

http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/15392/are-there-any...
Quite an interesting story. Highly competitive market you got in to tho.
20 somethings aren't comfortable hiring 40 somethings. That's the bulk of it, and if you think this isn't true you're lying to yourself.
I still think remote in situ denture cleaning sounds like a billion dollar idea.
Also not healthy to consume soy if you are male, apparently.

As for alternatives, there are many. There is a big community on the site which discusses recipes for rolling your own.

Edit: just read an article where he responds to that concern:

> The powder has always contained some soy lecithin, but the liquid actually shifts from rice protein to soy for its primary protein source.

>

>The change comes for a variety of reasons, including the water footprint of rice farming and the desire to make as many components of Soylent as sustainable as possible. Rhinehart also says that the switch to soy for protein enhances the product’s texture and taste. 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."
I chose to write a hugely boring open source product that no one in their right mind would bother with. Old tech, competing with a ton of other similar projects. I focused on the documentation, make it as simple as 'cut and paste this code to get it working' every time someone had a question, bam - a cut and paste example.

Did some serious SEO and soon was racking up a couple of thousand hits a week. This soon hits the million mark. That gets me interviews, even with people who don't want that old tech, they just see results.

I am currently doing a bit of Drupal for a client, there are a TON of half baked modules. Take some of them and make them work. Make them work with the backup module, the restore, the import.... then your CV is padded with a ton of neat stuff.

This is super common advice, the trick is to actually take it. Get all OCD about it and make it work.
Really? All the big corps I worked at had a referral program. Friend want a job? Send his resume to HR. If he got hired, some kind of referral bonus (500 to 5000 depending on job market)

Not the same as a direct hire of a friend but I know referrals were assumed better qualified than a random who applied online.
You'd hope that the content produced by newspapers would rise above the level of reddit leading to people wanting to pay for the content directly.

Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
This looks great! I bet she could get away with charging a little more :)
Ray tracing is a more generic term that covers rendering techniques which trace rays between a camera and a scene. Back in the day everyone used Whitted style ray tracers to render shiny metal blobs because secular reflections are trivially handled with ray tracing. Unfortunately other physical aspects of light like diffuse reflections were not handled by early ray tracing algorithms.

Kajiya introduced the rendering equation, a mathematical formulation of global illumination (takes diffuse, secular into account). It's a multidimensional integral equation. Unidirectional path tracing is an algorithm he introduced to solve the rendering equation. It uses several rays traced from pixels in the camera bouncing randomly through the scene. It's a Monte Carlo integration algorithm for solving the nasty integrals.

Photon mapping involves a pass algorithm tracing light from light sources into the scene, then a pass (like path tracing) gathering that light back at the camera. It better handles more complex light effects like caustics.
It's basically just a BCI short from wireheading.
Alright, fine, then how does HBO do it?

If I want to have the NY Times, it's $32/mo [0], plus I have to let them ride my shoulder as I go about the rest of my business online. HBO Now is $15/mo [1], the only ads I get are in between episodes and only for other shows on HBO.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp3004.htm... they charge different rates for different screen sizes, which I find highly objectionable. If I want it on all of my devices, it's $8/wk

[1] https://order.hbonow.com/ Oh, look, an https site. NY Times redirects from https to http.
HN allows humor. It tends to be downvoted because it tends to be not very good, where "not very good" means that it fails to extend the content and ignores the reader. At the meta-level, downvoted humor is invariably followed by "why all the downvotes, lighten up" driving any hope of anyone learning anything about anything other than the way HN tends to work further into the weeds with a pitcher of hurt feelings.

The idea to discourage humor comes from an understanding of how online communities work and how the mores of communities shape behavior.
It may be faster than cooking for yourself, but not always cheaper.

http://www.watchusthrive.org/Libraries/Resources_Documents/B...
Publicity is the lifeblood of commerce. As long as one seller exists, one or more advertisers will also exist to help him sell more. Sad but true.
They talk about the bounces of light, which reminds me of radiosity global illumination[1]. I'm left wondering if this idea of going "from the camera to the light sources" is applied in any particular radiosity implementation, and which are it's differences in respecto to the basic form of the algorithm (that would be "from the light sources to the camera").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosity_%28computer_graphics...
Not how up to the .com bust the newspapers were actually making more money than before. The collapse of the market took a heavy toll, both on newly minted online media as well as on established media that had made the jump to online.
If I remember correctly, a number of banks specify that providing credentials to a third party isn't allowed. If your credentials actually got stolen, the banks could deny assistance.

I use Mint though and I find it really helpful for monitoring my finances.
Why should we bend over backwards for advertisers but not paying customers?