Ask HN: What is the future of the programmer? - <AUTHOR> To clarify more the question: How do you see the programmer in the future? Some people are talking about scientific programmer. This seems like a trend now. But is is the only perspective?
For example I'm thinking what will a programmer do in a world where there are a lot of AIs and some of them are writing code already? Or what does a programmer need to know/to be in order to program AIs? <comment><USER2> The big picture is not going to change. There are two broad categories of programmer. 1) people who build applications by gluing libraries and APIs together to get what they want. There is no shortage of things people want the machines to do, and this is by far the biggest swath of programmers and will remain so for the foreseeable future. 2) The people who do deeper dives and build high performance subsystems and components and wrap them in APIs for the first group to use. The older components will see slow replacement by newer/better versions of the same, while new areas are opening up all the time. Vision, voice, image processing, genetic analysis, communications, payment systems, medical records, you name it.

If you're the first kind of programmer, do some programming with some of the tools that interest you to learn new things and broaden your experience/understanding. If you're the 2nd kind, pick and area that interests you and roll your own. It doesn't matter if there is a big commercial code or even a big open source version out there, chances are if the right person does their homework they can build a better mouse trap. Just because something is big doesn't mean it's the best that can be, some things just have a lot of momentum.

But no, I don't really see much changing other than the list of things people build and then glue together. That basic pattern (build tools, apply tools) seems to be very persistent. Rather than worry about the future, you should open your eyes to just how wide the field is today.

<comment><USER3> From talking with hiring managers and upper-level managers & executives across many different startups and big companies, there's an important caveat to "The big picture is not going to change."

Application engineering is getting easier and easier to the point where people no longer need a degree or even extensive training to be able to do application engineering work. Employers are aware of this, startups especially, and often prefer unskilled individuals (or people with only domain expertise) who are willing to work extra hard to teach themselves the skills on the job. They often pay these people less as well. This was explicitly stated as a good strategy by a ycombinator partner, and the executives of several successful, well-known, mid-size companies.

Honestly I hope this isn't true, maybe someone else can shed some light on this.

What will change is who is doing the work, how many people are employed, and how much they're compensated for their work.

I also want to mention that a number of my friends have gotten job offers from Google, and they're much lower than the offers other friends received just a year ago for similar positions (at least $20k less).

<comment><USER4> Honestly this isn't even close to true. It's can seem that way if all you look at is startups that fail fairly early on but the vast majority of startups that grow beyond the early prototype stage end up rewriting the app using solid engineering principles or they fold under the load. That requires people who really know what they are doing. Is it easier to prototype an app now? Certainly. Is it easier to build a scalable stable app now? No, not really at all. It's not breaking new ground anymore but it certainly requires a great deal of experience and hard earned knowledge to get there.

<comment><USER5> >. Is it easier to build a scalable stable app now? No, not really at all.

What? It's vastly easier. 10 years ago, you'd often buy servers. Getting a HA DB required a bit of knowledge (especially if you weren't using SQL Server's easy cluster stuff). Backups were another hassle.

Now? Click "New Database" and select a performance and HA level. Done. Look at StackExchange - they just scaled the DB up cause RAM is cheap enough to put a TB in a server. That's vastly easier than dealing with scaling out. And even to scale out, "cloud" DBs like SQL Azure have sharding and auto-scale built- in.

On top of that, servers are MUCH faster. Look at the RPS that some sites are claiming. They simply aren't that high. 1000 RPS? 10 years ago that required some planning. Now, so long you don't do dumb things, it's not an issue. (Source: I ran a system that did hundreds of millions of transactions a day, and the hardware requirements were rather light. Each transaction ended up in an ACID DB UPDATE, in addition to archival, auditing, HTTP requests, etc.)

It's simply incorrect to say it's not easier to scale today. It is.

<comment><USER6> 10 years ago expectations were lower too though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every 10 years or so there's a discussion on if we've reached the point when programs can program other programs, or the WYSIWYG is so good anyone off the street can do it.. It never turns out to be the case.

The problem is that software developers are largely detail managers, we work out the finer points of everything and translate it into something someone who doesn't need to think or care about the finer points can use.

For example, you could design a building yourself - but at the end of the day you could just tell an architect what to do and he/she will manage the details for you. A good one will even stop you making obvious mistakes, and save you cash by suggesting better materials etc.

<comment><USER8> [http://xkcd.com/568/](http://xkcd.com/568/)

"You will never find a programming language that will free you from the burden of clarifying your ideas."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> An interesting vision is that we'll go from _programs_ that can be executed to _models_ that can be solved with generic solvers (e.g. SAT solvers [1], or CP solvers [2])

So if you need to sort an array, instead of programming quicksort, you will simply _specify_ that you are looking for a permutation of the input array T such that for all i, T[i] < T[i+1] and the solver will search and find a solution to your problem (i.e. a sorted array) using whatever technique it likes.

Many constraint satisfaction and optimisation problems are already solved this way, there's a possibility that this generalise to other problems.

There's many advantages to this: first you need less (no?) testing, because if the solution doesn't match the problem specification it can only be a bug in the solver.

Second, there's a chance that solvers will eventually be as fast as human programmers at finding solutions. Just like the compilers are almost as good at programmers at generating assembly, and often better. If this happens programming in general will become as useless as programming in assembly today.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem#Algorithms_for_solving_SAT)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming)

<comment> vezzy-fnord Why hasn't Prolog programmed us out of existence, then?

Don't get me wrong. Constraint solvers are useful and powerful tools for declarative problem solving, but I don't recall them ever being viewed as general-purpose, especially not to the level of being a generic "autocode" (what compilers were once called, funnily enough) system.

Genetic programming seems like a more likely candidate (with some combination of SAT solvers and statistical learning), but again hypothesizing about such a major thing doesn't appear fruitful at present.

<comment><USER9> To clarify CP and SAT solvers are just examples and obviously they're not good enough otherwise we would be using them already. Genetic programming with combinations of SAT and statistical learning is also a possibility I guess [1]. The point is that you wouldn't need to instruct the processor what to do anymore, you would just specify the output (aka declarative programming).

> Why hasn't Prolog programmed us out of existence, then?

I would say because of its (low) speed.

> Constraint solvers are useful and powerful tools for declarative problem > solving, but I don't recall them ever being viewed as general-purpose, > especially not to the level of being a generic "autocode"

They are not autocode, but they are autosolve-my-problem which is in fact what you really want. I don't believe automatically generating code makes any sense. Source code is a very inefficient way to represent a program (i.e. a function) that is only useful because it can easily be written/modified by humans. There's no point in using source code as an internal representation for a program.

[1] AFAIK state of the art SAT solvers already do some level of learning: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict- Driven_Clause_Learning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict- Driven_Clause_Learning)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We'll be writing yet another goddamn reporting system for marketing. However, the coffee will be exquisitely made by Blue Bottle's autonomous cybernetic drone.

<comment><USER11> I have written a reporting system at nearly every company I've worked for. I've talked to programmers who wrote reporting systems in the 70's and 80's, and are still writing them today. I think you're right, we will still be writing reporting systems well into the future.

<comment><USER12> This is hilarious - I just started my internship at a company and a few of the people in the department are working on....you guessed it reporting systems!

A lot of the other things that are going on are fun things though, and being an intern and working on a project - from scratch is a rewarding experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I believe the current trend of high level languages will continue. Your average coder already is working at a high abstraction level, with many not even having to deal with direct file access or memory management. Even the ones who do work at lower levels frequently do not get down to assembly.

When I started this career a couple decades ago, this was not the case. Most people worked in C, with the majority at least having had exposure to, if not direct professional experience at the assembly level. The abstractions we work at today existed, but were were just written off as toys and script, not "real programming".

I think this will continue - most software developers will be re-using components, piecing them together like legos. Actually writing code to make those components happen will be less common.

There will always be people who can work at all levels of the systems... but the crowd of coders just making a living will move higher and higher in terms of abstraction.

<comment><USER14> Well, I'm gonna be one of the "all levels of the systems" guys. Honestly, if suddenly my job was nothing more than piecing components together, only writing stuff in super high level languages, I'd quit. I love my job, because I actually have to use my brain to do it right.

And then I'd work as a garbage man or something, and write good old code at home. ;-)

<comment><USER15> Or you can start your own company and write good old code at work for profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Programming isn't the hard part - the hard part is communicating with people and understanding the problems they need solved. Master that and you will have a job for however long you want.

<comment><USER17> That depends on how innovative your programming is. Let's take two examples of billionaire programmers: The Google Search guys and the Bitcoin guy. What you see is that they have never, ever asked anybody what problems they needed solved. They imagined something interesting and then they just built it. All preliminary forms of communication with other people would simply have been useless, because none of us knew that we needed Google Search until we saw it, and none of use would ever have believed that Bitcoin could work, until we saw it with our own eyes. In other words, if you are doing a truly innovative project, you should not communicate with people but simply ignore them until you are ready to show what you have built, simply because they will not be able to believe that it is possible to fly to the moon, until someone actually does it.

<comment><USER5> >because none of us knew that we needed Google Search until we saw it,

Did you use search engines before Google? It was obviously a shitty experience. And ads? And don't even start on the folks that thought they could categorize the web by hand, or use META tags to sort it all out.

So while the Google guys might not have gone around polling people "What can I build that you'd like and would make me rich?", it was far from a dream of a product no one had thought about. Tons of money was going into search engines and portals by the time Google started.

And Bitcoin? The dream of e-cash has been around for a while as well; it wasn't a brand new idea. The implementation was a breakthrough, but the idea has been around for a while. (Nitpick: And at current rates, Satoshi's coins are probably worth much less than a billion dollars. And AFAIK, there's been no movement on the blocks people thinks he has.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the 'programmer' will slowly dissolve away, as the new generation learns how to program just like we used to learn how to read and write. My daughter is 5, she barely reads, but she finds it very easy to make small programs on sites like code.org. She can think in loops and even understands recursion.

Like spelling and maths, programming is a technique to achieve a goal in an area. A couple of centuries there were very few 'literate' people and even fewer mathematicians, maybe a couple percent of the population. As education progressed, literacy and maths became a normality and now an average 16-year old has an arsenal of tools and equations to solve very complex problems that Pythagoras or even Newton struggled with or had to invent.

The same thing will happen to programming. We're talking about maybe 10-20 years when everyone will know how to program and the tools they will have (programming languages or environments) will be so powerful that they will be able to build their domain specific solution in a very short period of time.

There will be of course people focused on languages or low level operating system stuff, but those areas are in themselves entire branches so it will be more appropriate to call them 'compiler scientist' or 'performance engineers' rather than the generic term 'programmer'.

<comment><USER17> If that were true, everybody and their little sister would understand the Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem by now. It was discovered in 1817. They teach it everywhere in high schools as a mandatory item in the math class. However, there is no hope whatsoever that more than 10% of the population would ever understand what it means.

<comment><USER18> Multiplied by the population of Earth, that's still a huge number of people.

What I was trying to say is that there are lot of problems that are already solved and new generations can build on top of that. There are always going to be ever more complicated problems and ever-expanding areas, but in many areas we've pretty much figured things out so people can just use the solutions in their domain specific problems without having to re-implement them. I'm talking about open source libraries, higher-level programming languages and even visual programming which can be used by people to write programs without needing to understand the deeper aspects of things.

Doctors visualising data, artists making interactive art or chaining visual effects, lawyers querying databases - things you needed to hire programmers for will be done by people who aren't doing this full time, but can do it if required.

<comment><USER19> It's definitely seems true. I think it would be even more powerful. remember reading about nutonian which enabled a doctor to build a machine learning model to differentiate between kids who needed surgery and who did not.

And on the other hand ,similar capability, i.e. machine learning is being used by the researchers to crack TOR mostly just by feeding data to the algorithm.

So basically ,strong tools will be available to everybody, greatly equalizing programmers and non=programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think that a software that writes good software is quite far down the line, I wouldn't direct my career planning around it. Humanity's brightest haven't even managed to make a cross-browser styling language that renders lines that are aligned with each other correctly.

</comment><comment><USER21> We'll write AIs (heh).

On a more serious note, if program writing neural-nets develop much further I can see the field putting more of an emphasis on the theoretical aspect, and leaving implementations to the AIs -- a bit like the way mathematics is heading. Less time spent on proof-checking (and one day perhaps, construction), etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Consider the field from its inception and how it has changed over time. We move into higher abstractions and release ourselves from having to worry about details such as memory management. Even so, as an embedded software engineer I find myself wrestling with memory usage and throughput budgets. As AI becomes reality, it would be ideal to mold (evolve?) an AI to help me address specific weaknesses in my capabilities to allow me to focus on "the problem at hand". If you're curious about that sort of AI development as it relates to embedded software, check out "hyper-heuristics".

You can really answer your question according to the observable trends of the field. The role of the "programmer" will shift, that's all.

Regarding what a programmer needs to know, I think you'd be hard pressed to find something that wouldn't be useful in some way. Personally, I am trying to read as much of the "Old Masters" as I can. I've started with Claude Shannon and have tried to hit all the big names along the way. Bernard Widrow's work ([http://www-isl.stanford.edu/people/widrow/publications.html](http://www- isl.stanford.edu/people/widrow/publications.html) most articles are free) got me started.

<comment><USER23> > As AI becomes reality, it would be ideal to mold (evolve?) an AI to help me > address specific weaknesses in my capabilities to allow me to focus on "the > problem at hand".

It's possible to do this already. Although working on application software at the moment which doesn't have any special assurance requirements, I've started making use of an interactive theorem prover to help sanity-check some complicated bits of logic. It's the future, from what I can see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree with the comment citing XKCD "You will never find a programming language that will free you from the burden of clarifying your ideas."

I see programming as a way to model reality. All programs essentially created to do something with objects of the real world or model existing world in some way. And that is where the complexity comes from. As we go higher up the stack of abstractions and tools, some things get easier, but the problems and tasks remain complex just like the world behind them. Performance gains we get come from the fact that many of the modeling and decision making has been done "at the level below" so we can shift into making higher level decisions.

Just imagine a "magic AI" which can create any program for you simply based on your description. For any non-trivial program which does not previously exist you would need to specify so many details that your list of requirements essentially becomes a program (in DSL). The more "defaults" and existing pieces you can use, the easier your job will be.

So, following that logic, the programmer of the future would be using some sort of AI for sure, to take care of the parts of the system which can be reused and recombined (taking care of the common details). And that means that anybody who can _describe_ what they want will be able "to program". But for new problems, it would need to go into deeper down the stack and domain knowledge to be able to build new things.

In terms of "what you need to know" it means having domain knowledge so you can describe what you want. And for new domains - being able to dive deep and learn them, which means the more basic stuff you know (math, statistics, algorithms, whatever), the more efficient you will be in learning and ultimately building.

</comment><comment><USER25> we will probably continue to program the problem solvers for some time to come.

            $code = '$z = 0;' . PHP_EOL
                . '$y = 0;' . PHP_EOL
                . '$x = 0;' . PHP_EOL
                . '$x = 0;' . PHP_EOL
                . '$y = 1;' . PHP_EOL
                . 'for ($count = 0; $count < 10; $count++) {' . PHP_EOL
                . '    $z = $x + $y;' . PHP_EOL
                . '    echo $z;' . PHP_EOL
                . '    $x = $y;' . PHP_EOL
                . '    $y = $z;' . PHP_EOL
                . '}';

            $this->assertPhpAndResultEquals(
                $code,
                '123581321345589',
                $this->asPhp(
                    'sätt x till 0 och sätt y till 1 och upprepa följande 10 gånger:'
                    . ' sätt z till x + y'
                    . ' och visa z'
                    . ' och sätt x till y'
                    . ' och sätt y till z'
                )
            );

</comment><comment><USER26> You must look at this article about technological singularity.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)

In my opinion, the next programmers generation will do quantic computing. Crypto algorithms, protocols, softwares, we will have to rethink everything to get it working with qubits. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit))

</comment><comment><USER27> There will always be programmers. It's just a matter of whether said programmers will be electronic or biological :)

If AI ends up replacing most programming tasks, then our jobs will likely shift to something more akin to AI-centric psychology mixed with high-level software engineering. Much like how only the most hardcore "Real Programmers(TM)" today write their programs in assembly or machine code in this day and age of optimizing compilers and interpreted/JIT'd languages, only the most hardcore "Real Programmers(TM)" of the future will actually write software from scratch, with most programmers instead opting to give their AIs descriptions of what they want their programs to do like how we give compilers or interpreters source code files today.

I expect that there'll be a heavy emphasis on TDD/BDD in such a future; you'd write a specification or (inclusively) a suite of integration tests, and your artificially-intelligent program-maker will create software that meets the specifications provided and satisfies the provided tests.

Whether or not these will be "programmers" in the traditional sense is a bit fuzzy; it's conceivable that - someday - non-technical pointy-haired-boss types could come up with specifications if AI-driven software-building tools can sufficiently understand natural languages. At that point, though, it's fuzzy whether or not PHBs will exist, or whether humanity will exist (or AIs, if a Dune-Butlerian-Jihad-style anti-computer revolution manages to happen).

</comment><comment><USER28> Programming is way to important to leave it to humans. I think in the near future we'll have programs who write programs and humans will be unneeded in this field.

<comment><USER29> > humans will be unneeded

Nice try, Skynet prototype.

<comment><USER28> > in this field :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How far in the future are you wanting to consider? I don't think we're remotely close to even a primitive form of AI, let alone any AI that can program without human input.

Personally, I'd be shocked if this happens in the next 100 years. But it's such a "new" field, that trying to predicit 100 years into the future is a crapshoot.

<comment><USER9> How do you define programming? If it's specifying a program that maps some inputs with some outputs, many AI systems are already able to do this, sometime even better than humans.

For example: would you be able to write a program that can recognise people faces with 80% accuracy? Probably not but AIs can do it.

<comment><USER31> Neural nets currently still require a program to interpret them, and that program is typically written by a human.

<comment><USER9> The point is that the human doesn't write a face recognition system, but a system that learns from examples.

If humans cannot program AIs, who else is going to do it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Humans are messy.

AI will probably dominate the everything where the process is well known and BORING. Even if better mechanisms (security, processing, protocols) take place, there will always be issues between humans and machines.

For example here is a good example, about how computers and humans make each others situations more complex.

[https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a- hospital...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital-to- give-a-patient-38-times-his-dosage-ded7b3688558)

</comment><comment><USER33> The only thing I know about the future is that nobody knows about it. If you would force me to respond to your question, I'd say it would take a long while until AI's can predict taste, feelings, emotions, "change of minds" and so on and so on. Maybe AI's will do the websites for us, but even then I would not worry. Instead, I would do something with a real meaning and a real purpose. Like maintaining a garden. As skill which might come handy when the AI wars begin.

</comment><comment><USER34> Until there's a better way for humans and machines to communicate, programming will continue to thrive.

When I say better way, I don't mean touch or type, I mean better connected to our thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER35> "there are a lot of AIs and some of them are writing code already?"

That's post-Singularity, and can't be meaningfully discussed.

Since the idea of the singularity has gotten conflated with _one particular possible outcome_ ("rapture of the nerds" is merely one of the better possibilities, not the totality of the idea), let me remind you that the core idea of the singularity is that it is when the future is so different than it is now that our ability to predict it has dropped to zero. There's a certain amount of relativity to it... we're post-singularity for a cave man, for instance. AIs that are smart enough to program themselves will result in a world so radically different that there is no meaningful way to plan for what to do from here in 2015.

In the future before then, which for all we know may well encompass the entire lives of everybody here, and assuming no major civilizational hiccups (which may not be "singularities" but are also fairly difficult to predict around), programming will be one of the few fields that probably will continue to grow more or less indefinitely for the forseeable future. More stuff is going to be programmable, and the advantage for a company to have better programmer better than its competitor will likely also grow.

In fact I think there's a decent chance that demand for programmers, and especially _good_ programmers, is likely to rise beyond the base level of people who are even theoretically capable of becoming that level of programmer. I suspect we have not actually seen peak salary in this field for good programmers.

(Interesting tidbit... programming has the tendency to "eat" other fields, as others have noticed. Even if genetics and biology manage to do everything that they've ever promised... the top level of biological designers are going to look an awful lot like programmers, moreso than biologists, precisely because the only way we'll ever have that level of control over biology is to abstract the issues away until we have a programming language on top. Nobody can work at the raw gene level, at scale. Oh, it won't be C or Haskell or Python, but it'll still be a programming language. Probably declarative.)

I'm not just trying to say good things to make us happy; this has been my assessment of the field's prognosis for a while, even since before the bubble pop, and I've seen nothing to make me change it, even the bubble pop and the 2008 crisis. Even if we are in another bubble now and _it_ pops, it would have to _epically_ pop, like, the entire country, person by person, decides this whole "Internet" thing is a total waste of time forever for all things, for me to change my mind.

The fact that I feel this way about this field and that I work in this field is not a coincidence. Per my comment [1], when in 1996 I mentally did what I suggested in that post and "computer programmer" popped out in my second slot for Jobs I'd Like To Do, I was pretty grateful, and, again, have seen nothing to make me change my mind since.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667145)

<comment><USER36> "some of them are writing code already?"

I read it as, some AI are already writing code. In the present day.

<comment><USER35> Writing a bit of code is nothing interesting. I haven't seen anything that convinces me that any AIs have taken any interesting steps in the direction of replacing programmers. In a way, writing code is literally the maximally pessimal case for an AI, exposure to the full power of Turing Chaos [1], the worst possible space of possibilities for an AI to consider. Frankly, even after decades of training and practice, the smartest humans are not even all that great at it.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111308)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> CRUD websites for some boring management thing.

</comment><comment><USER38> Web forms</comment>


76 Popular Apps Confirmed Vulnerable to Interception of TLS-Protected Data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@chronic_9612/76-popular-apps-confirmed-vulnerable-to-silent-interception-of-tls-protected-data-2c9a2409dd1 <comment><USER2> Very interesting. I always felt that I better do mobile banking on a 3G/4G connection than over WiFi, so I'm already performing the mitigation action even if I'm not using any of those apps. I'm also on the other mobile OS but I think this could be a more general problem.

Unfortunately the post falls short of giving any advice to developers. They are the ones who made the mistakes and should fix them.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's "TLS-Protected data" then how can it be intercepted? I thought the idea behind TLS is to protect data on the wire. The only way I can think TLS would be intercepted is if a rogue certificate was placed somewhere

<comment><USER4> Mathematics lets us solve most of the problems of how to communicate securely at a distance, but one it can't tackle. Who are we communicating with? In TLS this problem is left to one or more trusted third parties, the Certificate Authorities. But, which CAs should we trust?

Developers of an application using TLS have to make this choice, but they may not do a very good job. Worse, they may not even realise they were supposed to make a choice at all. For Safari the decisions are being made by some bunch of Apple engineers who hopefully know a lot about TLS and trust. For Firefox, the decisions are made in public, anyone can help Mozilla make policy, both experts and amateurs are welcome to bring their insight. But for some random iOS app, the decision was probably made by some guy with no specialist knowledge, copy-pasting examples they found with Google.

Now, if they pick "Only trust Symantec's public CA" and six months later their company tries to switch from Symantec to Comodo, they'll soon realise their goof. It may cost them a lot of money, but no real harm was done.

But what if they pick "Just trust anybody"? Well, everything _seems_ fine. It all works, the data is encrypted, there's no outward sign that anything is wrong. Until a bad guy makes their own CA (takes about five minutes) and issues whatever TLS certificates they want, which the app will accept happily and talk to the bad guy instead if they're able to intercept the network connection.</comment></comment>


Is there any huge web application built using Redux? - <AUTHOR> All examples that I see on the web using Redux (which sounds really good in principle) are tiny small. Little counters, todo apps, etc. I wonder if the proposed approach of a single global state would scale to a real-world big app, where there might be hundreds (maybe thousands) of reducers and actions and a huge state object. <comment><USER2> Agreed. There's currently about 2200 repos that show up in a Github search for "redux" \+ Javascript, and the vast majority of them are boilerplates, TodoMVCs, and copies of the "Full Stack Redux" voting tutorial. Have to admit I'm curious to see some bigger examples as well.

The "Who Uses Redux?" issue in the repo ( [https://github.com/rackt/redux/issues/310](https://github.com/rackt/redux/issues/310) ) does list a number of companies, so it does seem like there's actual usage. I also ran across [https://github.com/mezod/listlogs/tree/joan](https://github.com/mezod/listlogs/tree/joan) , which is at least more of a real app. Finally, the Firefox DevTools now appear to use Redux some as well ( [https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/rev/17d1d8bbae99](https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/rev/17d1d8bbae99) ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

<comment><USER2> And to follow up on this, I turned up a few more actual projects on Github while searching for uses of the "createSelector" function from the Reselect library.

I can't say anything for how good these projects are, but they ARE actual uses of Redux that are more than a TodoMVC. Here's some links:

[https://github.com/jfurrow/flood](https://github.com/jfurrow/flood)

[https://github.com/FH-Potsdam/shifted-maps](https://github.com/FH- Potsdam/shifted-maps)

[https://github.com/quirinpa/2post](https://github.com/quirinpa/2post)

[https://github.com/karlguillotte/Ctfs](https://github.com/karlguillotte/Ctfs)

[https://github.com/madou/gw2armory.com](https://github.com/madou/gw2armory.com)

In fact, that GW2Armory app is the biggest one I've seen so far, including some VERY complex reducers and selectors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again!

Isn't it ironic that GW2Armory is actually an AngularJS app using Redux?

<comment><USER2> Not entirely. Certainly Redux is most commonly used with React, but Redux itself is entirely its own library. If I wanted to, I could use Backbone Views on top of it or something. On which note, it looks like the "ng-redux" project is the equivalent of "React-Redux" \- hooking up the state updates to a view layer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: OWASP London tonight. OWASP EU Summit and WordPress Security - <AUTHOR> https://www.owasp.org/index.php/London#Next_Meeting.2FEvent <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I am talking there on WordPress, and will sort something out for HN readers outside of the UK next month.

If you're a HN'er and you're looking to come down tonight, do say hello.</comment>


Kingston and PNY using cheaper components after good reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kingston-and-pny-caught-bait-and-switching-cheaper-components-after-good-reviews <comment><USER3> This sort of thing isn't unique to the storage business. In the auto industry, they call it "decontenting":

[http://www.autoweek.com/car- shopping/articles/2012/01/decont...](http://www.autoweek.com/car- shopping/articles/2012/01/decontenting--what-does-it-mean-for-car- shoppers.html)

... but it works pretty much the same way: early models of a particular car, the ones that make that car's reputation, come loaded with all sorts of nice touches. Then as time passes the manufacturer slowly strips those touches out, replacing them with cheaper alternatives or just dropping them altogether. The price of the car stays the same, though, so the manufacturer gets to keep the difference as extra profit. (Or the price actually goes _up_ , when the dropped features that used to be standard become optional add-ons instead.)

<comment><USER4> Interesting note at the end:

"Don't think decontenting is limited to just cars. Next time you're at the grocery store, stop by the freezer case and check out your favorite carton of ice cream. Most brands have quietly gone from a half-gallon (two-quart) container to 1.75 quarts--without changing the price."

I'm pretty sure I've seen the higher-end brands dropping to 1.5 quarts now. Sodas are pushing 1.25L and 1.5L containers when it used to just be purely 2L. There are a lot of four-packs in the beer aisle. A fair number of meats are being sold in fixed-sized packages, invariably less than one pound per package, rather than being sold by the pound.

At least it's clear enough if you look for it. In the SSD case, it sounds like they're making important alterations to things that aren't discussed in the specs. Of course, you shouldn't buy something depending on anything that isn't listed in the specs, but if all the manufacturers have the same crappy set of incomplete specs, you don't have a lot of choice.

<comment><USER5> Worse yet, some ice-cream brands (e.g., Breyer's) are _also_ reformulating their recipes to use cheaper ingredients -- meaning they no longer meet the standard to be called "ice cream", but instead must be called "frozen dairy dessert": [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/dining/remembering-when- br...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/dining/remembering-when-breyers-ice- cream-was-you-know-ice-cream.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER6> That's a case of the labeling law working nicely though.

I like it when package prices have to be shown next to sensible unit prices, it really simplifies the comparison, regardless of any psychology that has been built into the packaging.

<comment><USER4> This really makes me hate the half-assed use of the metric system in the US. It seems like my local stores go out of their way to use different imperial units for different products, making it harder to compare. Unit prices are great, but when one package is $/oz and another is $/gallon, it defeats much of the purpose.

<comment><USER7> Oz is weight and gallon is volume. This is not a metric vs standard issue.

<comment><USER4> Oz most certainly can be used for volume. It's called the "fluid ounce".

<comment><USER8> But both oz and gallon are still imperial units. In metric they would use liters. So this isn't caused by half-assed use of the metric system, but rather by not using it at all.

<comment><USER4> In your rush to be pedantic, would it kill you to engage your brain for a few seconds first?

The US uses the metric system in many places. However, adoption has been half- assed, and non-metric units remain in common use in many situations. I buy soda and wine in liters but milk and juice in gallons, for example.

The fact that any non-metric units remain at all is due to the half-assed nature of metric system adoption in this country.

<comment><USER8> What's with the hostility? I was pointing out that WalterBright was down voted for the perfectly valid point that the problem you spoke of is not caused by half-assed use of the metric system. No matter how much I use my brain, it won't become such either. There may be other problems caused by that (I wouldn't know; I'm not American), but you specifically brought up one that is not related to metric in any way.

<comment><USER4> The hostility comes because you're going out of your way to interpret what I said in a way that makes me wrong, rather than seeing how I'm right.

And you're doing it _again_. Did you just ignore my explanation above, about how _any_ use of non-metric units in the US is ultimately due to the half- assed adoption of the metric system in this country?

<comment><USER9> Hey, I understand what you are saying. But he did have a point, why use hostility? You could have made the same comment without the first line saying 'use your brain' and kept everything civil. Even if you are right, do you need to denigrate others who have gotten something wrong?

<comment><USER4> Pedantry is an inherent part of nerd-dom. It's often a good thing. Computers and other such things don't work on "well, you know what I _meant_ ".

However, there's a nasty subset of pedantry which basically consists of pattern-matching words without truly grasping the meaning and using that as a launching point for a "you're wrong" reply. This kind of pedantry derails conversations and wrecks communities.

That's the kind of pedantry I got above with this nonsense reply about how "in metric they would use liters". As if I didn't know that! A moment's thought would indicate, hey, maybe this guy is not a complete idiot who doesn't know _anything_ about metric, and he probably _already knows_ that neither ounces nor gallons are metric, so let's figure out what he actually meant instead of doing a mindless pattern-matching "you're wrong" reply. _That_ is hostility too. Especially when you keep on going even after the guy explains it.

And of course I get the usual internet double standard, where it's perfectly OK to to write a really bad comment as long as you don't outright use upsetting words, but calling that behavior out is criticized.

I don't subscribe to this idea that "civil" is equivalent to "use nice words". To me, "civil" is about how you behave. If you curse but treat other people with respect, that's civil. If you use nothing but benign words arranged in a way that treats other people without respect, that's "not civil".

<comment><USER8> I suppose any argument in the internet can feel hostile if you care about the subject, but my apologies for any distress I may have caused anyway. My message is not intended to be about whether you are wrong, but whether the example you gave is valid. I did read your explanation, and I find it mistaken. Let me rephrase my argument, and you can point out the part you think is wrong.

If we say that a problem is caused by half-assed adoption of X, it implies the problem can be solved in two ways: (1) Properly adopting X, or (2) Reverting back to no adoption at all. The example you gave can only be solved by 1, because it is an inherent problem of the imperial system. If you take metric out of the equasion, the situation is not affected. While you may have meant to say "the imperial system has problems, let's use metric", one can also understand it as "the transition to metric is causing problems, let's stop it".

<comment><USER4> Your mistake is thinking that any statement of the form, "I hate X, for example because Y" implies that Y can be solved by any action that eliminates X.

For example, "I hate how they're serving a 50/50 mixture of coffee and urine, makes the coffee taste like urine." This does not imply that the problem can be solved by eliminating the coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dell does this with their monitors [1], first by shipping certain models with IPS panels, then with cheaper PVA panels after good reviews are published.

That bit me w/their 2007wfp, which was a great monitor mostly for 1 reason: it was IPS at a great price point. Overwhelmingly positive reviews convinced me to purchase 2 of them.

Then buyers started noticing picture quality issues not described in previous positive reviews. After some research, it was found Dell had silently started shipping the 2007wfp with cheaper PVA panels, not IPS. After noticing similar issues with the 2 I purchased, I eventually confirmed they were PVA monitors. I was fairly upset.

There's a good thread on Hard Forum about all of this here.[2]

And despite very frustrated customers, Dell never acknowledged any problem. In fact, a Dell rep can be quoted: _"... a 2007WFP is a 2007WFP ... It does not matter what panel is installed."_ [3]

I stopped buying Dell products after this experience.

[1] [http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18107050.aspx](http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18107050.aspx)

[2] [http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1111100](http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1111100)

[3] [http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18286693.aspx](http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18286693.aspx)

<comment><USER11> > In fact, a Dell rep can be quoted: "... a 2007WFP is a 2007WFP ... It does > not matter what panel is installed."

Did they ever list the panel type? If they did, isn't this false advertising?

If they never promised the panel type/view angle/color accuracy in the first place, then I don't think there's anything wrong with what the rep said. After all, not every one cares what type of panel is used as much as physical dimension/resolution. Nevertheless, it is very surprising to me that they didn't specify what panel is used.

<comment><USER12> Would you be ok if a car manufacturer put a smaller motor in a car you bought because car reviews said "it had great ability to get up and hold freeway speeds"? Is it ok as long as they didn't sell based on horse power? Or maybe it's handling: reviewers say it corners great, but then you find the suspension has been massively downgraded. How do you even advertise a spec'ed suspension?

It's dirty business if you are giving reviewers something better than the people who are reading the reviews. People don't buy computer parts (or cars) based on the advertised spec sheet, they buy them based on what they can really do.

<comment><USER13> > Would you be ok if a car manufacturer put a smaller motor in a car you > bought because car reviews said "it had great ability to get up and hold > freeway speeds"? Is it ok as long as they didn't sell based on horse power?

If they lie about the engine performance, then its wrong. If they change the components underlying (admittedly weasel-wording-marketing-speak) marketing phrasing, then it's not as clearly wrong.

>Or maybe it's handling: reviewers say it corners great, but then you find the suspension has been massively downgraded. How do you even advertise a spec'ed suspension? This is why specifications, and often component information, exists.

I'm not saying that these companies are in the right, or that this doesn't happen. It clearly does, in some cases. In other cases, it's probably due to the fact that the manufacturing supply chain is more complex than most people understand.

In all cases, it's not a great idea to paint with a broad brush. Especially when creating somewhat comparable analogies than are also pretty general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And this is why I always buy Crucial. Cruial and Micron are the same company and micron actually make the chips rather than just assemble them. They have control over the entire process end to end and no motivation to pick up chips anywhere else as they already have the best deal.

Over the last 10-12 years I've bought about 2000-3000 sticks of RAM from them. Not one failure or problem ever. I used to buy vendor provided RAM (mainly IBM and Sun back then) and just got ripped off every time. Zero failures on Sun stuff but the ECC stuff hurts. IBM sold us crap lots of times.

Only pain is you can't get an 8Mb EDO SIMM anymore for embedded stuff so its off to a dealer to be shafted repetitively for stuff like that.

<comment><USER15> I avoid Crucial SSDs like the plague. They shipped the M4 and similar models with a firmware bug that causes the drive to stop working after 5000 hours of power on time:

[http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware- BSOD,14...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware- BSOD,14544.html)

Not cool.

<comment><USER16> Crucial, OCZ and Kingston were the favorite failure complaints on the email list I was on at Microsoft ("Hardware Junkies"). The wisdom a few years ago was to stick with Intel and Samsung.

I see no reason to change that. I'd rather spend fifty or a hundred bucks more and get a drive that I'm pretty sure won't fall flat on its face.

<comment><USER17> OCZ is the worst - I avoid them like the plague now. I've had 2 of 3 of their SSDs fail on me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen a similar situation about five years ago when I was testing USB pendrives for a local paper. It turned out it was close to impossible to get two pieces with the same specs and performance, even though they were branded with the same name.

I've heard similar stories about HDDs having different controllers, number of discs and so on.

Luckily in EU one can return within two weeks anything ordered online, so a simple solution is to order, test and return if it doesn't match expectations.

<comment><USER19> Return something that was taken out of the box and used?!

<comment><USER20> Yes; in UK, it's Distance Selling Regulations (DSR).

You're better protected if you buy online than in a store, ironically.

PS: I looked it up, and actually the DSR has been superseded as of yesterday (!) by Consumer Contracts Regulations, which ups the UK protection from 7 days to 14 days, bringing it into line with EU directives.

<comment><USER21> > You're better protected if you buy online than in a store, ironically.

It's the only thing that makes sense, particularly if you want to instil trust in customers that buying online is "safe" and not prone to scams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had this problem with PNY with one of their other products - I bought a mid- tier video card from them (GeForce GTX 570), and after a hardware failure, sent it in for an RMA. Over the course of _multiple_ RMA mailings, at various times they would send back a visibly physically damaged 'replacement' card, a 'replacement' card that was a different size/shape (and obviously a different model), and in one case _my broken card, that I sent them initially_. It was as if they had a pile of 'works well enough to boot Windows' cards and RMAs that weren't totally broken got put into the pile, while they pulled other cards out of the pile to ship to customers.

It was pretty impressive to be able to watch shady cost-cutting in action. Too bad it cost me around $120 in UPS shipping fees.

</comment><comment><USER23> I purchased an ASUS Notebook X550DP-DS101-CA with a resolution of 1920x1080 last year.

Exact same model #, 1366x768 at some stores, 1920x1080 at others. (Same store franchise.)

I was run around three stores until I managed to get the "real model" that I was looking for.

Caveat emptor.

<comment><USER24> Lenovo did this with the last Thinkpad I ever bought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this something the storage industry is particularly notorious for? I recall that Seagate and Western Digital's (knowingly) substandard drives nearly bankrupted Amstrad.

<comment><USER26> It's common in any commodity industry where the differences aren't obvious to the casual buyer. In older industries we've had regulation requiring things like standard labels, sealed packaging, etc. to prevent abuses like selling food with inferior ingredients or lying about a car's fuel economy. I suspect it's only a matter of time before this happens in the tech industry since the market pressures give a strong incentive to cheat.

Bunnie Huang had a fascinating, disturbing post about what the MicroSD market is like in China, eventually disassembling some dodgy Kingston cards:

[http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022)

<comment><USER27> Just yesterday motor oil, transmission fluid, and antifreeze came up in a similar lawsuit. Not a lot of details, but interested parties could start here: [http://fox2now.com/2014/06/13/mo-attorney-general-suing- five...](http://fox2now.com/2014/06/13/mo-attorney-general-suing-five-local- retailers-for-bogus-products/)

<comment><USER28> The unfortunate thing is there are probably so many people who just buy that shit because they need it. My initial reaction was that piece wasn't necessary & is more due to companies coming up with shit products & flooding the market, which happens in IT too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> People shouldn't have bought those brands to begin with since they add no value: [http://www.storagereview.com/it_s_game_over_for_most_consume...](http://www.storagereview.com/it_s_game_over_for_most_consumer_ssd_companies)

BTW, Apple does the same thing: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689180)

<comment><USER30> That's not the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hate hearing about these stories from manufactures, it totally kills their rep for me to ever trust them again. Why do companies go against just building solid products, even if it costs a little more money. It's exactly how Apple has gotten away with charging premium dollars for similar hardware - <USER2> quality always wins.

<comment><USER32> Nothing is more aggravating than planned obsolescence in appliances. Just sell me a good product that will last 30+ year with basic maintenance. I'll happily pay literally up to 5x the price you charge for your 5 year lifetime (if I'm lucky) piece of shit. Hell, I'll probably buy the replacement parts from you besides so it's not like you're completely losing my business.

<comment><USER33> Because nobody buys 100 dollar toasters.

<comment><USER32> I would if it came with an assurance/warranty for the next 30 years from a company I didn't think would go bankrupt before then.

<comment><USER33> If that were actually true they would be making them.

(And they do make them, they're commercial quality equipment and they're easy to find. Consumer's don't want to pay the big bucks for this stuff. Not even you, or you'd go find it.)

<comment><USER32> I have looked into these things, sadly commercial dishwashers aren't viewed as being suitable for residential purposes. Toasters perhaps, I'll confess to having not looked into those yet. Washing machine and dryer I do plan to buy commercial most likely as soon as the need arises and I don't live in a place with laundry provided.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm fine with paying for these things, I've learned time and time again that I'm better off paying more for a quality product than getting the cheapest thing I can possibly find.

<comment><USER33> Me too. If I'm buying cheap it's cuz I'm poor atm!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Dell has also been caught doing this with monitors.

<comment><USER35> Were they good to start with?

<comment><USER36> With a few exceptions (which may be what poolpool is referring to), Dell's UltraSharp lines have been one of the better sources of consistently good consumer IPS displays for 10+ years.

<comment><USER37> And even the models that have used PVA panels have been much better than TN- based monitors, with their biggest weakness generally being input lag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The Cadillac DTS initially came with standard heated leather seats. In 2009, > that feature became an option. "However, the price of the car didn't > change," he said.

The price actually dropped, due to inflation.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good to know

Kingston seemed to be a nice brand some 10 years ago, but nowadays it's mostly hype

<comment><USER39> Kingston was always the dodgy cheap brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Hardly new stuff. We had horrible problems in production 10 years ago. After analyzing the situation, we found out that the new servers had same memory as older ones from Kingston. But when you watched closely, you noticed that even if the Kingston label with all type information was exactly the same, the chips on the DIMM weren't. So no new news here.

If you work in the IT department, you'll also probably know, that when ordering 300 "similar" computers: Changes are quite low that you're really getting those delivered. After going through the delivery, it's quite likely that you got at least 10 different computer series in that delivery. Different power source, different memory, possibly different motherboard, hard drive, power source cooling fan, cpu cooler etc. That's just normal unfortunately. That's why many supplier leave the specification quite open on purpose, so it doesn't matter what they deliver as long as it's something meeting the specification.

</comment><comment><USER41> If you're going to buy a SSD go with Samsung or Intel

<comment><USER42> I was going to say the same thing. These seems to yield the least unhappy customers and return rates. Intel more than anyone seems to care about the quality of their SSDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Samsung too. Evo 240gb, Half the benchmarked read/write iops on newer SSDs. We returned 6 before going with a different brand.

<comment><USER44> Do you have a source for that? I'm looking to buy, that or the Crucial MX100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Just get Intel ssds. They are the best

</comment><comment><USER46> I've always wondered how this maneuver isn't considered a major free market failure.

</comment><comment><USER47> What a bunch of cunts.</comment>


Show HN: Outsource your Online Dating for $9.99 per week - <AUTHOR> http://www.flashsuper.org <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some of the additional products we have at Flash:

1) www.FlashRides.org - No Surge Pricing and Much Cheaper than Uber.

2) www.FlashSuper.org - Outsource your email, your dry-cleaning, your house- cleaning, your dating, or get a personal assistant!

3) www.FlashJobSearchAssistants.org - outsource your job search to us for $49/mo.</comment>


Movim 0.3 is out  - <AUTHOR> http://movim.eu/

<comment><USER2> This website is awful. I have to read the site's front page in order to infer that it's some kind of instant messenging protocol.

People aren't going to your site to see that big picture of a field, they're going to your site to either A) See what Movim is, or B) Download Movim. Tell us what Movim is, and provide us a download link, front and center.</comment>


One day offices will be a thing of the past - <AUTHOR> http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/one-day-offices-will-be-a-thing-of-the-past <comment><USER2> In general, predicting that something that has been around for centuries will be gone in decades is a bad bet. I wonder if Richard Branson has ever spent long periods of time working alone.

I spent six months working remotely in 2004. What led me to start my company in 2005 was not the desire to make money; I had enough back then. I really missed the in-person interaction with other hackers. I was living in Buenos Aires at the time. What I wanted did not exist there so I had to create it.

<comment><USER3> Hypothetically speaking, in a society in which "offices were a thing of the past", a problem so common as loneliness would likely be solved in a multitude of ways. Perhaps by changes in social conventions (e.g. friends working from each other's places) or by entrepreneurs directly attacking the problem (e.g. more coffee shops with fast internet, better tools for being social from home, etc).

<comment><USER4> That's the same argument that is often heard against home-schooling, the lack of socialization with other kids. What such people tend to not realize, or ignore, is that there are opportunities for kids to get socialization other than through school. True, it requires some effort on the parent's part but that doesn't mean they are not there.

If you work remote then there are avenues for socialization outside of an office space. Just because you find it lacking in one area doesn't mean that's the same for everyone nor should you ignore the possible advantages.

<comment><USER5> The problem, though, is that there's no "forced" interaction with others outside your own interests/background.

When I was in school, I was a white kid from a white neighborhood in a school that was 50% black. Had I been homeschooled, even if I had interactions outside of home, I would not have been exposed to the diversity of cultures.

I feel this will lead to a form of tribalism.

<comment><USER6> My anecdotal experience with homeschooled kids (my son is not old enough yet) is that the lack of 'forced' exposure at school is more than compensated by the habit of indulging and exploring one's curiosity. Especially because it applies not just to social aspects but to any area of knowledge, activity and culture. By the time the child's direct interests and background start showing their limits (9-ish years old?), they will have plenty of opportunities for interaction outside that circle (extracurricular classes, sports, travels, etc). Homeschooled does not mean hermit.

<comment><USER7> > Homeschooled does not mean hermit.

Agreed. My three oldest were public schooled, my two-youngest are home schooled. And what do they do after school hours? They're outside with their friends in the neighborhood, doing kid stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently had a friendly debate about this with a friend (ex-Yahoo of the golden years). The interesting thing is that a distributed organization, such as Yahoo or Google, or pretty much any multi-national, telecommuting is already in their work practices - whenever you have to coordinate across office locations, you are effectively telecommuting to that office.

However, that's not the interesting part of the conversation. What we pretty much both agreed on is that as the technology progresses, what we term in person interactions will change drastically. Today, when we talk about virtual reality, we are still bound in our conduits into that world.

Imagine if we had the ability to completely immerse ourselves into a virtual reality, Matrix-style. In that world, your commute is nothing more than going to a chair and loading the program. From there, you can appear anywhere in that virtual reality. It can be in the shape of an office, or a green field with desks, or no desk, pretty much anything the organization/group of people wants. With the totality of human senses present, neither of us debating the issue could see anything missing that a physical presence would provide.

Throw in the current trend of shrinking employment, and the future of the office buildings in the next few hundred years seems to be in question.

Technologically, we are not there yet and it's not clear if this will happen in our lifetime. However, it no longer feels like a pure sci-fi notion.

<comment><USER9> In my opinion we're actually a lot closer to it than most people may realize. I think virtual-offices are going to be a reality in 3-5 years. This will be driven by a few key technologies that are coming out in that timeframe:

      Oculus Rift - fully immersive digital environment
      Leapmotion/Kinect - natural UI for interacting in 3D
      Google Fiber - high-speed bandwidth networks
      Modern GPUs - can already produce movie-level graphics in realtime.

In fact, I could see the first prototype virtual offices being released within 18 months.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you that this is certainly going to happen soon-ish, but 3-5 years is wildly optimistic, particularly when it comes to the Leapmotion/Kinect (which are cool, but a long way away from resulting in realistic 3D interaction) and Google Fiber (only applies if we all move to Kansas City -- I know Google plans to roll this out to other markets, but in 3-5 years I wouldn't expect significant progress, maybe 1 or 2 other metro areas max).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        Choice empowers people and makes for a more content workforce.

...

        people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed

The choice employees make is always going to be to work from home? Surely _forced_ attendance at an office every day 9 - 5 will be looked back on as something that should never have existed, but offices disappearing completely seems unlikely.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I enjoy working in an office environment. My ideal would maybe be four days in the office instead of five, but I wouldn't want to go without it entirely.

<comment><USER13> That setup works well for me. I work from home Mon and/or Fri, and I'm always in the office Tue through Thur. It's nice to save some commute time and being able to really focus on coding, but I think I'd go crazy doing it every day. There are also lots of conversations I have with coworkers that wouldn't happen if I were never in the office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We make machines to replace workers, for lots of really great reasons. But, where does that end?

I'm struggling to think of a task that a machine cant or wont be able to do. I cant get further than art and thinking up things for machines to do, but even then I'm not so sure. I'm sure even philosophical issues could eventually be determined by a computer program. Robots can perform most mundane tasks, and equally highly complex tasks we cant even do. We even have machines that design and build machines.

So yeah, offices will be a thing of the past, because workers will be a thing of the past. Well, just a few workers who watch over the machines. But, wont they be deemed inefficient?

<comment><USER15> When they invent a computer that can write poetry or paint a painting or start a startup, I think your vision will have come true. Fortunately, I think we're still a long way away from computers that can do these things with the creativity a human can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've read a lot about telecommuting here on HN lately. While I do this myself, I'm hoping that one day infrastucture and cost of living near the workplace will be at a point where everyone can just walk to the office (in 5-10 minutes). This is the best of all possible worlds for me: healthier, allows working from home and still dropping in at work for meetings or lunch or whatever comes up and no getting stuck in rush hour traffic (not in the car and neither in the subway/tram), no dangerous biking (in the city).

Also, Mr. Branson does not look too comfortable in his outdoor chair next to the street. ;-)

<comment><USER17> Doesn't that imply living in cities? Not to everyone's taste, by any means.

Also, how is this going to work out for couples/families?

<comment><USER18> And suddenly changing jobs means either moving home, or limiting your search to within a very, very small radius.

<comment><USER16> It could mean unhooking your housing module (something like this: [http://www.arcspace.com/features/kisho-kurokawa/nakagin- caps...](http://www.arcspace.com/features/kisho-kurokawa/nakagin-capsule- tower/) but bigger) from the provided base near your workplace and transporting it to one near your new job.

OTOH, in large cities, there's plenty of possible work places within e.g. 1 square Km or mile. Perhaps they should be clustered so that similar companies are close together? Plenty of room for optimization (from an utopostic viewpoint).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These kinds of black-and-white views need to stop.

Some jobs (highly self-directed, autonomous, don't need teamwork) can be done just fine from home.

Other jobs (collaborative, creative, culture-building) just can't, or it's very difficult.

And then there are obviously a lot of gray areas in the middle, since a lot of jobs are a mix of things, as well as accountability and productivity- measurement being a big factor too (some people will get away with slacking off if they can).

Every kind of job and company is different, and needs to figure it out for themselves. And when you don't work at a specific organization, it's hard to know what they really need.

<comment><USER15> I think you're strawmanning Branson into saying something he isn't.

Let me ask you this: why do you automatically assume that this decision rests with the organization to fit its needs? Don't a firm's workers also have a lot of different situations that may require different solutions? Some workers love working at the office. Others love working from home. Others like to have a mixture. It sounds to me what Branson is saying isn't necessarily "telecommuting good, office bad" as much as "It's a bad idea to rigidly force choices on your employees", and I think there's some truth to that view. After all, I don't buy that employment at Yahoo necessarily means that a person won't be successful working from home.

Regardless of my views, I don't think it's accurate to say that this is black- and-white thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> People seem to think there is only one answer to this question but companies need to figure out what is best for them depending on their employees, culture etc. Right now I think the core problem of remote work is verifying that people are in fact working efficiently. Also people really need to use better metrics to make judgments; parking lot 'emptiness' or even VPN access logs do not hold meaning if projects are on time, and the deadlines are not lax.

</comment><comment><USER21> A lot of proponents of home working seem to ignore one of the big reasons people may want to work in a centralised space (be it an office, co-working space, somewhere else..) - the interaction with other people.

I hate working at home - I get cabin fever, bored and lonely. I prefer being around other people and having that interaction (IM, video calls just aren't the same). I like a change of scenery during the day.

It's nice to have the option to work from home when necessary (e.g. to avoid having to take a sick day, wait in for a delivery etc) - but I'd hate to do it every day.

I don't doubt that the nature of offices will change (e.g. I find it hard to imagine that cubicle farms have much future), and that the number of people working remotely _will_ increase, but I'd be very surprised if offices disappear completely.

<comment><USER22> I work remotely but I have space in a shared office about 10 minutes walk from my house. This means I never have to a long commute, can work from home or work around others when I want a bit of company. In terms of working conditions this seems to be the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER23> This does sound like a good balance. Do you have a dedicated desk or is it just general tables where you setup at?

Also how much does it cost per month?

<comment><USER22> I have a dedicated desk. I'm based in Spain(work is in London) so it's pretty damn cheap! I pay 200 euros a month for a bright, modern office on top of a block in the center of town(Granada). We have a terrace that surrounds the office and the views of the mountains are spectacular!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hope companies of the future will at least offer working space as a perk. I am much less productive at home with my pets around, and I can't imagine what it will be like once I have children.

In my experience, offices are a painful place to watch the clock but a great place to actually get stuff done.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've worked remotely more often than not over the last 3 years. It's becoming a more common trend. I am glad for it.

I was skeptical at first as I was prone to the common, ephemeral ailment of loneliness. However advances in group video chat, online whiteboards, cafes with high-speed wireless and power bars, shared working spaces... I prefer it to working in an office. I can choose when I am distracted, I can change my environment to suit my mood, and I get more work done over all.

I also get to spend more time with my family and less time commuting (which is a complete waste of your life).

I look forward to offices being "optional," but I doubt they will disappear completely. We are, by nature, social creatures. I predict that we will instead employ communal spaces instead of the traditional, "company office."

<comment><USER26> Agree. I worked in-the-office for 12 years. Then, the past 2, I've worked almost exclusively remotely. It's been really good.

Just as when I started my first job, I had to learn new skills. As a diligent, good employee, I tried to learn quickly. And, now, I'm probably more productive than I ever have been.

But, then again, I don't sit on FB or Twitter all day. Each morning, I set out with a focused list of goals, and I try to get them done. And, I need a quiet space.

The hardest part, for me, was learning when to shut off. As an office worker, there was a natural dynamic and rhythm of the team. When the lights started going off, or when the cleaning staff showed up, you knew that it was time to go. But, sometimes, at home, I forget to turn off. I think I have gotten closer to burnout, working from home.

Collaboration is an issue, but we work in such small teams nowadays, that there aren't as many communication channels. Long gone are the 15-20 person teams. Now, I work with targeted groups of 4-5. We communicate regularly. For more high-fidelity communication, I have face-to-face meetings with subject matter experts and stakeholders and designers maybe once a month.

As a software developer, I can't see how this trend can stop. With the state of things, I will never again have all the people that I need in the same office every day. Skills are just too specialized now. And, services are specialized. To get everyone (and all their dependencies) in the same office would mean sacrificing a lot of quality and agility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Offices are a cost center and have their own set of inefficiencies. I think Mayer was correct in "correcting" an issue at Yahoo! which is that many employees were gaming it. There is a value in face-to-face connection. We can do away with offices as long as there are community spaces (public or private) where people can connect. There is good value in finding a balance between isolation time and collaboration time. Offices might tend towards collaboration time and lose out on isolation time, while the opposite is often true with strictly home offices.

</comment><comment><USER28> I worked from home as a freelancer for several years until one of my clients insisted that I spend a full, regular work-day at their office at least once a week. When I did that I discovered that I was far more productive, even if the space they gave me was noisier.

I'm a lot different from others, though, in that I'm not only easily distracted, I also have chronic problems with motivation. I.e.: when I'm at home I'm a slacker, and when I'm at an office I'm not (or not _as much_).

After a few weeks of this I began offering to spend full days, once a week, at some of my other clients, and observed a boost in productivity there, too.

I know of some work-at-home freelancers who have set aside a room in their home that they treat quite strictly as their office, even dressing in a suit and tie every morning and "commuting" from their bedroom down the stairs or across the hall. They find that it helps them get into the right mindset so they can more easily suppress the temptation to knock-off for a few minutes and watch TV, or play with the cat, or whatever.

Meyer might be doing something slightly different, though, which is that she needs to get Yahoo! onto a new track. This must be accomplished psychologically as well as technically and logistically, and I know many companies have tried a variety of tricks to get their employees to think differently, shift into a different mindset. Changing decor, company colors, cubicles-to-open-space or vice-versa, different dress codes, and so-on.

This might be a permanent thing at Yahoo!, or maybe they will begin slowly re- introducing work-at-home. A kind of reverse if what I did, perhaps: one day a week, or month, while keeping tabs on how the employee's performance differs. Some may perform better, some (like me) might not have the discipline.

</comment><comment><USER29> Working Remotely != Working from home. Often when I'm working remotely, I'm either in a coffee shop or a co-working location, vary rarely at home. I don't like driving, so being able to control when and where I drive is huge.

The big issue is that of being able to control my own environment. If it's too hot, I can work someplace where it's not, same if it's too loud. When you require everyone to work in one shared area, this control disappears and you're often left to the whims of either the weak common denominator, the highest paid person, or the loudest (ie the small thin woman that keeps the office incredibly hot)

If you want dedicated employees, don't run a shitty company.

</comment><comment><USER30> Apparently I'm an anomaly, but I like going to the office. Currently my company's offices are utter shit, but I'm still not opposed to the concept in general... and I still come in despite the less-than-inspiring setup we have at the moment.

I think what's crucial here, however, is that I don't extrapolate my "I prefer to work in an office" sentiment to everyone, like Bloomberg does. Furthermore, I'm lucky in that I have a choice in this and my bosses are constantly encouraging me to work from home more.

So I think if there's one thing it's better to predict, it's that employee choice will be much more of the norm, not that offices themselves will be history.

<comment><USER31> I agree. Having worked in great offices, not-so-great offices, and currently working on my own (i.e. from coffee shops, coworking spaces, and at home), working with other people at an office isn't horrible. Not something I always want to do, but also not something that I would want to rule out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Empowering employees with choice is always a good thing as long as results are prioritized above their choices. My policy has always been to present company goals to our staff like so: Get X done, by Y, and be sure it meets our standard of quality. I don't care if you work in your childhood tree house up until Y as long as I am able to contact you if needed & you produce the desired results.

Marissa Meyer likely saw that the freedom wasn't producing the results she would like & decided to reel it in. I'm sure it will return when appropriate.

The wave of the future will be MORE offices that make people not want to leave.

</comment><comment><USER33> Choice is a great thing and for some jobs it's reasonable to allow people some flexibility in where and when they work.

But I would be less happy flying on Mr Branson's airline if the pilots were allowed to telecommute.

</comment><comment><USER34> Employers like the current setup because they can make sure people aren't playing Minesweeper all day. And people still feel that face-to-face conversations have higher information density.

But if holographic teleconferencing becomes mainstream, then I could see a lot more knowledge based work being done remotely. That has downsides as well. Why employ an American, if you can get a qualified person in say, Poland, who speaks fluent English, is willing to work in your timezone, and has the equipment to virtually be around in 3D?

<comment><USER35> What's the downside? You say that as if it was bad to hire someone from Poland...

<comment><USER34> I meant that it's bad if you're an American knowledge worker, and you have to compete with cheap foreign labor, thanks to holographic technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I love working from home and also enjoy the occasional day in the office with my peers. But I prefer to work at home most of the time. Avoiding the daily commute is a _wonderful_ thing.

<comment><USER37> I actually like my commute most days - I spend half an hour walking outside, and half an hour reading (each way). Those are good things I might not otherwise make time for. But if I had to drive, that same hour would be intolerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd far prefer to work in a well configured space, vs. itinerant coffeeshops. But that might be personal space vs. a business, and wouldn't have much in common with most offices I've ever seen. (I'd like a big hw lab space, smallish but comfortable private office, and various areas on a campus or large building which are either dedicated to a specific task or just interesting.)

Maybe closer to a university's layout for a professor or postdoc than most commercial offices.

</comment><comment><USER39> This has to happen sooner or later, if for no other reason than the tremendous amount of damage that commuting by automobile is doing to the environment. Commuting is also a huge, inefficient waste of time and a major source of unhappiness and poor health.

Self-driving electric cars and buses will help alleviate this pain point, but electric cars still cause pollution--just at a (often coal-burning) central power plant instead of an internal combustion engine.

</comment><comment><USER40> One day jobs will be a thing of the past. How will our current society adapt when we reach a point that we are so productive that we don't need everyone to work?

<comment><USER41> As idyllic as that sounds, they've been predicting that since the start of the industrial revolution and the trend has continued in the opposite direction.

Manufacturing desires and trumping economic needs over social goods is so entrenched now that I doubt most people would choose a more relaxed lifestyle over the next shiny bauble dangled in front of them.

I wish it were not so, but I see little to no evidence to the contrary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Offices? Probably not. Entire floors and buildings without any purpose other than holding offices and cubicles? Yes, they were a fairly recent invention and will probably be gone soon.

Remote work may be somewhat inefficient now, but when our technologies get good enough to build a room for consistent telepresence, there will be little point in having a cubicle across town when you can own a customized office and virtually project it anywhere.

<comment><USER43> "Yes, they were a fairly recent invention and will probably be gone soon."

What do you mean by "recent"? They have existed for perhaps more than 100 years and before that there wasn't the type of work where they were needed and so they didn't exist. (There was no paper to be pushed? Or phones to be answered?).

"build a room for consistent telepresence"

There is much nuance you can pick up when someone is right in front of you vs. by telepresence. I'm not saying you aren't right or that what you say won't happen but don't discount the value of face to face at least in business, negotiation and management.

It takes much more work from me to buy something face to face (because I have to act and hide visual cues) then it does by email. But on the same hand I can pick up visual cues in the seller and make split second decisions based on them. It all depends on the situation of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If the work gets done and deadlines are met working from home should not cause any problems.We have technology to support working remotely but the real issue is that human interaction gets lost if we move towards this trend. This debate depends on the industry you work for its not a black or white issue.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think that offices will always be around. Yes, being able to work from wherever and connect with people through tech is amazing but there is NOTHING like a face to face discussion. Human contact is essential; especially where company culture is concerned.

</comment><comment><USER46> "One day people will just swallow a handy pill instead of eating food!"

The future will be completely weird and amazing, but it won't be the weird and amazing you thought of...

</comment><comment><USER47> Whether or not Branson is right (I don't think he is), it's completely irrelevant to the yahoo situation which is just one company at one point in time.

</comment><comment><USER48> That's a sad prediction. I like going into the office.

</comment><comment><USER49> "I have enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg and have rarely disagreed with anything he has done or said..."

I really could not get past this introductory bit. It tainted my opinion of everything Branson said. If Branson has enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg, I can't really muster much respect for him in turn. Which is a shame, because I essentially agree with him on this point--working from home-- in particular.

Though I also feel it's any company's prerogative to allow or disallow working from home.

</comment><comment><USER50> Was anyone else like "wtf is a one day office?"

<comment><USER51> At first read yes. I thought it meant that there is an office shared by 5 people and they each go "to the office" 1 day a week and the other 4 they work at home.

<epic fail>

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> On the same day, jetpacks and flying cars will be released. With a half-price introductory offer.

</comment><comment><USER53> Tangential : every time I read this title, I ask myself what a "one day office" is.

</comment><comment><USER54> This seemed to completely ignore expensive shared capital, like the tens of millions of dollars of digital test equipment engineers use to design iOS devices, Android devices, perform diagnostics in medicine, fly that capital as Virgin airlines, for examples. Nice buzz-generating headline, though.

<comment><USER15> I don't think anyone would claim that there's no job that can't be done from home. However, are these things always necessarily blockers if someone _really_ wants to work from home? I mean, I can access an iOS or android device from anywhere in the world. Or my company can buy me one of each for probably less than one or two thousand dollars. I can pay a lab to do that expensive diagnostic. About the only one I see as problematic is flying for Virgin, and I think that's more a technology limitation than anything to do with the job itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> One day we will have teleportation and this discussion will be pointless. :)

</comment><comment><USER56> I love how he ends it with a question. Most blogs are so dictatorial.

</comment><comment><USER57> How about non-performing workers?

<comment><USER58> Do the same thing to them as you do when they're in the office.

<comment><USER59> Performance management for mobile workers is harder for the manager. There's a lot more metrics and measuring than most "soft skill" managers are comfortable with. And until recently, many managers are selected because of their "face skills" and not their project management chops.

There will always be jobs were people will go to a place and work with other people (McDonald's, Prisons, Hospitals.) But there will be a increasingly large sector of the economy where it will be economically beneficial to "do away" with the office. Those who have those skills are destined to benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Yep, partially due to technology but I also think in 30 years almost everyone will be a freelancer and "jobs" as we know them today will be very very rare.

<comment><USER37> I can't imagine the pain of having to assemble a team of freelancers every three-nine months for the next iteration on some product/project. Unless the freelancers are utterly interchangeable, which is a pretty awful vision (people think they are cogs now?). When you want to organize a team you'd spend 25% of your time just assembling a team. The freelancers themselves would also spend tons of time waiting for a team to be ready to go. Probably the norm would be for freelancers to have multiple projects going at a time, so any project would only get some percentage of each individual's time & attention, requiring larger teams or slower cycles, each of which requiring more overhead on communications and coordination.

The obvious alternative is to maintain a group of people that have developed a good working relationship together for a longer period of time. Of course people would come and go occasionally due to other opportunities & changing needs for skills. But wait - that sounds an awful lot like what we already have.

<comment><USER61> That sounds exactly like a movie production. I'm sure they have figured out how to bring teams back together for sequels.

<comment><USER37> Movies take years to produce. At least from what I've seen, people switch jobs every 3-6 years. So not much different really. I agree that the 25+ year tenure at a company is by and large gone for good.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Orleans – Distributed Virtual Actor Model from Microsoft Research - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dotnet/orleans <comment><USER2> IIRC this is a talk about this: "Building Scalable Stateful Services" by Caitie McCaffrey

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0i_bXKwujQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0i_bXKwujQ)</comment>


SiFive Launches 7 Series, Their Highest Performance RISC-V Cores – WikiChip Fuse - <AUTHOR> https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1775/sifive-launches-7-series-their-highest-performance-risc-v-cores/ <comment><USER2> What good are these without readily available, cheap 1U, 19" rack-mountable servers?</comment>


Ask HN: Which startups came out of MIT? - <AUTHOR>

I recently read http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/business/mit-lab-hatches-ideas-and-companies-by-the-dozens.html?hp and wondered which other companies started at MIT <comment><USER2> There's a Quora answer [http://www.quora.com/Massachusetts-Institute-of- Technology/W...](http://www.quora.com/Massachusetts-Institute-of- Technology/What-startups-have-come-out-of-MIT-since-2004)

Also <http://www.sourcemap.com/and> the world's most beautiful computer, Danny Hillis's Connection Machine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine></comment>


Datasets for Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://gengo.ai/articles/the-50-best-free-datasets-for-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> Ben from Kaggle.

Open up the ~50 different individual datasets linked in separate tabs, and then quickly flip through all of them trying to get a sense of what each one is.

That experience will demonstrate one of the main challenges we're aiming to solve by making Kaggle Datasets your default place to publish data online ([https://www.kaggle.com/datasets](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets))

<comment><USER3> I've heard that Kaggle data sets encourage people to do "supervised" ML only. Is that true?

<comment><USER4> (Not Ben, but - ) outside of academia, the main thing that seems to encourage people to do supervised ML is that it's the only thing that seems to work. I haven't really heard of any success stories with using unsupervised techniques for most common ML applications.

<comment><USER5> Unsupervised works, but your ability to measure "does it work or not" is much more dependent on a case by case evaluation rather than a score.

(Because if you know a priori what is it that you want to measure - it's supervised)

<comment><USER6> Yeah this my experience too, evaluation ends being almost endless time sink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The link at the bottom should be emphasized: [https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public- datasets](https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets)

It is a very expansive collection of datasets, some well-prepped for ML and most not (which is part of the fun of it, anyways).

</comment><comment><USER8> Two sources that are missing:

opendatanetwork.com: this is effectively a Google for public Socrata data portals, and for me, the best way to discover datasets across different municipalities. For example, when I was interested in trying to replicate the NYT's _" Do 'Fast and Furious' Movies Cause a Rise in Speeding?"_ [0] article, it was pretty easy to find a bunch of other traffic/motor vehicle violation datasets with opendatanetwork's search.

Enigma public ([https://public.enigma.com](https://public.enigma.com)): a huge collection of scraped public datasets, including flattened versions of data that originally comes in annoying-to-parse, such as U.S. lobbying disclosures [1]

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/upshot/do-fast-and- furiou...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/upshot/do-fast-and-furious- movies-cause-a-rise-in-speeding.html)

[1] [https://public.enigma.com/datasets/lobbying-disclosures- lobb...](https://public.enigma.com/datasets/lobbying-disclosures- lobbyists-2013/f3ce179f-9171-4754-9f71-71d7596d900a?&filter=%2B%5B%3E%5Blobbyist%5D%5D)

</comment><comment> andy-wu Surprised that CIFAR wasn't mentioned under Images. I feel like that's one of the standards, even more so than some of the ones that are listed.

</comment><comment><USER9> To train machine translation models parallel corpora in many languages are provided on the WMT conference site: [http://www.statmt.org/wmt17/translation- task.html](http://www.statmt.org/wmt17/translation-task.html) and previous years

</comment><comment><USER10> My original comment was meant for a separate HN article on machine learning and I posted in the wrong tab.

My apologies.

<comment><USER9> How is this related to the article on gengo.ai?

<comment><USER11> Oops, missread for [https://modelzoo.co/](https://modelzoo.co/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Inspired by this post, I was looking for a fun way to browse datasets randomly, which led me to build this Kaggle Random Dataset Generator:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313374)

Thanks Gengo!

</comment><comment><USER13> Here are 1000s of more open datasets for anyone to explore, use or build upon: [https://dataturks.com/projects/trending](https://dataturks.com/projects/trending)

</comment><comment><USER14> From the title 'The 50 Best Free Datasets...' I was expecting a curated list of datasets. But the list has mix of individual datasets, and sites that provide/host datasets :(

</comment><comment><USER15> Here is a dataset for abstractive summarization created from Reddit .

Dataset [https://zenodo.org/record/1168855#.WyJG3I7pdhE](https://zenodo.org/record/1168855#.WyJG3I7pdhE) Paper [http://aclweb.org/anthology/W17-4508](http://aclweb.org/anthology/W17-4508)

</comment><comment><USER16> Security industry related datasets always seem to be omitted from this type of thing. Please check out the excellent [http://www.secrepo.com/](http://www.secrepo.com/).

</comment><comment><USER17> For audio, LibriSpeech, M-AILABS, LJ-Speech, VCTK, TIMIT, Mocha-Timit, VoxForge, Blizzard Challenge, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know of good datasets for Concept Drift analysis?

</comment><comment><USER3> Can these datasets be used for academic and research purposes?

</comment><comment><USER19> Can't open this website.

<comment><USER20> Click on the link.

<comment><USER19> Done, what now?</comment></comment></comment>


An attempt to study broadband investment in a net neutrality world - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2017/06/29/the_real_story_behind_internet_regulation_110285.html <comment><USER2> It is nice to see an actual economic study on the subject.

While net neutrality sounds nice it is important to remember that it is being pushed by companies like Google that already own their own private global networks to which net neutrality rules do not apply.

If Google can prevent the other owners of national/global networks from giving preferential treatment to their potential competitors then they can exploit the competitive advantage of owning their own global network to which those rules do not apply to prevent competition.</comment>