skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's getting really hard to find simple problems that have software solutions in a niche that isn't already competitive. There are a lot of software companies out there and more talented developers with successful side projects floating around than ever before.

10+ years ago you could maybe just google around and find a niche business problem with a simple software solution in a wide open market. This is not the case today.

As a developer your experience of the world typically overlaps with every other developer, so anything you can relate to by a few degrees of separation is pretty picked over and likely very competitive. Ditto for anything in a cash-rich industry.

So really anything that's easy to solve with an MVP product that wouldn't require clawing for attention, is lurking deep in the trenches of an industry or hobby you've never heard of and wouldn't be exposed to without being embedded in that world for a long time. There may be some sort of very valuable software solution for a problem with wool production in patagonia but you'd never know if you weren't a patagonian wool producer.

I think the best approach these days is pick out a very programmer un-sexy field, study it intensely and chat with as many people in that field as possible until something shakes out. Or just bite the bullet and go head first into a competitive market and try to make something that outshines the competition...
That's what I do. I wrote subuser.org and now I run everything in a subuser.
On a slightly related albeit not quite exactly the same type of note: can usernames be changed? I see a very large number of non-name related usernames and am curious as to why that is and if they can be changed to a real name or away from one....?
Amazon Robotics: We Reimagine Now
These articles are getting real old real fast. If you think the modern internet sucks you clearly haven't been developing websites for 10+ years.

> In 2015, becoming a Web developer is all about learning Ruby or figuring out Node.js, not just building cool things you like.

This guy is a moron
Yes, this is what I meant.
Those "flags" just mean they sponsored whatever conference this is at. The video nor the other stuff doesn't say which conference it is.

It's funny how the US is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't in these cases. "Big oil" might or might not be even interested in how Ukraine/Russia works out, beyond the usual "can we do business there?" concerns. Isn't it simply that competitors to Russian control over Ukraine need partners offshore for oil operations?

I know people who have had to travel to Cote Ivorie to do work, and it's an uncomfortable thing to have to do. They have a number that can call if they need to be evacuated. Not that this has been executed, but it has come up in discussions with the customer there.

After all, we could just turn our backs and let Putin have whatever he wants.

When we look back historically at the 1953 Iran coup, that sure as heck was oil oriented, but it was the British government ultimately that requested CIA involvement. Nationalizing other people's oil assets has certain ... risks associated with it. This is at very least much more subtle than that.
Denied by the Rubicon Project – AdFortress
Tech lead of pdf.js here: All of the above exploits were issues with extension code in firefox, i.e. other extensions could have these issues too. If you were to use the web only version of pdf.js none of these exploits would apply.
Oooooh, good point. I had forgotten you used Go, actually.
> Which is why the government should be held accountable to the victims of that abuse

The exclusionary rule holds the government accountable to victims of abuse, by removing the value that the government sought to gain by the abuse and the expense of the victim (it is imperfect, of course, in that it fails where the abuse was targeted at some use other than criminal prosecution.)

Any mechanism that fails to prevent the government from getting what it seeks by the abuse fails to hold the government accountable to the victim of the abuse.
The thing is, it's not always about an "unsolved problem" per-se. I think looking for "unsolved problems", in a manner of speaking, is an overly simplistic idea. The question is more "where are the places where the introduction of some technological solution could (make some process more efficient | help somebody make quicker/better decisions | improve quality | reduce costs | drive revenue | etc). In most cases, firms have some kind of solution to their problems, they may just not have the best solution.

I guess you could also say that this is arguing semantics, but they may also have places where things could be better using some new technology, but they don't think of it as a problem, since they don't know the technology exists, and therefore don't even think in terms of applying it to their "problem".

Also, as somebody else mentioned, people tend to "normalize pain" over time, to the point that something can be painful but yet if you ask them "tell me about your pain points so I can help you", they don't even think of $WHATEVER (because it's become "normalized pain").

My point is, it's hard to just ask around for "unsolved problems" and find good stuff, even if you called up people in various companies and asked them flat out. And that's simply because they may not know what to tell you.

I think the best way to really identify areas for improvement is to have a deep knowledge of how a particular company (or at least, companies in a given industry in general operate) and identify the problems spots based on your own knowledge. That, of course, is difficult for domains that you don't know much about. Unfortunately I don't think there are any easy answers to this. Probably the best answer I can offer is to say, build relationships with people in a given company / industry, spend as much time talking to them as you can, and bounce ideas back and forth until something seems to resonate. IF you can find a company that has "business process analysts" on staff, some of those people may be able to help you, since they spend all their time looking at business processes and trying to find ways to improve them.
See also, "The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction"

http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916557
We've received more than 50 applications, we're still working our way through it.
Esperanto is a pretty good idea. I spent a week with an introductory book and speak it better than Spanish (3 years of study).

There is a book by Richardson I think (learning and using the international language) that has a lengthy introduction on why its a good idea. The language is really simple to learn and is generally easy to learn for speakers of the major language groups (Germanic, romance...etc). We waste millions of dollars on translators. Think of the UN where they have to translate complex ideas in real-time. There are numerous articles on how errors are frequently made. Think of the Soviet Union "we will bury" you really meaning we will outlast you. This also keeps us from infringing on other culture's local languages. Examples are Welsh people defacing street signs in English. Most Americans think it is dumb because we like having the rest of the world spend years to speak our own language. The tables will eventually turn.
just more reasons to run ad blocking software
Most tutorials show sharing and X11 server, but that's not a great security solution as X11 is totally insecure. But I am working on this with my project subuser. See http://subuser.org/news/0.3.html
It failed for me because I'd already clicked the link and they set a cookie.

Solution: open the search in an ncognito window or privacy window, and then click through to WSJ.

Chrome: COMMAND-SHIFT-N
Firefox: COMMAND-SHIFT-P
One option: get a part time job in an interesting industry.

I discovered this by getting a contract (few days a month) doing onsite work for a small/medium size organization. I asked lots of questions about things that I perceived as broken and found out what processes and software they hated. Then I worked on a prototype (evenings, for fun) and showed it to them. Now a year or so later that organization is my first customer for a SaaS I saw that they needed.

Also, make friends with other vendors while you're there. A company that already serves that industry can give valuable feedback and even market your app to their other clients if it integrates well with their solution.
discussion on the guy's blog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10021268
That's not such a bad deal considering you get a free bus transfer back home for quick trips.
I am very interested in changing my HN name to align with the rest of my internet identity. But I do not want to lose what few internet points I have accumulated here.
It sounds like you may be looking for more than just an advisory board agreement no? What exactly is it that you want the agreement to deal with?
Thanks for the reply! I have talked to my curators and some of them told me that they want more engagement with their subscribers. That's my main question, how can I encourage more engagement....
As a maintainer of an open source project, we often get a lot of proposals from people - my project is a compiler. And while some of them are interesting, there are a few who are suggested by people who don't really have any experience in language design, so usually we have to say no to a lot of features.

When someone knows what they're on about, it's probably the architecture of our project that doesn't allow us to implement a specific feature; or would make it incredibly difficult to do so. And when you're dealing with even larger projects like Nginx or something, you have to work on it to know if something would work in terms of the project, which is tricky unless you've worked on it extensively.

We've even had a guy who said we shouldn't use LLVM because it's slow (it's not), and he didn't like it. What I'm getting at with this point is that some people suggest ideas that a) change the entire course of the project, or b) are kind of silly and subjective.

TL;DR It's complicated
Unix Rosetta Stone is also very useful: http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
It bombed on the very first PDF I fed to it. (Admittedly, a technical datasheet of ~50 pages.)
It's really not about javascript getting better or worse - it's the fact that I don't enjoy coding in javascript anywhere close to how much I enjoy coding in Python. Javascript would have to morph out of all recognition for that to change.

I'm sure other people feel the same about their language of choice too. I'm hoping WebAssembly will open the floodgates for genuine choice in browser scripting.
That's a good idea, I like it. It works good in all the AMA...Yes, most of the newsletters are very niched...Thanks for that (:
Oh no! I'll have to take a look at it. Thanks!
This is from 2011-12, what makes it relevant right now ?
The real question is whether the dog is better than the officer at guessing who has drugs. If the dog is much better than the officer, it would suggest that a dog 'alert' should be given more weight than the officer's guess. If the dog is no better than the officer, the dog is useless.

I say this because it is possible (and indeed likely) that the officer is also better at guessing who has drugs than a coin toss.

Full Disclosure: I have never used or trafficked contraband, but I do not support random searches or the use of drug dogs in public without a warrant, regardless of their effectiveness.
This is really cool but a few aren't working for me on ff & chrome... evening bonfire and in the city are silent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
this is an incredibly useful shortlist of commands, most of these I've used before - some I've used and forgotten (mount -o remount,ro)
Got a pretty simple solution for level 1: http://honeypot.softwareskills.se/#/contest/5587cf988a4c5edb...

840 score and 36 LoC, good enough
Speaking as one who is laid back in a personality sense, I could imagine nothing worse than a life lived non-stop frenetically under the imagined need to speed up all activity in the name of productivity.

Take time to pause, reflect, think, and enjoy your life experiences.

Even when it comes to work-related activity, there are times and places to do things quickly and there are times and places to do them deliberately. If nothing else, just for sanity's sake, it is important to pace yourself through a day, through a week, through a month, through a year, through a career. Even if speed were exactly correlated with maximum productivity and effectiveness, it is vital that you have times when you simply feel you can enjoy being at work, being with people, doing your activities, without everything feeling you have to work like a machine that will be evaluated by engineering standards only.

Even more, we all have different personalities and some people do not work well if they feel they are forced to work at some arbitrarily quick pace as opposed to one that suits their style.

Finally, even speed as a factor can vary with your activities as you develop skills in those activities. When I began years ago to try to write things, I was agonizingly slow about the process. I felt I had a quick mind but the process of getting what was in my mind down on paper made me feel plain stupid. Whatever I did, it would never come out right. Through a very tedious process of writing and re-writing, it would eventually become passable and that was it. It might take me a week in such cases to write something expository of modest length. Yet, realizing this was a weakness, I worked damned hard to fix it and, through a process of many years and countless hours of effort, I reached a breakthrough point where I could do "walls of text" (in the phrasing of some) in 10-15 minutes and produce quality stuff. I now write very quickly and effectively. But had I tried to do so years ago with my limited abilities at that time, all I would have produced was hash.

So, lighten up and do it in your own style. Yes, speed does matter. But it is only one of many factors that will determine how you do at work or, even more important, at life itself. By all means, apply yourself well - be diligent, hard-working, etc. but do it fast or slow as suits your needs and your own style. At least that is how I view it.
Because it's the answer to life, the universe and everything? :)
JPMorgan Chase’s Exciting Site Redesign – Learning the Lessons of Mobile
What an Engineer Looks Like
If it was explosives and a dog got a 93% alert rate irrespective of there being any explosives, then that would be useless and nobody in their right mind would use that dog, as it would have them search 93% of everything.

At that point you might as well give up on faffing about with a sniffer dog and just search the remaining 7%.
> Sure, but that should be the default setting, even if it can be changed.

That's a strong statement... I prefer bitbucket default view actually. The fact I can see the latest commits right at the start is very useful to me.
I have no opinion on the legal and ethical issues, I was commenting only on the classifier. I don't think your first question is appropriately described as "the real question" though, as one of the coolest results of machine learning is that there are techniques for combining multiple bad classifiers [0] in to one really good one.

Even more so, I think that is actually what is happening here. An officer is acting as a tier 1 filter, and then the drug dog is acting as a tier 2 filter, further reducing the number of false positives, which in a "legal and ethical" sense, we generally feel are worse than false negatives.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning
Then we should simply search 100% of the bags.

Or maybe just 93%.
I would recommend http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/ for all noise related needs.

This website allows you to customize every noise to your liking and the selection of soundscapes is HUGE.
Oh boy, you've gotta be joking, right?
Sorry for not making this more clear. Create a shell script with the exploit, then remove the .sh extension. You can edit the icon to make it appear as any application and when double-clicked it will open and run in Terminal.app.
Peter Thiel Leads $20M Series A Investment in Flexport (YC W14)
Focus and Drive Ep3, Jeff Atwood, Isaac Schlueter, Damien Katz
> what's stopping someone from taking code from the EE, modifying it, and including it in the CE?

1. Copyright law.

2. For corporations it's probably more cost effective to pay a subscription than maintain a fork.
The thing that annoys me the most are things that move. If I'm reading something, and something else elsewhere on the page is moving, then that automatically draws my attention. This is very distracting! I understand that advertisers are doing this, but why on earth would anyone put such things on their own site, other than the ads? Here's an example of the sort of mind-boggling stupidity that I'm talking about:

http://wowslider.com/

In the old days, you could just disable animated GIFs and the problem would be solved. Then came Flash, which was also easy enough to disable. But now with Javascript, it's harder. I'm using NoScript, which gets rid of the annoying stuff, but often the websites don't look right.
> I'm not sure where you're going with this.

My point was to show that this very nasty exploit can be mitigated in the short-term by introducing a wrapper script to "protect" setuid programs.

> That `unset` is useless since they don't call sudo to initiate the exploit. The setuid/setgid bits on the newgrp binary are to blame here (combined with the env variable).

You are quite right. In an effort to be concise, the example wrapper unset the environment variable (for completeness) and mentioned checking /etc/sudoers against a known-good hash. I did not properly explain the mitigation strategy and should have stated that wrapping and unsetting the environment variable should be done for all setuid programs. Doing so should block this attack vector until a vendor supplied patch is available.

Is it an ugly hack? Probably. Doable, though, and I believe capable of defending against this particular vulnerability.
I wonder if we could use bees instead then, as there seemed to be some interesting research on training them to detect drugs and presumably they wouldn't be biased by human behaviour especially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera_training

Alternatively are there any portable mass spectrometers now?
I have a bunch of scanned PDFs from an open data request I'm looking forward to trying when I'm home. My own solution with pytesser was pretty effective but required a ton of tweaking.
Ditto, with Fx 39.0 and uBlock Origin, 1920px, also Yosemite.
Just as a warning, look at what happened to Detroit, when the auto industry left.
Nicole Barr hailed a genius after getting an IQ score better than Einstein
I might be too late for this one, but:

Daily exercise
To-do list for EVERYTHING. If it isn't on the list I don't get it done.
Time-boxing and frequent breaks. Work a single task for 30 minutes. Then switch to something else or take a 5 minute break.
By what metric are you claiming the US is less protectionist than most other nations? We have a lot of farm subsidies and tariffs and limitations in imports, and I have never heard any claim that the US somehow does significantly less than other nations.
It is factually untrue that outdoor cats live longer. See, for example:

https://www.vetinfo.com/indoor-outdoor-cat-life-expectancy.h...

And since you're quite content with anecdote as evidence, of my last 5 cats, all indoor cats, only one didn't live past 18, and she had other health issues. One cat, in fact, lived past 23.
The library does NOT depend on the version, since it supports pluggable engines.
Currently the only available engine is focused on AMD GCN GPUs and uses OpenCL 2.0 features in its kernels.
Other engines are possible and planned, notably one that would work with older versions of OpenCL and support tuning for Nvidia.
A Drive in the 550hp 2016 Jaguar F-Type AWD
The dog has low precision and high recall. The dogs are capable of high precision and high recall, but aren't being trained to do that because other incentives are at play.

I found it impressive that the dog that alerts 93% of the time was correct 40% of the time. That means the police are doing what seems like a good job of identifying targets that actually have drugs. With those kind of odds, you'd probably want to take a closer look at everyone just to make sure you aren't letting people with drugs get away (false negatives).
Erm, let's say 10% of the people on whom drug dogs are called have drugs.

Then for 1000 stopped, you'll have

0.59 * 0.1 * 1000 = 59 true positives and ...

0.34 * 0.9 * 1000 = 306 false positives.

That's pretty terrible.
Perhaps it is an MPAA effort to drum up hate for any and all things Google as part of their smear campaign?

See:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150724/15501631756/smoki...
Routing could also be shared; you could declare endpoints in one place, but the implementations for client and server would be different.

At the risk of oversimplifying: on the server, routed actions are concerned with getting data from a database, serializing it, and sending it to the client. On the client, routed actions get data from the server and use it to render a template.
We're Rich, You're Not. End of Story. [On the Nordic Countries] (2005)
If the dog is much better than the officer, it would suggest that a dog 'alert' should be given more weight than the officer's guess. If the dog is no better than the officer, the dog is useless.

A very big problem is that drug dogs will alert when the handler gives it subtle clues. This is done to get probable cause for a search when there is nothing more than an officer's hunch or just a desire to hassle a particular individual.
I like the integration with Hipchat and the business model too. For small groups is a great place to start your work privately until is clean enough to make it public.
It's in the article. The 93% in that study includes a 59% true positive (of 93%, presumably) success rate. We can't know how many true or false negatives there are because those searches aren't actually carried out, so out of every hundred cars stopped for a dogsniff, 55% (59% of 93%) are found to be carrying drugs.

More worryingly, that also means that out of every hundred cars stopped, 38 are wastefully searched by police (after getting probable cause from the positive dog alert) without finding drugs. From the article, a search takes about 45 minutes and carries a bunch of other risks for occupants of suspected cars (e.g. civil forfeiture, overenthusiastically trigger-happy LEOs), so this is pretty bad situation, not just in wasted time and cost, for both the car occupants and the police force.

One slightly positive thing I'll take from this: Over 50% of cars that are dogged have drugs, and I sincerely doubt that over 50% of cars (on average) have drugs, so in this particular study it appears that police have a better than random chance of guessing which cars have drugs. It's not a very positive thing though, because civilized countries that operate under the rule of law cannot permit law enforcement to operate on guesswork. This is underlined by the fact that the article mentions that the false positive rate rose to something like 80% for latino drivers.
So drug dogs become a kind of police "search anything" power totem.

(This as opposed to the "kill anything" power totem that is the cops brain and tongue via I thought he had a gun or I thought my life was in danger; or the "break into people's home and terrorize them" power totem of the knock-less warrant; or the "track anyone, listen to anyone" power totem of the Patriot Act, etc. at the federal level.)