skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did my PhD in econometrics. Reading this article, it looks like it was a general interest article profiling a professor who just got tenure. So if people are asking "how is this relevant to me", "how can I use this" or "should I learn more", the answers are most likely "it's not", "you can't", and "no". Not trying to be negative here, it's just that there are dozens of people getting tenure in econometrics every year at a similar level, all working on things that might seem to have some relevance to what HN readers are working on. From a HN readers perspective, there is nothing unique or special that I see here.
I'm more curious how it works when you're doing something requiring intense concentration. Do you feel the need to stop the treadmill to focus on your task?
1.3 million Hacker News stories tell a tale
SF != the Bay Area

I don't understand why people continually tend to ignore places like Oakland, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and even the nearby surrounding areas like Daly City, Pacifica, San Bruno, Burlingame, and South SF.

Daly City, South SF, and even San Bruno are like a 15 min drive into SF or 20 min using Bart. Housing is more affordable in those places. Am I missing something?

EDIT: Considering that these posts are on HN, I find it very strange and disturbing to repeatedly read variants of "it's impossible to do x because of y".
Why not use WebP for this?
WikiHouse: Open source building system
I looked at the data from 1.3 million Hacker News stories and found that when a story gets submitted makes a big difference (up to 172% better chance of getting on the front page). This article shows the analysis and results.

I used the official Hacker News API to get the stories using Python, and used R and ggplot2 to do the exploratory data analysis and plots.
Same as it ever was. Boom, bust, boom, bust.

Booming now, when's the bust?
According to wikipedia, as a whole $617M was spent in Georgia in 2013 on production; this compares disfavorably with Louisiana ($674M), British Columbia ($778M), and New York State (1880M). Wiki doesn't even bother to list California. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry_in_Georgia_%28U....)
This spaceship for the ocean will allow scientists to go into uncharted waters
Big+boobs+and+big+tits+movie+of+Dede+from+Big+Naturals+at+CoonyBoobs
Hi- I'm curious to know what your use case is. Can you explain why substitution is not sufficient?
90 90 90 90
Maybe there's also some reporter bias at play? Maybe people who are generally happy with their job don't feel the need as much to write long blog posts about it?
Folk tunes are more complicated than they sound. Jigs, reels, etc are all classes of tune, with broadly similar features. But there are further sub-groupings based on date of composition, composer, and even location.

So if you feed an ML system a generic mix of folk tunes without understanding how the subgroupings work, you'll get a messy blob of musical data out. It will sound sort-of interesting in a work-in-progress way, but you will always have to hand-edit it to get something acceptable. And even then it will probably be mediocre rather than memorably great. And if it sounds at all good, you'll likely find you've created a mashup machine, not a true composer.

Really, it's like training an ML on "ballads". You'll get a few features that are similar, but everything else will be too noisy to be anything other than a crude attempt.

So I think good musical imitation is probably a lost cause, because the rules are so complex and contingent, even for "simple" music, that there simply isn't enough consistency to do the job.

At the same time the differences from the template create recognisable styles, which have emotional and other associations. So the differences are significant in their own way - but even noisier as a recognition problem.
Any engineer with a decent job in the Bay Area should be that far right on the income distribution. I could take a gig there at $300k+ if I chose to (a specific offer, which was recently re-extended to me), and most who work for large companies probably approach $200k in total compensation. I know some who are making ~$450k -- not famous developers, so you've probably never heard of them, but good ones.

I left the Bay Area a decade ago because, in order to buy a four bedroom house (2 kids+home office) in a good school district, the cheapest, crappiest house would have set me back $1M. A nice house started at $1.2M or so. In the suburbs. And I just didn't want to be tied to one of those high-paying jobs. I wanted to be able to quit and do my own thing. So I left that market behind.

For Bay Area prices in general, those are typical. Period. The fact that I see a few ~$700k prices on that map means to me that yes, there are some bargains to be had in that area.

The only exception is if you have a high tolerance for run-down areas and/or poor schools; lots of cheaper houses in Oakland, for instance, even near Bart stations. THAT's where the people who can't afford San Francisco, but who work there, should be (and are!) looking. I did a San Francisco commute on Bart for nearly four years, and it's not bad. Or live in Alameda and commute on the ferry; that is an awesome commute. Did that for a year as well.

But I have a house near Boulder/Denver, Colorado now. Cost: ~$360k. Coming from the Bay Area, I had enough equity to pay cash. Transit: Short walk to two busses that could take me to different parts of Boulder or Longmont (though traffic is low here and I typically drive my Volt, charged with the solar panels on my house). Neighborhood: Short walk to a library, grocery store, about ten restaurants, and two cafes (not counting the Starbucks embedded in the grocery store). Eighteen minute drive to Boulder or Longmont or the north part of Denver.

All that and no mortgage. The recruiters who email me face an uphill battle trying to convince me that I want to live in the Bay Area again. I miss my Bay Area friends, for sure. But it would take something really compelling to make me want to return.
Request Evaluation throws a 404.
I admit I am boring. I use the 'Save Windows as Group' feature in a tiled four square, found under the Window menu in Terminal.app

iTerm2 handles split panes quite nice as well.
Thank you very much for your answers. Like d_luaz I would like to suggest to write a blog post about your ups and downs with the migration journey, would be absolutely interesting! Have a nice jump into the coming week!
I'd like to see a double blind experiment published in peer review journal before having more thrust in this than in astrology. (The control group can listen to "The cow wants to ruminate.")

This sentences is very suspicious:

> Forssen Ehrlin even played recordings of the book to his own child Leon while he was still in the womb, and now puts on the audio book to help him fall asleep.

It reminds me a lot of the "Mozart effect": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-ba...
Parking? If I have to drive into SOMA for work I'm not sure how much cheaper those areas are when you factor in time and parking.
Show HN: Ready to use developmet server for Phaser.js in Python
A* Pathfinding in Functional Languages
I did this to help others get setup quickly with Phaser. Its super simple and saves you about an hour of tweaking around with things. Just jump right into the coding.

Hope it helps in any way!
Accidentally downvoted you (instead of upvoting).
Machine-learning is a kind of AI, right? Assuming you mean human-style general intelligence, it's more interesting to me since it helps us understand ourselves, and we have a working model to work from.
Learn C#. It is a beautiful well formed language. The concepts are seen in a lot of other languages. Also it is now open source and about to blow up 100x because it runs on Linux.

Don't learn JavaScript until you have understood C#.
I always thought that the primary difference between econometrics and statistics was the focus on causality/endogeneity. But I guess that in most cases, the endogeneity is caused by self-selection, e.g. selection into a treatment group, so both viewpoints are valid.
They're fascinatingly smart.

If they weren't aggressively solitary and if they lived for more than a couple of years they'd rule the oceans.

If they lived on land as well we'd have serious competition.
Other option: http://realproblemhunt.com/
More generally "sampling bias": available data is generally negative because positive data lacks incentive to be reported. Of all the gigs I've had that I liked, I spent my time thinking about the work being done, not the workplace. Hint to managers: workplace culture is strategy.
Shit, I have just being offered to start there on SDE position and I'm considering to reject the proposal after reading the article and many other related opinions on the net.
I went down the route of trying to build one, and it's simply not worth it. To get to a point where you can easily adjust the height on a homemade desk is really, really difficult. You're much better off (both in terms of time and finances) with going with a prebuilt solution.

Here's a few of the commercial options that I considered:

* Crank-adjustable desk frame: www.amazon.com/Ergo-Elements-Adjustable-Standing-Black/dp/B00YE6CRY8 with an IKEA desk top, perhaps. I also considered using a solid wood door that a friend was going to give me, but it was quite heavy and looked pretty bad.

* The IKEA electric standing desk (Bekant): http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S19022530/ A couple friends have had mixed success with this one. If you live near an IKEA, go check it out in person.

* A fixed standing desk and a tall stool (this is likely the cheapest option and would be the easiest to build yourself). Nothing in particular that I can link to on this one, but if you can find something that has the desk top at > 40" from the ground, that's probably a good candidate. I'm 6'0" and my standing preset is at 43.5" (sitting is 27" if you're curious).

* NextDesk - this is the one I ended up going with. I got the Terra (http://www.nextdesks.com/terra) and I'm very happy with it. It's expensive, but it felt a lot more solid than many of the other options that I looked into, and at the end of the day, it's holding a lot of expensive things. I don't want any issues with it, particularly those that result in the damage or destruction of my electronics.

A question, though: you said you didn't want electronics or a motor. I'm curious - why not? I'm assuming you're a developer, and you're going to have a computer at your desk, so there's likely power nearby. Is it a philosophical thing or something?
F.B.I. fingerprint files
No click bait is an article which overstates itself in its title.
اصباغ الكويت 51387985 صباغ 55050048 صباغين الكويت
If you can call that living.
What about a fixed standing desk with a drafting chair?

I have a Conset 501-27 legs with a custom top, and it's been great. [0]

Last I looked, hand crank desks weren't much cheaper than the motorized ones.

[0]:http://www.conset.com/product/prodone/4380/default.aspx
Yea. Tim is an alpha geek and will be treated like royalty wherever he goes, at least for the first few years. Borrowing some political terms, he is the 1% and will do well no matter what. Nobody is going to make him cry. After all, as he himself stated, he doesn't really need a job.
Only a moron would run anything that isn't GNU/Linux or BSD.
>What this means is that if you use sudo to give yourself root privileges, your sudo authentication is not bound to the TTY in which you ran sudo. It applies to any process you (or malware running as you) start after authentication. The way Apple ships sudo it is, essentially, a giant privilege escalation vulnerability.

But even if you enable TTY tickets, a malicious process on your system can still elevate itself by patching the shell (in memory, using /proc/id/mem) to inject commands alongside the original sudo command. For example:

User types:

sudo apt-get update

shell executes:

sudo bash -c "apt-get update; evil.sh"
OP here: I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here. The "Computational Journalism" class is an elective at Stanford, and while some of the students are from the journalism program, others come from more technical fields such as CS or MSE. The programming part for them is not a huge challenge...but besides the exposure to civic issues and data policy, for some of them, this is the first time they've worked with things like webscraping and public-facing APIs (as was the case for me in my computer engineering degree program, though that was years ago).

So there's a decent sized group of technically-apt students at Stanford who are interested in journalism. And my advice to them would be to at least intern as traditional reporters, as there's no better way to learn the work of developing access and sources (as well as interviewing and writing on deadline!).

That said, there are opportunities to quickly explore a domain if you're skilled at data collection and analysis. One of the best examples I can think of is this writeup by a couple of data reporters about their investigation into Florida cops:

http://ire.org/blog/on-the-road/2011/12/20/behind-story-trac...

> This was a case where the government had this wonderful, informative dataset and they weren’t using it at all except to compile the information. I remember talking to one person at an office and saying: “How could you guys not know some of this? In five minutes of (SQL) queries you know everything about these officers?” They basically said it wasn't their job. That left a huge opportunity for us.

This scenario -- in which the data is freely available but no one thinks to simply collect it into a spreadsheet -- is just the tip of the iceberg of data work that needs to be done...but I'd be lying if I said that this kind of low-hanging fruit was rare...There's plenty of information out there that's just begging for efficient examination...to paraphrase a classic adage, the problem today is not that we lack information, but we lack ways of filtering and understanding it.

I'll leave aside the debate of how worthwhile it is to try to teach programming to traditional journalists -- it's definitely not easy work...but there's a great deal of potential in teaching comsci students about civic and journalistic issues and how specifically to apply their skills. I turned out OK after first spending a few years as a newspaper reporter, but I think I missed some opportunities to hit bigger...but back then, I had no concept of mixing my programming background with my journalism.
Just changing the language is in the diminishing return area and is why it hasn't happened yet. Something else need to change.

Any sort of shell programming is going to be full of side-effects. No matter how strict the language, building the script will still involve trying on the target system, maybe accumulating shell commands in a script, and then have these long full cycles where the script is tested on a fresh system to make sure it's still working. This is happening every time I do any sort of sysadmin-type of stuff. Even in ansible, chef, docker, ...

To escape that something deeper needs to be changed.
I've answered similar criticisms elsewhere in this thread, feel free to respond to them directly. I have a PhD in economics, so hopefully more than a "slightly-better-than-average" understanding of economics.
I worked at Amazon for three years, 2010-2013. My experience was better than most of my coworkers', but I watched a lot of people including some friends go through exactly what is described in the NYTimes article. There's an old team that I'll see about once a year at somebody's house. People tell me that our conversations sound like we all have PTSD from our time there.

I have a friend still at Amazon, on a particular Kindle team. I got him an interview there, and felt a lot of guilt about that for awhile. I've been relieved (and quite surprised) that he's still happy there; the team he describes is quite different from any team I worked on or saw first-hand.

You can find a place in the company that isn't totally insane. But most of the many Amazon folks I keep in contact with are either looking outside for different jobs, or switching teams rapidly to try to find something better.
>>More generally "sampling bias": available data is generally negative because positive data lacks incentive to be reported.

Yes, but that bias holds true for every company. So if many more negative reviews are coming from Amazon than Google, Facebook, etc. then we can reasonably conclude that Amazon is a worse place to work. (Much worse, from the sounds of it.)
That's a good point and I probably agree with you. "Self-selection" was my quick attempt to translate "endogeneity" into english :)
Incomplete 'Stagefright' Security Patch Leaves Android Vulnerable to Text Hack
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jackdepp.s...
It used to be issue - in your local network, you had IPv6 automatically with Vista and newer (the same for Linux distributions). So your browser resolved AAAA records, trued o open connection to the the host, after few seconds found out that it is going nowhere, resolved the A records, the site worked.

So it became popular to manually disable IPv6 to speed up the browsing.
They do have such a line. There are a couple of big recruiters I got contacts from which advertised nothing but Amazon positions. Those same recruiters were still calling me over a year after I took a job somewhere else. They were also totally useless so I can only assume they had piles and piles of candidates.
nope, this is not supported out of the box
I think that the experience for a highly desirable technology elite like Tim Bray in the premiere highly profitable AWS group is not representative of the standard employee in less profitable groups.
I'm an SDEI in Seattle (also marketplace), and I have a similar experience to yours. While marketplace does have a reputation as one of the tougher orgs at Amazon, I get the sense that a lot of these horror stories are coming out of retail, where there's always been more pressure, especially from the senior leadership at the company.
I think you're right! Thanks for helping clarify.
It would be helpful for this entire conversation if we could get a data-driven answer for the question of how the work environment is at Amazon. Someone mentioned them having one of the lowest retention times for developers in the industry. If that's the case, it's damning, no matter how many anecdotes come along defending them. If that's not the case, then a few disgruntled employees with axes to grind shouldn't make a difference as to how we judge them.
I think so,

It would be easy to make bitmap data with APL. What is the output of the "draw" being processed by, (or where)? From there, I think it would be easy to see where to wedge in APL.
Given such brutal firing practices, it seems like there's a lot of ways this could go very, very badly. If you know you're competing against someone for a raise or to keep from getting fired, what's to stop you from paying some thugs to beat the hell out of your competition, slash their tires, or poison their food?

I'm morbidly curious when Amazon is going to start threatening promising candidates to work for them rather than paying well (or at all). Imagine the money Jeff could save if he could motivate people with their family's continued safety instead of money!
Re the Google/Amazon comparison, I've been at one and am at the other now. The article is a little bit overboard, didn't see anyone cry at AWS for instance. But overall the general impression is accurate. There's many ways to compare and contrast between the two. Amazon really cares about the customer to an extent I haven't seen at other places. And Google really cares about their employees. Google prides itself on being deliberate to a fault when it comes to hiring while Amazon is a hiring machine, but both have equally high standards. Both pay well, I would say Google is better than Amazon primarily because they don't try to cap your stock grants to a total comp number, but you're not going to get rich in either place if you join now.
This is my work-flow for contributing on GitHub
Ask HN: How to find consultants?
I run a startup called udproducts.in, we develop ecommerce solutions in ruby-on-rails, nodejs, andriod and IOS apps. We had a consultant who gave regular projects which lasted for 4 to 5 months with good finance also. He is no more.

We badly need projects, so looking for such consultants. Where and How can I find them?

Thanks for the pointers.
Yeah, the experimental results are pretty poorly presented, but on the other hand the abstract says: "While this algorithm is of lesser practical interest, we believe it may be of theoretical value."

The number of random bits used by both algorithms is within a few percent of the theoretically optimal value (4.6% more for Rao-Sandelius and 5.5% more for MergeShuffle) so I don't think that's really a significant concern.
Why Greece and the EU aren't playing games
I also have a NextDesk, the Solo Plus (http://www.nextdesks.com/solo#plus). I'm generally quite pleased with it; it's certainly far nicer than anything I could build myself. The Terra is probably noticeably more stable than the Solo, which can flex a bit (I wouldn't lean on it).

One interesting datapoint: I was originally very keen to get a desk with height presets, but it turns out that I don't use them much. I end up adjusting the height based on what shoes I'm wearing, etc. so I'm almost never at the height I set on the preset.
I got to stay in a house that had a nest thermometer. The AC compressor happened to be broken and the nest perpetually said 1 hour until cool. Nest isn't smart enough to detect a broken AC.
Just out of curiosity...

It seems to me much of the "mess" in Amazon's culture is on the MWS/eCommerce side of the house + any physical products they sell [e.g. Kindle].

AWS seems to be far more relaxed environment wise.

Would you agree with that?

The reason I ask is the OP is AWS and I've only seen people on the AWS side post rebuttals to the various articles about Amazon's culture.
>There’ve been week­ends when I haven’t opened my work com­put­er.

That doesn't sound all that great. I feel that if things are managed well employees shouldn't be working on weekends at all (barring a major crisis)
You got that backwards, one of the two, Mike, suggested to that they should spend some time working on payment channel and improvements like lightning and since they though it was a good idea they did.

Blockstream has to benefit from blocks as large as possible without losing decentralisation and security properties, like everyone else.
Might be just me, but "See this excellent tutorial for more details" -- I wasn't sure where to click, so I hovered a bit, didn't see it, thought the page wasn't complete yet, but then accidentally found it.

tl;dr Might want to make links stick out more. :)

Looks neat though. However I'm not sure that someone would want to support their iOS app with this and not Android. So... is Android coming soon?

Good luck!